Listen To This Article

How To Hire & Interview The Right Employee

Almost every business at some point has to figure out how to hire the right person. Who is the right person for the business? It sounds simple on paper but the reality is it's a tricky task for any company whether they are big or small. This is because half of the companies recruiting end up hiring people who do not have the right skills or they are not the right fit and the costs of those mistakes are high.

This book summary will help you find out the things to consider before hiring someone in your business or company. We'll highlight the things that need to be considered before starting the hiring process and preparing the right interview questions.

Learn To Interview Potential Employees

• How to make what you need clear
• How to attract people you want to hire by highlighting the points the potential recruits care about
• How to prepare the right questions to ask in an interview
• How to stay clear of common hiring mistakes

WHO Book Summary

Recruiting mistakes can be devastating. Making the right decision is a skill that is crafted. Without proper understanding of what questions to ask, how to ask them and what to listen for, most people are not going to make the right decision. The good news is that most of the wrong decisions made come down to the same mistakes that most people make. This book shares what to avoid, what to listen for, and how to pull information out of candidates.

Recruiting can be a stressful task. If the wrong person is hired you just fire and replace them right? Well, it's not that simple. Recruiting new employees is not a matter of just trial and error, hiring the wrong person can cost businesses and companies a lot of money and they occur more than they should.

Studies conducted by the authors have shown that a mistake in hiring can cost a company approximately fifteen times more than the employee's salary. Some of the costs come from the employer's poor decisions and the rest comes from the work that's done to fire and replace him. In the book Built To Sell there is an amazing example of this kind of mistake that cost the company $400,000 because he hadn’t hired the right person.

Hiring the wrong person is a huge mistake but it happens all the time, this is mostly because business people do not have the necessary skills to make the right hiring decisions and they end up relying on their gut instinct, asking the same wrong questions every time. You need to know what to ask, when to ask it, and why. The book shares exactly those things. Telling you what specific questions to ask in what order. To this end, it is unlike any other book on the subject of hiring the right people.

---

Want to buy a book review like this?

LEARN MORE

---

It is important to know your needs before hiring as this will help I hope you and your business to find the right recruits that meet the right qualifications to succeed. You would not hire an unlicensed contractor to remodel your home because they don't have the right skills to do the job so why would you hire the wrong person with the wrong skills into your company or business. This is a big part of the book Team Of Teams.

Most recruiters forget to define their needs and what they're looking for in an employee and end up making the wrong decisions when it comes to hiring people hiring employees. As an employer, if you're not sure about what you want from your employees there is a risk you will end up with a generalist instead of an employee who has been trained to have specialized skills. This is a well placed argument in Who, but David Epstein believes the opposite to be true as well. In that generalists hold an immense amount of value today. His book Range is about leveraging generalists.

 

Hiring people without specialized skills is the most common mistake made by businesses and companies that are hiring. Most managers are easily impressed by the general skills of people and forget to ask about the specific skills they possess. The book The ONE Thing shows the power of focusing on one thing and the authors of WHO are trying to get you to uncover what each candidates’ ONE Thing is. Recruiting the wrong person into your business can increase the number of customer complaints which may then lead to reduced profits.

The ability of a recruit to fit in perfectly into the company culture is more important than their skills

Smarts and intellect alone won't make a great employee, they should also have strong social skills and this is something recruiters should keep in mind during the hiring process. In order to make sure the new recruit will fit in perfectly you should first find out the culture of your company.

While writing this book the authors interviewed CEOs who admitted they made mistakes because they did not consider the importance of the culture within the company. To avoid making this mistake from day one define the culture of your company. Bring together the leaders of your company and ask them to describe the environment within the company. Countless books talk about defining culture and making decisions about how to handle situations and growth, one book that provides situational examples and less actionable information is Small Giants. It's about companies that decided to be great rather than big.

Outdated traditional hiring techniques can easily be revamped. The biggest fault with traditional hiring techniques is that they are only used when new employees are needed. Especially when the hiring team is under a lot of pressure to quickly find someone new, this will most likely make them hire the wrong person. Examples of ‘doing the wrong thing’ are provided and readers are likely guilty of many of the common mistakes.

A better method, say Smart and Street, is to get the best referrals from your networks both private and business. Most CEOs admitted that the best way to get successful new employees is by using the network of referrals. Tactics for doing this are provided as well. It's also important to keep searching for potential candidates instead of just looking for a new employee when you need them.

Find the perfect person for the job by investigating the candidates deeply and many times. A screening interview will help you narrow the field but there is still some work to do before selecting the ideal candidate. The second interview is a more in-depth interview and the main goal is to find out who the candidate really is.

Based on a method developed by Brad Smart who is the father to one of the authors, when done correctly at the end of the interview you will have a greater understanding of the potential candidates which will allow you to select the ideal fit.

Reading the book Bait & Switch will also give hiring managers an idea of what applicants are experiencing throughout the process. Empathy can be a very helpful ingredient in communication.

About The Author Geoff Smart

Geoff Smart is the founder and chairman of ghSmart, a firm that offers leadership consulting that offers its services to Fortune 500 boards and CEOs, heads of state, and billionaire entrepreneurs. He also wrote other New York Times bestselling books like the "Power Score your formula for Leadership Success" and "Leadocracy". Together with his colleagues, Geoff Smart contributes hundreds of hours of their time each year to advise leaders in Government, Business, Education, Public Health.

Randy Street is a managing partner at ghSmart. He has given his time to advise CEOs, executive teams, and boards for more than 25 years on topics such as management due diligence and CEO successions. He frequently assists them to choose and grow teams that will succeed.

Randy Street is a keynote speaker with an energetic and dynamic style that regularly creates one of the highest audience satisfaction ratings. Before he joined ghSmart Randy worked as a Sales and Marketing EVP and as a Corporate Development EVP and Strategy for EzGov, a software company that was labeled Atlanta's fastest-growing company.

---

Want to buy a book review like this?

LEARN MORE

---