4 Tips for Hiring the Best Employees

A company is only as good as the people who make it run. Primarily, this is the employees. Getting good employees isn’t as simple as just wanting them, though. There are, however, several simple things you can do to improve the quality of applicants to your company as well as your hiring process to make this happen. Here are four tips for hiring the best employees for your business.

1. Competitive Salary

You can easily increase the quality of applications received by your organization by raising your base pay for employees. Higher pay incentives more people to apply, giving you a greater pool of talent to select from. It also encourages people who might have otherwise passed you up due to low wages to take another look. Employees who are financially stable and well-compensated tend to feel valued and perform better.

2. Offer Benefits (Especially Health Insurance)

Employer-sponsored benefits can go a long way towards attracting talent.  Health insurance, vision, and dental benefits, and vacation policies are often just as important as salary to job seekers.  A generous employer-sponsored health plan is often a top draw.  In addition to attracting talent, employees with access to good benefits are more likely to stay healthy, thereby reducing the missed time from work.

3. Hire Without Names

When reviewing applications, one way to ensure that only the talent and qualifications of an individual are being evaluated is to hide the names on applications. Several studies, including one jointly from Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, have shown that biases both implicit and explicit can negatively affect applicants during the hiring process depending on the origin of their names. No one should lose out on a job because of this and your company shouldn’t lose out on a valuable employee because of something so inconsequential. As such, hiding names during at least the end of an initial review of applications can help boost your headcount and make your business more inclusive.

4. Create Formal Scoring

There will always be some degree of personal feelings that go into who to hire but ensuring some base objectivity factors into things is an important goal. That’s why creating a formal scoring system for applicants is a helpful tool for a hiring manager. Formal scoring helps to improve the quality of evaluation someone does with applications, allowing a manager to compare against the scoring rubric rather than whatever they think will work best at the given time. Assign certain “point values” to things like certifications, relevant experience, and the like, then see how applicants stack up against one another once you go through. Often, there will need to be deeper analysis on top of this, but it’s a good tool for helping narrow the field during a first pass and structure the hiring process.

4. Keep Perspective

Sometimes, the qualifications of an employee can overshadow what they’re being hired for. That’s why it’s necessary to keep perspective on the job you want your applicants to do once they’re hired. A Harvard grad with a law degree might be impressive, but it’s probably not relevant to the job at hand unless you’re a law office. That isn’t to say there might not be other reasons to hire this candidate, but those other reasons should be the focus at this time. On occasion, it may even be best to hire someone less experienced on paper if those experiences make them better suited for the job than someone with a more formal education.

Hiring isn’t a simple process. With so many considerations to make, try using these four tips to ensure that you end up with the best employees once it’s time to clock out.

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Dan Levenson

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