Six tips to improve the quality of your hires

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With less than a quarter of UK businesses saying they’re confident about measuring the quality of their hires, finding and retaining the right people is more important than ever.

How exactly do you achieve this however? Below we have listed six top tips for improving the quality of your hires.

Don’t rely on the interview alone

One in five hiring managers admit to making a decision about candidates within just one minute of meeting them. Making an impromptu and uninformed decision about someone can spell disaster however.

If you disregard someone because you don’t think they’re the kind of person you’d enjoy going for a drink with after work, you could be missing out on top quality talent. On the other hand, hiring someone because you got on well with them while disregarding all the evidence that this could be a problematic or short lived recruit, will obviously affect the quality of your hires.

It is of course important that candidates fit in with the culture of the company but it’s equally crucial that their credentials match up.

Use assessment tools

The use of assessment tools can drastically improve the quality of your hires. Anything from video interviewing and situational judgement tests to psychometric assessments can help you to determine how people will perform once they’re in the role.

Conduct exit interviews

Very few companies carry out exit interviews but they can be an incredibly valuable tool when it comes to finding out what you’re like to work for. This process provides you with an insight into your candidate experience from your employee’s point of view and enables you to adjust your hiring process to reflect the data gathered so that you can improve the quality of your hires.

Modify the job to fit the person

Attracting good quality talent is difficult because chances are they’re already in a job and have plenty of other recruiters trying to attract their attention. If you’re found an exceptional candidate, be flexible with the role on offer.

Build profiles based on your top performers

It would be great if there was a sure-fire way of knowing whether or not somebody is going to be a successful long-term hire before you made them an offer. While there is no guaranteed way of doing this, you can improve the likelihood of it happening by building a profile of the attributes of all the top performers in your organisation. You can then use this to identify similar characteristics when interviewing candidates.

Use a recruiter

Enlisting the help of a recruitment agency can help to improve the quality of your hires for a number of reasons:

• A professional recruiter can dedicate more time to the process.
• They have a lot of experience and are therefore in a better position to establish whether or not someone would make a good hire.
• They often work with candidates in the long-term so they have first-hand experience of how this person performs in a role.

If you would like help finding your next top hire, please feel free to contact Choralis Consulting and we will be more than happy to help.