Editor's note: Employers all have several
things in common, one of which is the necessity to periodically hire
employees. Unless the employer has a background in human resources, this
can be a bit of a daunting task and hiring an employee might be more based on
a general impression than on fact.
Hiring practices however, are a crucial
component of building a strong team of employees as well as developing your
corporate culture. Before you hire your next employee, check out the
five essential hiring practices as outlined by Jan B. King.
Five Essential Hiring Practices
by: Jan B. King
Recruiting and hiring are often done in haste, leaving the company to repent
in the long run. Today, there’s a reason to be concerned about negligent
hiring. Negligent hiring means you and your company can be sued if one of your
hires injures other employees, especially if you could have foreseen a problem
but did not do a thorough check of the new employee before hiring.
The following list of five essential hiring practices establishes the minimum
you should follow:
1. Require outside testing. Allow a competent, impartial professional
interviewer to administer both paper and pencil and verbal tests. Professional
testing firms can administer valid psychological tests for intelligence,
stability, even determinations of addictive or dishonest personalities, as well
as skills tests of important technical abilities in your workforce. I find
testing often validates a suspicion I already had but wasn’t yet ready to come
to terms with.
2. Conduct a rigorous personal interview. This includes asking general
attitude questions, how you would manage your boss questions, how you would
manage your staff questions, questions relating to the applicant’s
understanding of the financial workings of a business and your department’s
role in the business’s overall success, questions relating to the
applicant’s ability to set goals and his or her expectations about achieving
goals, questions relating to specific skills required for the job, and general
communications required by the job.
3. Arrange a peer group interview. This part of the process encourages
applicants to speak more freely and helps determine how comfortable they will be
in working with their peers. Follow up with a meeting of everyone involved in
the hiring decision to determine if there is a group consensus about the
applicant’s suitability for work at your company.
4. Do a background check. Don’t neglect this, even if it is an employee’s
cousin or your competitor’s best salesperson. It’s very easy to set up an
account with an investigative firm online and to relatively quickly and
inexpensively find out if the applicant has a criminal record or a history of
DMV problems, lawsuits involving previous employers, workers’ compensation
claims, and so forth.
5. Do a reference check. You can conduct these over the phone, but they may
involve a request in writing. Reference checking is less effective than it used
to be, although you may still find a few people who are willing to talk. Most
former employers play it safe and verify only dates of employment and salary.
Document that you took all of these steps and you’ve gone a long way toward
protecting yourself against a charge or negligent hiring. And more importantly,
you’ve taken the first steps toward finding an employee who can trust and with
whom you can establish a successful employment relationship.
About The Author
Jan B. King is the former President & CEO
of Merritt Publishing, a top 50 woman-owned and run business in Los Angeles
and the author of Business Plans to Game Plans: A Practical System for Turning
Strategies into Action (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). She has helped hundreds
of businesses with her book and her ebooks, The Do-It-Yourself Business Plan
Workbook, and The Do-It-Yourself Game Plan Workbook. See www.janbking.com
for more information. jan@janbking.com
