How to Hire the Right Talent the First Time

As anyone involved in hiring will tell you, few things are more frustrating than choosing the wrong candidate for a vacancy. Bringing what you thought was a prime candidate onboard only to have them fall well short of expectations can be downright demoralizing. Not only did you waste thousands in recruiting and training expenses, but you have to start back at square one.

This guide is for you if you are in a hiring rut marred by more misses than hits. Below, we identify the hidden risks of bad hires. Additionally, we provide you with several proven tactics for hiring the right talent the first time.

Better hiring will create a cascade effect that will help your organization become more productive across the board. Hiring great talent can also lead to better staff morale, reduced turnover, and more profits. Sounds like a very appealing proposition, doesn’t it?

The Hidden Risks of Bad Hires

When discussing the risks and challenges created by hiring the wrong candidate, many employers focus solely on the fact that they must start a new search for quality talent. However, the impacts of bad hires go far beyond the inconvenience of attempting to recruit new applicants.

First, the cost of a bad hire is much higher than you may expect. According to recent research, the cost of a bad hire can be approximately 30% of that individual’s annual salary.

So, hiring the wrong candidate for a position that typically earns about $50,000 a year can cost your company roughly $15,000. This figure accounts for recruiting, hiring, training, screening expenses, and lost productivity.

In addition, bad hires can negatively impact our existing employees, especially if the bad hire remains for an extended period. When it comes to bad hires, you can quickly end up in a tight spot.

While you may not want to give up on a once-promising candidate too quickly, keeping them too long can ruin your team’s morale. In extreme cases, working with a bad hire may prompt your top performers to seek jobs elsewhere.

The Keys to Hiring Great Talent

If you are exploring ways to hire great talent, we recommend leveraging these proven tactics:

• Treat Recruiting like Marketing: If you want to stay relevant in the changing professional landscape, you must modify your recruiting strategies. Specifically, your recruiting staff needs to treat talent acquisition more like marketing. This approach highlights your company’s culture, values, and mission when advertising vacancies. In addition, your recruiting staff should leverage popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and of course, LinkedIn.
• Manage Your Company Image: Maintaining a positive brand image is important for attracting and retaining clients. However, it is equally vital to your recruiting efforts. According to Glassdoor, maintaining a strong brand can reduce hiring costs by 50%. Modern employees actively seek out job opportunities with reputable, value-oriented companies.
• Reach Out to Passive Job Seekers: Did you know that most job seekers are not actively looking for new employment opportunities? However, these individuals are willing to make a change if the right opportunity presents itself.

This disconnect means that your recruiting team must work proactively to connect with passive job seekers in meaningful ways. Examples include inviting top talent to digital trade shows or sending invitations to fill out an application on job posting sites.

Focus on Skills, Not Pedigrees: When screening potential candidates, does your hiring team kick things off by verifying employment experience and reviewing resumes with a fine-toothed comb?

If so, they may inadvertently undermine your efforts to identify top talent. Instead of focusing solely on an applicant’s pedigree, consider taking a skills-centric approach. The most talented individuals may not necessarily be those with the strongest educational background or work experience.

Cumulatively, these tactics will assist you in your efforts to hire the right talent while also helping you minimize the risk of rapid turnover.

Why Skills-Based Screening Is Essential to Hiring the Right Talent

You might find a diamond in the rough by relying on subjective screening practices, but these antiquated tactics are unreliable at best and disastrous at worst. Why risk it with so much at stake, especially when skills-based screening offers a better solution?

Skills-based screening is a pivotal component of hiring great talent the first time. Your hiring staff will no longer have to rely on old-school screening strategies. Instead, they can gather actionable information about each applicant’s skills, abilities, and aptitudes by administering skills tests to applicants.

Online skills tests are highly accurate screening tools that subject matter experts create. Popular skills tests include Accounts Payable, Microsoft Office, and Logical Thinking. Once an applicant completes their assigned skills tests, your hiring team can instantly access their results and zero in on top talent.

Search our massive skills test library to see the wide range of skills tests for nearly every kind of position available.

Our Assessment Library contains hundreds of skills tests to help you hire great talent and hire the right talent the first time. Request a demo to try them out.