You’re sitting at your desk, head in your hands, desperate to figure out what keeps going wrong.
No matter who you seem to hire—no matter how strong their background, experience, and expertise—you can’t seem to get the RIGHT person in the position. Whether your employee left on their own or you had to fire them from the position, losing a team member is expensive and takes away from the momentum you’re creating with the rest of your team.
Turnover wreaks havoc on your company. From the reported $600 BILLION in turnover costs companies suffered in 2018, to the mental, emotional, and cultural toll losing someone has on your remaining team, employee retention has never been more important.
However, the problem with employee retention is making sure you have the RIGHT person in place to begin with.
As a leader in the recruiting space, I’ve been through thousands of hires and seen exactly what works (and what absolutely doesn’t!).
Here are four keys to making sure you hire the right fit for your company, so you can get off of the employee turnover rollercoaster.
Values-Based Hiring
As a company, your values guide the vision and direction of your business. If you value leadership, innovation, and learning, you need to hire employees who share those values. If you don’t, it’s difficult for them to understand where the company is going, and how they fit as an important piece to that puzzle.
It’s vital that all of your team members feel like they’re contributing to the success you’re creating together. If your team member doesn’t feel like they belong, they can feel like an outsider who is imposing. It makes communication difficult and breeds mistrust amongst your team.
The best way to avoid this is to have a full understanding of your values as a company and the shared values that your employees need to have in order for them to be a good fit for your company culture. During the hiring process, evaluate the values of potential candidates. You can use value-based questions in the interview process, have them rank their most important values, or conduct a core values assessment. This will give you a powerful foundation to work from to make sure you’re hiring for the right fit instead of hiring for the right experience.
Personality Awareness
The right fit overrides experience all day, every day when it comes to hiring—because it’s not just their skills that matter in your company. Your team spends over a third of their life at work. That means you must have the right people interacting with one another to make the environment ripe for success.
Understanding what personality is needed in each role is vital to the success of the person in that role.
For example, if you have someone in a leadership position who is brilliant at their job, but struggles with relating to or hearing the people they manage, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.
Likewise, putting someone into that leadership position who is overly nurturing or understanding could also be problematic. Instead, leadership roles require individuals who have a balance of authoritarianism, empathy, and strategic thinking in order to balance workloads and manage the team properly.
Using personality tests and behavioral assessments in your hiring process will help you make sure that you have the right personality in the right position. My favorite behavioral assessment is the Fit Test. It’s given me the most accurate and reliable results over and over again in all of the positions we hire for.
References
When you think of references, you’re probably thinking of checking in with the bosses of a previous candidate. However, if you get a little more creative in the references process, you can hire more effectively, especially when it comes to leadership positions.
When you’re looking to bring on a new team lead, C-Suite member, or manager, think about your bottom line. Who are the people most affected by this hire? The people the leaders oversee.
So if you’re looking to bring on a leadership role in your business, consider asking for references not only by the candidate’s superiors, but also by the people they’ve previously led.
These could be people they oversaw in their current or previous job, a community service organization, or even someone you have sat on a board with. The more you learn about the candidate, how they operate in a leadership capacity, and how they interact with different people in various roles, the more likely you are to make the right hiring decision.
Transferable Skills
Sometimes it’s easy to look at a piece of paper and decide you’ve found the perfect person. But as in life, everything can look good on paper and be an absolute mess in the execution. When you’re looking for the right person to fill a position, look for transferable skills that would help the candidate excel and bring fresh ideas or perspective to their position.
It’s easy to forget that different and varied experiences can bring immense value to the way a candidate sees and solves problems within a team. Paper perfect does not equate perfect fit.
Whether you’re hiring for the first time, or you’ve hired for thousands of positions over the years, these are the key differences in hiring the right person and keeping your company out of consistent turnover loops. How are you going to look at hiring differently so you can finally hire (and KEEP!) your right fit?