Organizations that hire the right employees stand a much better chance of achieving their organizational goals. The process of hiring the right employee can be challenging. Failure to hire the right employee can be costly to your firm. It is imperative that you match every new employee hired with the potential job. By so doing, the new employee will more likely be productive, leading to a more cordial employment relationship and a more positive impact on the overall work environment. Here are some key steps worth following when hiring an employee:

Provide Job Description Beforehand

Think of a job description as a shopping list that you write before going out to shop at your favorite supermarket or retail store. The labor market is like a supermarket with a wide range of skills ready to be “purchased”. The job description will guide you or the hiring team to know exactly what to look for in the potential hire.

When designing a job description, you will first do a job analysis to determine the duties, responsibilities, skills, and qualifications needed for the vacant position that needs to be filled. For instance, if you are looking to hire a digital marketing manager, you might include proficiency in the use of a popular or common marketing attribution model. Equipped with the job description, the firm can then move on to the second step.

Recruiting Strategy

Once you have the job description at hand, you should convene a meeting with key human resource officers from your firm to design and settle on a recruiting strategy that will be used to hire the employee that you seek to recruit. A hiring manager or a representative from the HR department should be present at this planning meeting.

Use a Checklist

Once you have agreed on the recruiting strategy to use, you now need to come up with a checklist which will have the remaining steps that need to be followed in hiring the employee or employees. The action items on the checklist will be ticked once they are completed by the hiring team. This checklist will help you to monitor the progress of the hiring team.

Invest in Future Candidates

If possible, make an effort of developing relationships with potential candidates long before you even need to hire. Maintaining a large pool of potential candidates will simplify the process of hiring a new employee because, at the very least, you will have created some form of rapport with these candidates.

Review All Applications and Credentials Carefully

Go through all job applications, resumes and cover letters and select those applicants whose skills and experience match or come close to what you had detailed in your job description checklist. Screen all the job application letters against the skills, qualifications, and experience that you are looking for and pick those that satisfy your requirements. Conduct some background check to ensure that the candidates are who they say they are on paper.

Pre-screen the Candidates

After selecting the most suitable candidates from the previous step, you can now engage a skilled telephone interviewer to conduct a phone interview with the candidates who have passed the previous step. From this interview, you will be able to establish if the candidates will fit your organization culture and also establish if their expected salary falls within what you can offer.

Face to Face Interview

For those who will have passed the previous step, you can invite them for a face to face interview. Make sure that the venue is set and the interviewers should have the right questions ready for the interview. During the interview, try as far as possible to ask the right questions. After interviewing all the employees, you will now be able to come up with a list of candidates who you can either invite for another interview or go ahead and offer them a job.

Although the tips above may not be exhaustive, at least they provide a basic guide that you can follow when hiring an employee. Follow it keenly and you might just get that perfect hire for your firm.