The Benefits of Involving Your Team in the Hiring Process
1. It makes team members feel valued – By letting your team members have a voice in the hiring process, it signals that you value them, respect their feedback, and want the hiring decision to be a collaborative process.
2. It provides interviewing and decision-making experience for future leaders – Some of your individual contributors today will be your supervisors/managers of tomorrow. Having them participate in the hiring process now gives them training in interviewing techniques, experience evaluating candidates, and insight into how hiring decisions are made that will benefit them when they move into leadership roles.
3. It creates a sense of ownership in the success of the new employee – Because they are staking a bit of their reputation on the selection, your team members will tend to be more invested in the success of the new employee and will work extra hard to prove they made the right decision.
4. It gives you a broader perspective on candidates – Hiring people is risky business. No matter how extensive the interview process, there is only so much you can learn about a candidate prior to him/her joining your team. Having more people involved in the interview process gives you a broader perspective and more insight into the candidate. Inevitably some of your team members will see things in people that you don’t, and likewise, many times they confirm the positive/negative qualities you observe. Leaders often aren’t aware of their blind spots, and getting more people involved helps prevent that problem.
5. It gives the candidate more insight into his/her future co-workers, team, organization, and culture – View the hiring process as a two-way decision: you are choosing a person to join your team and the candidate is making a choice to join my team/organization. Having exposure to more teammates allows candidates to get a broader taste of the type of people they’ll be working with and the culture of your team and organization. Candidates need to make an informed decision when joining an organization and interviewing with their future teammates is invaluable in that process.
6. It improves employee referrals — Being involved in the hiring process will help remind your employees of the tremendous value added by quality new hires. This realization may directly increase both the volume and the quality of the referrals submitted to your company’s employee referral program.
7. It increases employee learning — The exchange of questions, answers, and ideas during the interviewing process can by itself be a learning experience for your employees. They will also learn about best practices at other firms and the different ways to handle their problems. Taken together, this may directly increase employee productivity and innovation.
8. It increases retention — Making hiring a collaborative effort will reinforce your employee’s feeling of community. It will also remind employees that your culture values and practices collaboration, consultation, feedback, and transparency. These benefits, along with the fact that employees like having a voice, being trusted, and feeling needed, can increase the retention rates among your employees that are involved in hiring.
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Ten Key Steps to Involving Employees in the Recruitment Decision
It is critical that you set your employees up for success when you make the decision to involve them in the recruitment process. Here are ten steps to pave the way for positive results:
1. Start with a well defined job description
When less experienced people are involved in a recruitment decision it becomes more important to have a well defined and documented job description.
2. Have defined competency statements
Once the role has been defined, the competencies required by the role need to be documented. This provides a consistent check for any recruitment decisions.
3. Produce clearly-defined scoring or competency sheets
Having the competencies documented is one thing but having a consistent way of measuring and recording candidates' performance is another. This provides a common framework for all involved in the selection decision. It also provides a safety shield for the organization in the event of a claim of bias.
4. Train staff to use scoring or record keeping sheets
Having the tools is one thing, knowing how to use them properly is quite another. A ten minute show session is not enough. Remember the reputation of your organisation is at risk here. Poor recruitment and selection, even to unsuccessful candidates, is a reflection on the customer satisfaction of an organization.
5. Ensure that the employees involved have a specific role in the process
Just being involved is not enough to achieve the goal of increasing retention. The role must be real and must be an integrated part of the team. If this is artificial in any way your employees will know.
6. Limit the number of people any one candidate will interact with
If during the selection process different team members are involved at each meeting or interaction, it may appear to the candidate that no one really owns the process. What the candidate wants to see is a decision maker. Seeing different people each time just sends the message that either they are not important or there is no real leader.
7. Keep the process consistent – limit the number of staff involved with each post recruited
Every effective recruitment requires a balance of participation and consistency. Consistency is best achieved by using the same (few) individuals for a given post. Others in the group can get involved when a different role is posted and another person is recruited.
8. Aggregate outputs to ensure fairness
When more than two people are involved in a selection, decision assessment scoring mechanisms are both fair and robust. It ensures that any bias is minimized throughout the entire process. The scores can then be 'averaged' or at least 'normed' as appropriate for the process. Remember: no one person's view should have a higher weighting than anyone else's.
9. Make cultural fit a more objective assessment
Cultural fit in new hires is often as critical as technical capacity. The idea of cultural fit, however, can be a slippery slope. Try to drive the question past "Would I grab a beer with this person?" and train your staff to make more objective judgements on how well someone fits your value system, rather than how much we like them as a person. It is vitally important to determine if disagreements that arise in the process come down to differences in the interview experience, if it's just a matter of personal chemistry, or if it might be a real warning sign about a candidate's cultural fit.
10. Create a methodical roundtable process
After the interviews are finished and the interviewer roundtable starts, everyone will inevitably have a different perspective on a candidate. It’s important to consider how these conversations are structured and how the team will come together. Set up the conversation so that everything that should come out during the roundtable, can.
Source: hrzone.com
Effective Collaborative Hiring Requires In-Depth Knowledge
Contact Wendy Ellen Inc. for assistance today!
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