How to Recruit the Best Staff? An Ultimate Guide

A smart entrepreneur knows that business depends on people – the ones who make it work. One of the most important factors for any business working efficiently is the right staff. Before starting the CV screening process and the initial selection of candidates, it is necessary to properly establish the goals and tasks that will be faced by a new employee. Thus, it should involve not some vague indicators and duties, but a clearly formulated task with a focus on the future.

Here’re some rules for hiring staff from Laszlo Bock, former VP of People Operations at Google.

• Google uses an internal tool called qDroid, which selects the interview questions depending on the position for which the candidate is applying. There are two types of questions: behavioral – involving the living experience, and situational – involving the hypothetical scenarios.
• Bock does not approve the unstructured interviews with questions like “What was your last Halloween costume?”. He cites research proving that structured interviews with job-specific questions allow to better predict a candidate’s future performance.
• After the interview, a group of impartial people analyze the full report and decide whether or not to hire a candidate. This allows the recruitment process to be independent of the interviewer’s prejudices and makes its result completely unbiased.

This is Google’s experience, which you can, of course, adopt or adjust in your hiring system, but we’d like to share the core methods of this important process and offer some tips. 

First, you need to clearly identify the required personnel:

• describe the responsibilities and relevant skills, competencies and experience of the candidate,
• include applicable hard & soft skills. Hard skills are professional skills that relate to the position directly. Soft skills are personal qualities of a potential employee. Remember, a candidate might be a top-notch professional, but sometimes his/her personal qualities will make it almost impossible to blend into a settled team. And this will affect the general atmosphere and as a result, team performance,
• also determine which negative aspects you can ‘tolerate’ in each case. For example, you want an employee to attend the office every day from 9:00 to 18:00, but a person at the interview is a high-quality professional with maximum skills who can be present at the office 3 days a week. You need to understand that you can’t find a 100% perfect employee. Thus, choose two or three downsides that you can ignore.Then we will speak about wage. If you want to decide on the amount of compensation based on the candidate’s experience, specify the salary range, from minimum to maximum. After all, potential employees have to understand why they are spending time on a test assignment or an interview.

Important moment is determine the recruitment stages. You must define all stages of the recruitment process and screen out a certain number of people at each stage:

1. CV – get a general understanding about the person.
2. Test assignment – check key skills. Make sure that the completion of the assignment does not take more than 4 hours, otherwise you’ll have to pay for it and many people simply wouldn’t want to waste their time. Not all candidates are ready to do the test tasks. Thus, at this stage you will screen out the majority of applicants.
3. Job interview – find out whether a person fits for your team and check hard and soft skills again. Before the interview, determine the exact questions you will ask the candidates, taking into account the results of a test assignment and CV. To get a good idea of the candidate, ask general questions first and then move on to specific topics. Don’t ask a person to tell you about setting up the sales funnels at the start of the interview. Begin with a discussion of the entire workflow. General questions help to find out how a person solves tasks, and specific questions clarify the details.

Probation period – find out how a candidate copes with tasks in real working conditions. This is a test drive of a future cooperation that is beneficial for both parties. Sometimes after this experience the candidate leaves. In reality, only half of the candidates pass the probation period. Thus, it is better to have several decent candidates. If a person rejects the job or does not pass the probation period, you can offer it to another candidate.

Identify the resources you will use for recruiting your future employees. If this is a highly-specific position, posting it on Instagram page or one of the general job search websites won’t be sufficient. In this case, you should rather search for candidates on such websites as LinkedIn and refer to specialists, recruiting companies that will help with the search. If for example, you need a personal assistant without special skills and competencies, an ‘internal search’ among the friends of people who already work at the company will do the trick.

It is quite difficult to find “the chosen one” from a hundreds of candidates. Think about how you will check the necessary competencies at each stage. The faster candidates go through all recruitment stages, the more chances you have to get a great specialist into your team. If you wait for too long, applicant may get an offer from another company and accept it. And first of all, set clear requirements to your candidate. Remember that the success of your business depends on your team.