How to screen candidates

Learn how to write a job description that attracts the right candidates to hire a team to help your business reach and exceed its goals.

If you’re having trouble finding workers with the skills you need to compete, you’re not alone. More than 80 percent of employers report that they are experiencing a skills gap — particularly a soft skills gap — in their workplace. Surprisingly, the hardest to find qualifications aren’t tech-focused hard skills. The top 10 soft skills…

Just when you had mastered face-to-face job interviews, along came COVID-19. Almost overnight the virus changed basic hiring procedures.As a result, remote interviewing is the new norm. Fortunately, vetting potential staff via phone, email and video had already been on the rise, particularly in the initial screening process.Now that via video conferencing and video calls are more prevalent, you might not even need to meet an applicant in-person for lower-level positions. As for more senior roles, you could defer face-to-face sessions until after initial video scrutiny. This trend is one that may extend far beyond the coronavirus pandemic, which makes mastering the video interview process essential.

While some are harmless stereotypes other biases can render your impressions invalid. Being aware of them can help your hiring acumen.

With so much information in background searches, must you pry into someone’s finances?

Finding the right balance between smart and educated

Making promises or exaggerations that prove false could be misrepresentation. Protect yourself from “wrongful hiring” lawsuits by watching what you (or your recruiters) say to prospects.

There are several good reasons to answer inquiries from rejected interviewees.

Every time you post a new job, it becomes a small recruiting campaign. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can automatically trace most of these sources for you. Here’s what you should know in order make this most effective.

There you are, just about ready to wrap up the interview. What a great candidate, then…

As an interviewer, if you’re doing things during interviews to turn the candidate off you may be disengaging the best applicants.

While you’re running the standard background employment check, you could also check out the candidate online. But the risks might outweigh the benefits – so use caution before you click.

On average, cultural mismatch accounts for about half of first year attrition and, in many cases, rapid turnover costs more than not hiring at all, especially at senior levels.

Getting fooled can be costly. You might mistakenly hire someone who can’t perform their duties. Or that person’s dishonesty could spill over into their work habits, causing havoc internally and harming morale in your organization.

If we are not consciously paying attention to our intuition when we interview, we are leaving out one of the essential pieces of picking the right person.

Hint: their pants won’t be on fire so watch for subtler signs. Sometimes what seems obvious isn’t a sign of lying candidate.