Kathy Shwiff - Hiring People: Recruit and Keep the Brightest Stars

What is the best way to hire a perfect employee? Where is the most cost-effective place to advertise open positions? How do you write an ad that will attract a pool of strong candidates? How can you identify a star performer from a stack of resumes? Will asking interviewees about their past experiences predict their future performance in your company? What interview questions are legally out-of-bounds? How do you craft an appealing offer?

In this book, we distill the wisdom of some of the best minds in the field of human resources to help you hire talented employees with ease. The language is simple and the design colorful to make the information easy to grasp.

Quizzes help you assess your knowledge of the hiring process. Case files show how companies have addressed their own hiring challenges. Sidebars give you a big-picture look at hiring and highlight innovative, out-of-the-box solutions worth considering. Quotes from business leaders will motivate you as you begin looking for the perfect employee. Finally, in case you want to dig deeper into hiring and related management issues, we recommend some of the most important business books available. The authors of these books both influence and reflect todays thinking about effective hiring practices and related management issues. Understanding the ideas they cover will inspire you as a manager.

Even if you dont dip into these volumes, the knowledge you gain from studying the pages of this book will equip you to deal firmly, effectively, and insightfully with the hiring challenges you face regularly on the jobto help you improve your company and the lives of the people who support you.

T HE E DITORS

F illing your ranks with good people has never been more important. Thats because your people represent your company to the public; and theyre the ones who will create your success.

If you can get the right people onto your team, and if you then give them the freedom to think and be creative, they can work magic. Yet good people are in short supply. Although universities and business schools around the world are churning out tens of thousands of MBAs every year, the imminent retirement of a whole generationthe 76 million baby boomersmeans a wave of positions will be vacant. The competition for the top talent is already stiff. Within the next ten years, it will become even more intense.

Whether the person youre hiring is a junior software developer or a senior project manager, a civil engineer or a newsletter editor, a hotel maid or a registered nurse, getting a star performer to notice the position you want to fill, to come in and talk to you, and to choose you over other companies demands increasing skill.

Smart managers need to develop every possible resource. They need to build networks of good people they can tap into when they have jobs to fill. They need to develop skills among interns. They need to raise their firms visibility so that people will come to them. They need to discover talent in every corner of their communities, focusing on groups of people who may be underemployedamong them women, many of whom drop out of the workforce at some point in their careers and subsequently find it difficult to return. Managers need to create a diverse workforce to benefit from the competitive edge that results when diverse approaches to problems and diverse points of view are adopted.

Having invested so much time in developing talent pools, smart managers will need to figure out how to bring these stars in house. Theyll need to respond quickly to applicants via phone calls, run intelligent interviews, and learn to sell the candidate on their company.

Searches are expensive, both in time and money, not to mention the productivity lost while a job sits vacant. So you need to do whatever it takes to make your hiring process quicker and more effective. Its simply good business.

The journey from deciding to bring the best possible people on board to actually making the hire can be long and difficult. It is punctuated by challenges: writing a clear job description, choosing the most effective (and most cost-effective) advertising medium, and crafting your listing so that it appeals to the kind of individual you hope to find. Although some people wait until they have a job opening to pursue candidates, its a good idea to be on the lookout year-round. You may want to do some active recruiting, for instance. You will definitely want to build a list of people you might some day want to work with, so that youll have a roster of people to interview as soon as the need arises.

Lets suppose that youre losing a key member of your department. Or perhaps youve met a talented young person who youd like to find a way to bring on board. One of the first things you need to tackle before you set the hiring process in motion is the job description.

If youre starting with an existing position, pull the most recent description of the position held by your departing employee and determine whether it accurately describes the functions of the job. If the text hasnt been updated for a while, it may well need dusting off, especially if your company has had any reorganizations since it was last revisited.

Give careful thought to what the person in that position actually did, day in and day out. What were the key tasks that the individual performed? What are your expectations as to productivity and quality? Is this a back-office kind of job, offering little contact with the public, or does the person in this job interact with customers, clients, or vendors outside the company?

What experience and skills are required to do the job? What training and education? What are the challenges and opportunities the job offers? Enlist the help of your departing employee or another employee in the same role when gathering all this information.