Hiring Without Regrets

Your candidate may indeed be a superstar, but the money and time your organisation is about to invest in him require that you find out more about the person than what his resume tells you-and what he tells you during an interview. You can approach hiring acquisitions in two ways.

Method One 

• You examine the candidate's resume and find many points that suggest he or she is right for your company.
• You call the candidate in for an interview and spend a long time reviewing the resume and interspersing the interview with questions about his/her likes and dislikes. You also tell the candidate what your organisation is all about.
• You call the candidate's references and hear rave reviews.
• You offer the candidate the position at top salary. You negotiate other benefits.
• You advise everyone in the office that you have found the perfect person for the open position.

Method Two 

• You post an opening internally and externally. An external candidate looks promising, so you also examine his/her credentials.
• You ask all candidates to take an assessment that provides you with more information to consider and questions to ask each one during an interview. The external candidate, reportedly a superstar, is still in the running.
• You interview all the candidates and examine assessment results, paying particular attention to job interests and skills of candidates, and whether those interests and skills match those of people who have done this job well before.
• You conduct background checks and call people at previous jobs (not only those on the reference list) to find out if your finalists' resumes are accurate and truthful.
• You hire the best person for the job. It may or may not be the purported superstar.

The second method may take a bit longer than the first, and it may even cost more at the outset. But its advantages over the first method include the fact that it allows you to gather information about all candidates aside from the information that they provided you with, it allows you to make a decision based on objective facts (not your gut), it saves you money the long run because you are certain you hired the person with the best job fit, and it protects both the organisation AND the candidate. The organisation is protected because you have made a fact-based and fair decision, while the candidate is protected because he accepted a job he is interested in and able to do-not a job he took because he thought he should for the prestige, money, pressure from someone else...or just because he was tired of the job search.