Tips to avoid making painful hiring mistakes

By Andrea Hill

If you’re one of those managers who would prefer to get a root canal than hire new staff members, you’re not alone. Hiring is one of the most stressful responsibilities of business owners and managers. Fortunately, much of that stress can be alleviated with some new tools in your toolbox. Get ready to bump up your hiring game.

Painful Hiring Mistake #1: Not Knowing What You Want

Solution: Create a Meaningful Job Description
The analogies between dating and hiring simply cannot be ignored. In particular, if you don’t have a clear understanding of what you need and want, you’re going to make the mistake of falling in love with the first charismatic person who stumbles into your office.

Start every hiring process with an analysis of what you need: what skills, what characteristics, what enthusiasms, what personality type. If you already have an excellent job description for your sales staff and you need to hire another salesperson, this should be simple. But if you’ve never created a job description or if this is for a new role, it’s time to get to work.

The internet is filled with examples of job descriptions. But the key to getting that description right is to consider these nine questions carefully:

• What business value must I gain from this person?
• What responsibilities will this person be given in order to deliver that value?
• What tasks will this person have to do to meet those responsibilities?
• Which people/departments will this person interact with to meet those responsibilities?
• Which personality attributes are best suited to that work and those relationships?
• Which skills must this person have to successfully complete the tasks?
• What background, education, and experience must this person have to successfully complete the tasks?
• Does anyone currently working here have sufficient knowledge to provide the new person with training and development, or are we counting on this person to bring knowledge that we do not currently possess in-house?
• If this person is bringing knowledge we do not currently possess, how will I assess this person’s skills and knowledge?

Once you have asked and answered these questions, creating a job description should be a cinch.

Painful Hiring Mistake #2: Not Enough Candidates

Solution: Cast a Wide Net with an Excellent Ad
What’s the best way to sell a piece of jewelry? With a beautiful picture. You wouldn’t run an ad filled with manufacturing specifications and details to describe your jewelry—you would grab attention with a simple, compelling image.

Unfortunately, many people advertise for employees with the equivalent of a manufacturing specification. In the case of a help-wanted ad, words are essential, but use them to paint an interesting picture, not a dull bulleted list.

If selecting a spouse required writing a spouse-wanted ad, you’d probably put a tremendous amount of time and thought into what you are looking for in your happily ever after, and you would make it as interesting as possible. When you bring a new employee into your company, you are looking for someone you can trust to do the work, represent your company, behave well with your other employees, and appreciate your culture.

Divide your help-wanted request into four sections:

• Personal attributes
• Skills and abilities
• Previous experience
• What makes this opportunity great

Write a simple, informative, interesting paragraph (three to four sentences max) for each of these elements. Then post it everywhere you can imagine. In addition to the standard newspaper and paid internet recruiting ads, put it on your website, and tweet once a day about your opening with a link to the ad. Share it with your Facebook friends and ask them to share it too. Post it on job boards (physical and virtual). Find a fun, shareable picture and post it on Pinterest and Instagram with a link to the job description. Get creative, because you need a lot of candidates to find the one.

Painful Hiring Mistake #3: Skimming Résumés

Solution: Read and Analyze Résumés Carefully 
I pity any job seeker tasked with writing a résumé. The seemingly simple exercise of listing one’s previous jobs, responsibilities, and education has been morphed into an art form that can only be entrusted to professional copywriters. Job seekers have been told that they have two seconds or less for their résumé to grab someone’s attention.

But you can do better than this. Read every résumé carefully, and compare it to the list of attributes you are looking for in a job seeker. Don’t just skim! Analyze, think, and consider the content. Spelling and grammar matter. Formatting and “one page versus two” do not.

Painful Hiring Mistake #4: Confusing the Interview with a Sales Pitch

Solution: Be a Thoughtful Interviewer
The only time you should spend talking during an interview is to share information about the company and the specific role you are hiring for, answering any questions the candidate asks, and asking interview questions. The rest of the time you should be listening intently and scrupulously writing notes about the candidate’s answers.

The key to conducting a good interview is to plan your questions well in advance. You can’t wing it in the interview room. Remember the nine questions you asked and answered at the beginning of the hiring process? Prepare for your interview by creating questions related to the first seven from that list.

Next, prepare questions for each of the following areas:

• Character and honesty
• Work ethic
• Peer relationships
• Boss relationships
• Special talents

Finally, remember how you studied and analyzed the applicant’s résumé? You probably had a few questions about it; perhaps a concern about a gap in employment, a reason for leaving, or a skill that was listed. Make sure you write those questions down before the candidate arrives, and ask them during the interview.

These four tools won’t remove all of the stress from the hiring process, but by making you better prepared, more visible, and better informed, you will definitely make better hiring decisions.