5 Tips You Must Know Before You Start Hiring
So, are you sure you want to hire humans for your company?
It’s a tough task that has become grim recently, with growing attrition and layoffs. When you hire humans, you take on the responsibility of finding people with similar goals and values who believe in your company’s mission to reach for the stars. You also take on the risk of failure — a team full of strife or frustration at a time when you need a cohesive group working toward the goal of growing your business.
So, take it from us. Consider hiring bots. No? Okay, we get it. As a bunch of humans who are also interested in hiring other humans, here are some of our favorite and most valuable tips you ought to know before you hire:
When Should You Start Hiring?
1. Hire for a New Role Only When Necessary: The key to successful hiring lies in the role’s necessity and the timing of the hire. Hire too early, and you’re paying someone to sit around and twiddle their thumbs while waiting for an opportunity to knock on your door. While hiring for a new role, look at how crucial the role is to helping your product or service reach its market.
As Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Freshworks, Inc., says,
What’s necessary for your product to get through the door? To build a successful world-class product, it’s not enough to have just good engineering. You need to have good engineering, good marketing, good design, and the whole value proposition is what makes the product a winner. As the CEO, you have to respect every functional area and hire the best people.
2. Hire If Your Workload Is Overwhelming: Growth can be deceptive. It isn’t always easy to predict when you need more people on board if you are in a business that ebbs and flows with the months, especially given the uncertainty of the times. Set a simple rule of thumb. For example: When employees who should work X hours per week are working 2X, hire.
If you have a reasonable degree of confidence that your new hire will do at least one of these two things, go for it: make money for the firm or save money for the firm.
How Should You Start Hiring?
3. Stay Away From Standard Job Descriptions: Instead of writing a “requirements” or “experience needed” section, as is the standard while writing job descriptions, describe the kind of person you are looking to hire. This is something Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, learned the hard way when she was scaling her online ad platform team at Google. As she said on the Masters of Scale podcast, “I did not look for people with online ad sales experience. And that’s a good thing, because there was no one with online ad sales experience.” Instead of limiting her pool to people with experience, Sandberg chose to focus on skills. Her approach was to hire the best and the brightest so that they brought their passion and dedication to their jobs and worked hard. And it worked.
Vet your job description before you post it. Recruitment software tools like Freshteam provide numerous templates for job descriptions that you can choose from.
4. Make Sure Your Jobs Page and Career Site Reflect Your Company Culture: Career sites are pages on your website dedicated to displaying your employer brand and a list of currently open positions. It’s the first brand touchpoint that anyone who wants to work for you will look at. Use your career site to describe your work culture and perks to attract the right kind of candidates. Designing a rockstar career site is easy with Freshteam, and it helps set the right expectations with candidates.
Giacomo Guilizzoni, founder and CEO of Balsamiq, tells us why he decided to list the negatives as well as the positives of his company culture:
Hiring someone is very much like entering a long-term relationship. I believe in being honest with prospects; they should know what they are getting into with their eyes open.
5. Ensure You Have the Right Tools to Make the Hiring Process Smooth: The right tools make a recruiter’s job unbelievably easy. Stuck doing follow-up calls with candidates and your hiring team and spending hours buried in resumes and Excel sheets to screen, track, and update candidates? A small investment in the right ATS and HR recruiting tools can change your work life by automating your mundane tasks, freeing up your time to focus on other tasks.
A smooth process is not only necessary for the recruiter but also vital for providing an excellent candidate experience. Whether your company hires the candidate or not, a bad candidate experience can inevitably lead to negativity or lower the reputation of your company culture. In contrast, a good candidate experience increases your brand reputation and candidate satisfaction.
Freshteam by Freshworks is a smart HR software that offers all the tools and features necessary to make your hiring process more effective and hassle-free, from start to finish. It helps recruiters source, screen, interview, and hire the best candidates with ease and has helped transform how numerous businesses recruit. You can check it out for free here .
This article by Freshteam is built on the original article that first appeared on the Freshteam blog.
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