Does your company utilize a rubric for evaluating job candidates? If not, it’s time to start.
Using a hiring rubric or similar tool (like a job candidate evaluation form) is a wonderful way to evaluate job candidates to identify who to hire. It gives your hiring team the ability to easily compare candidates side by side, especially as it relates to the key functions of the job you are hiring.
Understanding how to evaluate a candidate in a job interview is crucial to finding the right hire. Standardizing the process can also help with each hiring step.
How to improve your hiring process
There are three things an organization can do fairly easily that will dramatically improve the hiring process for the company and the talent they meet with. Let’s think of them as a step-by-step plan.
Step one
The hiring lead, along with key constituents, should iron out the experience, skills, and behaviors required for the role, including those that may be learned on the job.
Knowing which skills may be learned by a new hire is important to determine especially if the role is highly specialized. Hiring teams might try to find a unicorn that has the exact right type of experience, which will likely slow the search down. By being open to possibility and potential, the hiring team will be able to cast a wider net and likely accelerate the pace of the search.
Step two
Prior to launching the search it is critical that a rubric for evaluating job candidates, sometimes called a feedback matrix, be created. This will help the hiring team to be sure that each candidate is evaluated in the same way.
A matrix, along with standardized job interview questions will help remove bias from the interview process, ensures that candidates are evaluated based on their own merit and not against one another.
Step three
Finally, structure the interviews so that each interviewer in the search committee knows exactly what they should be focusing on when evaluating job candidates. Candidates often find themselves answering the same questions over and over again. By taking this step, you’ll be sure that the hiring team will get a broader understanding of the candidate (and you’ll decrease the chance of bias creeping into the process).
Hiring a new team member is one of the most important things we do in business. The right hire can solve problems, improve morale, and shape a team on a day-to-day basis.
Hiring should be about more than just past work skills and experience. You might benefit from assessing a candidate’s soft skills and potential corporate cultural fit before making a hiring decision. A standardized evaluation process can help in every way.