Without sustained growth, businesses can stagnate and even run into a situation that threatens continuity. While most companies can (and do) make every effort to discover new markets and business opportunities for growth, they often neglect one key element of meaningful growth: having the right people in the right place.
The world’s most successful companies aren’t just those with the perfect product or service to fill a business need. They’re also the ones with successful talent acquisition strategies that enable them to hire the right people to drive the business to success.
How should a business strategize about hiring the right people? Below are some useful starting points.
Table of Contents
Create a Structured Interview Process
The interview process is one of the most important parts of recruiting the right talent. It offers recruiters an opportunity to gauge a candidate’s skill and competence for an open role. However, this is hardly ever as simple as asking a series of questions or measuring the answers against a set of pre-defined values.
When hiring for growth, businesses must structure the interview process in a way that improves their chances of hiring and onboarding the right talent. Interviewing an unnecessarily large volume of candidates will only make this more challenging. That is why mortgage recruiters, for example, try to screen out as many unsuitable applicants as possible prior to an interview.
Employers can take this a few steps further. For instance, the interview proper could be preceded by an aptitude test or, interviewers could require candidates to provide short video introductions.
In both cases, the information received in advance of the interview allows recruiters to properly structure their questions, determine points of discussion, and otherwise gauge the potential of a candidate before the interview itself. This enables them to organize a final screening before the interview, ensuring that their efforts remain focused on the best-suited candidates.
Devise Interview Questions to Test for Must-Have Traits
Some businesses may need to modify their interview process to ensure they can identify the right traits for the role in question. This may require a different approach to questions during the interview. Initial outreach and interface will help to screen applicants applying for the role, such that any subsequent interviews are with candidates that have the necessary academic and professional credentials.
As a matter of determining proficiency and capability, interviewers should ask questions that can highlight a candidate’s innovative abilities. Alternatively, interviewers can structure questions as theoretical situations that would allow a candidate to demonstrate how they would react in response to a business situation.
Some questions could even help interviewers gauge soft skills like communication, personability, organizing, etc. These questions can help businesses decide on the right candidates to drive growth once hired.
Prioritize Candidates That Can Wear Different Hats
Cross-functional employees are a tremendous asset to any business. These employees can bring value that may exceed the conventional requirements of their roles. As a result, this places them in a position to take on more responsibility, make informed decisions, and act knowledgeably under difficult circumstances. Rightly so, candidates that have worked in more than one field or department often merit more consideration during the hiring process.
Streamline the Onboarding and Training Process
The onboarding process is critical to the success of the entire hiring effort. It is imperative that businesses, having made a hiring decision, should ensure that their new hire experiences a smooth transition into their new role and integrate well with the existing workforce.
A satisfactory onboarding experience sets the right tone and offers the new hire all the necessary resources to meet their training and orientation needs. A poor onboarding experience, on the other hand, could impact the employer-employee relationship, making it harder for businesses to successfully hire the kind of talent that can help them grow.
Nurture a Culture that Attracts and Retains Talent
Great company culture goes a long way when it comes to attracting great talent. Employees want to work for companies that empower and support them. This includes employees who a business feels will contribute most effectively to its growth. Therefore, employers must make every effort to make their workplace culture as appealing as possible.
How this is executed will vary from business to business, but it will also be uniformly essential if employers aim to attract and retain growth-driving talent. This will also make it easier for third-party recruiters, like a manufacturing staffing agency, to present the culture as a big part of the employer’s value proposition.
Get Support from Specialized Recruiters
Businesses are often able to more efficiently source talent if they choose to work with third-party specialized recruiters. This helps to supplement hiring efforts, especially where positions may require recruiters to have deep industry knowledge of a role and what it entails. Specialized recruiters, such as those offering manufacturing staffing solutions, often possess a better understanding of manufacturing-related roles than a general recruiter. As such, they can identify candidates with a greater potential for growth more readily than a general recruiter.
