One of the biggest investments an organization makes is in it’s people. Hiring is not just a process. It is a strategy. It is critical that hiring managers, Human Resources (HR), and the leadership team develop, implement, and understand the organization’s hiring strategy or you could be making costly and frustrating mistakes.
What is your organization’s strategy?
Most hiring manager’s will say their strategy is to hire the best person for the job. Great! But what does that really mean? Is the open position geared toward an applicant right out of college or does the position require someone with X years of experience? It is important that Human Resources work with hiring managers to understand and define each job opening so that expensive mistakes are not made during the hiring process. Believe it or not, organizations that have a poorly defined hiring strategy are still hiring people that are a not a good fit for the job opening. This creates short term, as well as long term problems for both the organization and the employee hired for this position.
Take for example, if your organization is actively recruiting for a senior level manager in your IT department. Your job description describes a leadership position with at least 15 years of experience. The candidates that respond to your job postings are going to be seasoned leaders with IT experience. You go through the hiring process and find the “right” candidate according to your hiring manager. This new employee joins the company and quickly starts putting his past experience to work, but discovers that the organization really needed a requirements analyst. These are two difference skillsets and career paths. This can be a shock and disappointment to the new employee who joined this organization expecting a role completely different than the one now offered by the hiring manager.
So how does this story end? Well, it costs the organization big time in productivity, wages, benefits, and employee satisfaction. It costs the employee as well. The employee loses motivation and self-confidence. It is important to develop a hiring strategy that gets your hiring managers and HR directors working together from the beginning to understand the organizational needs of new employees. The hiring manager and hiring team should not be the lone voice in hiring decisions. This sets the organization up for failure and will result in hiring employees who are not the right fit for open position and will ultimately cost both parties in the long run.