Manager Tips: How to Avoid Hiring the Wrong Employee

Although companies within the same industry often share many similarities, each have some unique features – such as culture, procedures, training, and goals – which makes them unique from their competition. 

It is precisely these company-specific qualities that demand careful attention to the way in which applicants are screened, hired, and placed into jobs. Companies that are dedicated to only hiring candidates who have the right mix of skills, abilities, interests, and personal characteristics to perform the core job duties, AND who have a compatible belief system, will outdistance their competition in short order.

The 4 points below are not mystical or even quick-fix solutions, but they’re part of a strategic talent management model that has been proven to be effective in hundreds of leading companies around the world. 

1) Define what it takes to deliver exceptional customer service.

Take a step backwards and invest time to better understand the company’s broader strategy.  The following questions will help you begin to get a better feel for some of the bigger issues and opportunities:

• What is the company’s corporate culture?
• How does the company define and strive to achieve superior customer service?
• How is the company performing relative to its competitors today – financially and in terms of customer satisfaction?
• Over the next 12 months, what are the top five areas to improve?
• What are customers (current and former) saying about the company?
• What will be the company’s focus in 3 to 5 years?
• Who are the key competitors and will they be the same over 3 to 5 years?

The answers to these questions will help paint a picture of the company, how it’s performing, and where it’s going over the next few years. You can't hire for a company, if you don't know it.

2) Specify how to measure success (and failure) fairly and accurately.

An overlooked aspect of building a robust hiring and talent management strategy concerns how to measure performance. Most employees assume the company knows how to accurately measure performance, but in reality, few companies have a reliable performance measurement process. More often than not, companies conduct an annual review where supervisor's evaluate a representative on a standardized rating form – which supposedly measures qualities that are critical to on-the-job success.  However, considering the rate of attrition and crippling shrinkage, it seems likely that many companies have room for improvement when it comes to defining what it means to perform well and measuring it accurately.

Measuring performance well begins with a clear definition of the job’s role within the business and what someone in the job is expected to produce. It is essential to delineate these outcomes in ways that are clear and observable. In doing so, the company will be able to create an evaluation form that pinpoints precisely those things that are critical to success. Moreover, the same information can be used to modify hiring and training processes, and to educate supervisors and representatives on exactly what it takes to be successful.

 
3) Understand the person who is interacting with the company's customers.

By measuring current representatives’ knowledge, skills, abilities, personal characteristics, and performance using well-designed and researched assessments, the company will gain a better understanding of area strengths as well as weaknesses that will need to be addressed in the coming months and years. Having a transparent view of the company’s bench strength is critical to a successful hiring process because it objectively reveals which individual qualities are most important to the company across its different jobs. In addition, the information gathered from the assessments also helps the company understand more about the type of people who represent the face of the company in the eyes of its customers – are they friendly, flexible, and willing to go the extra mile to solve a problem?  

4. Revisit what it takes to achieve desired performance goals on a regular basis.
 
It’s important to understand how assessments add value to the business! The key to ensuring assessments remain linked to the business is to quantitatively compare assessments and key performance indicators. Depending on the job and business, these comparisons should occur every 6 to 12 months. Continuous assessment monitoring is critical to fully realizing the value of a pre-hire assessment process.
 
–  How do you avoid hiring the wrong employees? Please submit your opinions in the comment section below. 

All information compiled in this blog post was gathered from "How to Measure Contact Center Skills Using Multimedia Simulations." – compiled by FurstPerson.

To read the full text and discover more solutions that help candidates find a job they will love and enable clients to hire people that will perform well, be satisfied, and stay with the company – visit www.furstperson.com.


Hire Furst, Hire Right – FurstPerson