Eight Steps to Hiring Success

Eight Steps to Hiring Success

A colleague recently told me about how her daughter’s all-star softball team missed its chance at a state championship—to the dismay and frustration of the players and parents alike. She explained that, individually, this group of girls was incredibly talented, with physical skill-sets far beyond their age group.

Collectively, however, they just couldn’t seem to gel as a team.

Unfortunately, we see this scenario all too often in sports. But business is a team sport too. Yet, we often still hire team members based primarily on personal talent. And, particularly in medical device manufacturing, talent without teamwork can be costly.

Conversely, a business team composed of good-natured, highly cooperative people may make for a very amicable atmosphere, but if they lack the aptitude to perform their roles, their cooperative nature cannot make up for a fundamental lack of capability. In sports, business, or the creation of any winning team, what’s needed is an intentional, consistent recruiting process to distinguish the impressively skilled individuals who also are successful collaborators.

An effective recruiting process can reduce many bad-hire headaches, create a happier and more productive team, and increase your organization’s profitability.

High Cost to Subpar Hiring Process

At first glance, implementing a thorough recruiting process may look overly time-consuming. In practice, however, it dramatically increases the efficiency of your hiring efforts, saving your organization a lot of time and money in the long term.

Hiring affects your bottom line both directly and indirectly. Brad Smart, author of “Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People,” reports that hiring the wrong person can cost you 13 times a person’s annual salary (from the salary you pay them, the severance, the mistakes they make, disruption of existing teams, missed opportunities, etc.). Moreover, the loss of productivity and potential decline in morale can be like losing a major client.

Developing and implementing a step-by-step recruiting process, where each step builds on the previous one, will help your organization avoid wasting countless hours and resources associated with hiring the wrong person.While no hiring process or technique can assure 100 percent success and accuracy, increasing your success rate by even a few percentage points can pay huge dividends.

The following steps can serve as a guide for your hiring team to more efficiently and consistently find the right person for the right position within your company.

Step One: Identify Technical and Cultural Requirements

In order for medical device companies toaccelerate results, it’s important to weigh a candidate’s technical abilities (ability to produce quality work) equally with their cultural competencies (ability to work collaboratively). Candidates’ technical skills represent their raw horsepower and their cultural skills are their transmission, which allows them to deliver such horsepower to the wheels. Without both, nothing moves forward.

Where the technical requirements of a job tend to be specific to each individual position, organizations can identify cultural attributes that are important to the company as a whole. Higher-level positions may require greater mastery of the particular attributes, but the cultural values typically remain consistent across a company.

In addition to helping the team know what technical and cultural requirements to focus on during the interviewing process, identifying these requirements early on helps the team save a great deal of time and accelerates the hiring process.

Working in tandem with human resources, the hiring manager typically puts forth the initial effort to identify the technical and cultural requirements for the position and draft the job overview (job description and the skills required).

Step Two: Establish and Align Hiring Team

Regardless of whether there are three people or a dozen on the hiring team, the point is to get them aligned with theobjectives of the position.

After the hiring manager drafts the job overview, it’s the team’s responsibility to review it, ask questions, seek clarification, add their own input, and establish a common perspective from which to base their hiring decision.

While the hiring manager begins the process with a draft, the multiple viewpoints gathered from different hiring team members provides a more complete view of all aspects of the position. It also provides representation for the other associates in the company who will be asked to produce results with the selected hire.

Step Three: Review the Resume

While some candidates’ resumes do include references to cultural competencies, demonstrating awareness that “soft skills” also are necessary for successful performance, most resumes mainly provide insight on a candidate’s technical skills.

This actually helps expedite the process by giving the team clear “yes” or “no” answers as to whether the candidate possesses the mandatory “hard skills” to advance to the next step of the process.

Step Four: Interviews

Developing a set of interview questions to ask each viable candidate helps ensure that all relevant information is collected and an apples-to-apples comparison can be made.

Whether it’s a phone screening, one-on-one interview, team interview, or all three, the objective is to assess whether the candidate’s basic skills, personality, and goals match your organization’s needs.

Determining the types of interviews to conduct (phone, one-on-one, team, or all three) should be set by the hiring team. The team also should decide on the length of interviews; the number of times a candidate should be interviewed; whether they should take skills tests or assessments, etc.

In addition to asking questions consistently from candidate to candidate, the types of questions asked also are meaningful. Questions that tend to offer the most value in the interviewing process are those that a) focus on the cultural and technical competencies that the team concluded were significant for the position, and b) are open-ended.

For instance, if the hiring team decides that it’s crucial for a candidate to work collaboratively, then an insightful question might be: “Describe an experience where you had to work with someone at a company who you found difficult to get along with.” As opposed to limited, “yes/no” questions such as, “Do you get along with others?”

Following open-ended questions with a series of questions that focus on responsibility and results also is incredibly beneficial, such as: “What was it about working with that person that you struggled with? What did you learn from that relationship?What results were you able to produce together?”

Asking questions that oblige the candidate to elaborate on what they actually did in a given situation, versus what they might do in a hypothetical situation helps the hiring team circumvent “Pollyanna” answers that are contrived and inauthentic.

Step Five: Assessments

In addition to skilled interviewing, an effective tool that can complement your hiring process is personality assessment tests. Personality tests are a standard recruiting practice for many companies—especially when hiring for key or critical positions.

Assessments have been shown to reduce employee turnover, improve department effectiveness, and guide your organization on how to best manage, communicate with, and train new hires. They also can provide quantifiable information on a candidate’s specific strengths and weaknesses, uncover issues that are sometimes overlooked during the interviewing process, and increase the likelihood that your company hires the right person for the right position.

Over time, assessments also can give you comparative data about the types of personalities that tend to work well in your organization and how to better balance or augment your internal teams.

It’s important to note that while assessments can be valuable tools to help evaluate a candidate by understanding their work methods, how they interact with others, and how they contribute to a team, the assessment results alone should not be used as a qualifier for a potential hire.

Assessments are most effective when used to enhance the hiring process and serve as an additional measurement when considering your final hiring decision.

Step Six: Reference Calls

Once you have identified a qualified candidate (or maybe two), always check their references. Reference calls are critical as they allow the hiring team to independently validate the information collected during the phone and face-to-face interviews and even clarify any questions that arose from the assessment.

Meaningful reference call discussions can give you a semi-objective sense of what the candidate did well in their previous job, additional strengths, and areas for growth and development.

Whereas short, three-minute “would you hire them again” conversations don’t offer much insight into skills and personality traits that may set a candidate apart from the other applicants.

Whether you’re calling four references or ten, the same priorities that were established for your interviews also should guide your reference calls. While being respectful of their time, it’s beneficial to establish rapport with the reference and have a genuine conversation with them about the candidate.
Avoid asking rote questions from a checklist that make the process seem mechanical. Engage in their answers with follow-up questions so that you can really get to know the candidate through their eyes. Not only will you learn a lot, you’re also demonstrating respect for the candidate, their reference, and the hiring process.

Step Seven: Discussion of Employment Terms

Even though the hiring team may be prepared to offer a candidate the job, the negotiation step should still contribute to the ultimate decision.

Discussion of money, benefits, andposition intangibles (i.e., daily commute, vacation days, etc.) can be akin to discussing religion and politics. Not only can these conversations be stressful and uncomfortable, they also can produce visibility of underlying personality traits.

For example, if there is a spread between their expectations and your offer, pay as much attention to how they resolve that potential “bump in the road” as you pay to the actual bump.Do they get sharp, demanding and become easily upset? Or do they get creative and cooperative to find a way to overcome the challenge?

How a candidate conducts themselves during these discussions can be very telling of how they’ll handle difficult or taxing situations that arise on the job.

Step Eight: Make the offer

If the negotiation process left you unsure as to whether or not the candidate will actually accept your offer, keep communicating with the candidate until you are confident that they will. There’s little

advantage to floating an offer and then waiting to see if it’ll be accepted.

Once you and the candidate have reached a satisfactory in-person or telephone agreement (a verbal or in-person handshake), then submit your offer in writing and expect a next-day acceptance.

Chances are that if steps one through eight were followed, the right candidate for the right position will be prepared to accept and sign your written offer.

Upfront Commitment forLong-Term Benefit

You, your company, and your hiring team are the foundation of your hiring process. There should be as much attention and intention put into hiring an exceptional associate as there is in designing, developing, and manufacturing exceptional products.

Skipping steps in the process will be tempting in cases where a “fast-track” candidate looks appealing—but be careful. That approach is likely to cause more stress and anxiety in the long run. It’s far more advantageous to follow an intentional hiring process, even if it must be accelerated into a three-day timeframe. Staying with the process not only will save you time, it will lead you to talented, team-oriented people who are committed to adding significant value to your company and clients.

With less associate turnover, more company-wide cooperation and an increased ability to produce results, your company will be better positioned to play at a championship level.

Mark Murphy is president and CEO of Pro-Dex, Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based design, development, and contract manufacturer for medical device OEMs.