Overcome 3 Obstacles To Hiring Better And Faster

The obstacles to effective hiring are not difficult to overcome if you change your fundamental mindset and follow some simple rules.

In “Why Aren’t You Hiring Faster?” I suggested you can make your company more competitive by speeding up your hiring process to avoid losing the best candidates. There are of course many reasons why hiring decisions can take more time than you’d like.

• Decision makers aren’t always readily available to interview candidates.
• It takes time to nail down the budget for a position.
• HR has to filter the wheat from the chaff as all those applications pour in.
• Candidate assessment can require time-consuming tests and interviews.

Your HR department can explain why those reasons for delay are legitimate. As a headhunter, I’ll tell you they’re all bunk. If hiring is a strategic objective, none of those reasons for delay should slow you down. You must decide how critical hiring is for your marketing operation and immediately assign someone to manage (or eliminate) the obstacles. We all know that time to market can make or break a product or a business. Time to hire can, too.

Even if I can’t convince you that hiring is the most critical task on any manager’s agenda, I’d like to show you that the obstacles to effective hiring are not difficult to overcome if you change your fundamental mindset and follow some simple rules.

Obstacle 1: “There’s No Rush”

Don’t embark on making a hire unless you’re really ready to act. This delay-inducing mistake results in your best candidates going to employers who are ready to make offers quickly. Don’t start the process until:

• You are sure you need to fill a position and have defined how the job will contribute to your company’s success and profits.
• Your budget for the position is locked up and ready to spend.
• You have set a deadline for making the hire.
• You’re ready to meet and judge the candidates.

Be in a hurry to hire. This means you—the marketing manager—not just HR.

Obstacle 2: Too Many Wrong Candidates

If you look in the wrong places for the talent you need, you’re going to waste a lot of time filtering applicants. To speed up hiring, narrow down your choices by improving the pool from which you will recruit. Hiring the best people means recruiting in only the right places.

• Don’t post a job in front of the whole world: If you post on a big job board like Indeed or search through a huge database like LinkedIn, your pool is the whole world. Do you really want the whole world to apply? Filtering the whole world is a fool’s errand. It’s costly and it wastes time. Worse, it implies you’re indiscriminate and don’t know what you want.
• Decide where to recruit: Start recruiting only after you have defined the narrow pool of best candidates. Then determine where they hang out, and go there. For example, focus on professional associations, events, and online hangouts—even with specific competitors whose people you want.

Obstacle 3: Guessing-Game Interviews

Do you make your marketing team guess what you want accomplished on a project? Of course not. To help your employees do their work effectively, you show them what the desired behaviors are. You don’t make a secret out of anything because you want them to be successful.

Yet most employers play guessing games with job applicants. “We can’t tell job applicants the answers to our interview questions! We can’t disclose what we’re willing to pay! Hiring is a game, and we write the rules!”

Sheesh. Isn’t that just goofy? Take the secrecy out of recruiting and hiring.

• Tell candidates what the salary range for the job is. This is the simplest way to avoid wasting time with people who will never take the job.
• Let candidates know in advance exactly what you want them to demonstrate to you in an interview.
• Show candidates what deliverables you expect in the first month on the job, the first three months, six, 12, and 18.
• Ask candidates to show you how they’d do the job and deliver. Let them talk to your team members in advance of the interview, so they can prepare.

Eliminate obstacles during your hiring process, and you’re more likely to beat your competitors to the prize. Be in a hurry. Limit your pool of candidates. Help applicants win the job. When word gets around that you hire like it matters, the best marketers will come to you themselves just because they’re fed up with slowpoke employers that waste job applicants’ time.