Sometimes businesses experience rapid growth and need to hire people quickly. Finding them, though, can be a massive challenge. People aren’t as available as you might imagine. And even if unemployment is high, you can often struggle to find the people you need for your operations. Workers might be in ample supply, but skills aren’t.
Identify Your Hiring Needs
The first thing to do is to identify your hiring needs. Do you need to take people on full-time as registered employees? Or could you just grab somebody from sites like Snupit to carry out the work?
Think carefully about the mission for the employee. Is their role process-based and ongoing? Or is it a one-off project you need them for?
If it is the latter, then you can usually get people quickly. Often you can source them from on-demand labor sites or freelance platforms.
If it is the former, then you can again outsource these tasks. For instance, marketing professionals don’t have to work in-house to add value to your enterprise even though they provide ongoing support. The same goes for your finance team.
Prepare Your Interview Questions Ahead of Time
The next step is to create a process that will allow you to interview candidates quickly. You’ll want to include a range of questions that test candidates on a variety of levels. Try if you can to cover the following bases:
- Culture fit questions where you find out whether a person has the temperament to fit into your organization
- Icebreaker questions you use to help interviewees relax and open up about themselves
- Situational questions where you find out how candidates are likely to react in specific scenarios in the workplace
- Behavioral questions that ask how candidates dealt with prior situations
Use Group Interview Techniques
Interviewing people one-on-one is a time-consuming process that takes you away from the rest of your work. Rifling through employees trying to find the best people is an astonishingly labor-intensive task.
Interviewing people in groups using a panel of experts helps you gain deeper insights.
This happens for two reasons. First, you can see how people interact with others in a group – important for team-based businesses. And second, a panel of interviewers will be able to capture more information about each candidate than a single interviewer. So, use this method to your advantage.
Use Red Flags as a Form of Triage
Nurses will often use triage systems in disaster situations to mark people worth saving. Businesses need to adopt a similar approach. They should look out for red flags and use them to reject candidates quickly. You simply don’t have time to delve deeper into their psyche and find out how they tick.
What red flags might you look out for?
Here are some examples:
- Dressing inappropriately for the interview
- Being rude to people they meet during the course of the day
- Talking too much about themselves or things that don’t relate to the questions you asked
- Appearing arrogant or combative in the way that they speak
- Offering vague or non-answers to the questions you ask
- Failing to help other people in collective tasks
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