Hiring Advice
5 critical factors to consider when hiring an employee
5 critical factors to consider when hiring an employee
Your employees are the people who handle the everyday operations of your business. This leaves you free to grow your business into something more. You need to pick the best workers possible so that they get the job done correctly. Good employees can make a big difference in offering your customers a great experience or not. When you are hiring, you need to know how to pick the right people. Here are 5 critical factors to consider when hiring an employee.
1. Loyalty
It costs a lot of money to hire and train people. You need to find people who you believe will stay with you for a long period of time. They will learn more than other employees in this time. A loyal employee will also work harder for you than a disloyal employee. A good employee won’t help you much if they are ready to leave at the scent of something slightly better somewhere else. You need to consider how candidates have shown their loyalty to previous employers. One of the best ways to see loyalty, though, is through their work history. How long has the candidate worked for one employer before moving on?
2. Personality
An employee’s personality can really affect the mood in the office. You want someone who exudes positivity and happiness as opposed to someone who is always stressed or rude. You also want someone who fits into the culture you’re trying to create in your office. Get a sense of a candidate’s personality with simple small talk. You will also get a sense of their personality through their body language and their general aura. You also need to hire people with the right personality for the job. A customer service employee will likely have a different personality than an aggressive sales associate. Yet, an IT tech will have a different personality all together.
3. Experience
No matter how nice a person is, you need to know that they can do the job. A good way to determine a person’s ability to get the job done is by looking at their experience. Have they done similar work at other positions? How long have they been performing these duties? Do they have education in the area of work? The more experience someone has, the more they will be able to contribute with the least training. Of course, you also want to find someone who is trainable and is willing to adapt to your systems and processes.
4. Hard Working
You aren’t going to get to the next step in your business by being lazy. You can’t let your workers get lazy, either. You need to hire people who work hard and put their all into whatever they do. A hard worker is the person who will stay late or find things to do when work is somewhat slow. These are also the people who will reach out to customers to do the extra mile, ensuring those customers come back to your store again. You can tell a candidate is hard working by asking about a time that they went above and beyond at work.
5. Common Sense
There are certain things you just can’t teach. One of the most important things that people just need to learn on their own is common sense. The perfect employee for you should know how to get things done in the most efficient way possible. They should also be able to figure out basic things for themselves instead of running to you for every little thing. It can be hard to tell if someone has common sense. Try asking trick questions that will make the candidate really think. You can also ask about some of their previous processes at work.
These are the most critical factors to consider when hiring an employee. Naturally, you want to pick an employee who contains all of the important factors while also following your instinct. Hopefully, these considerations can help you limit the number of candidates to the top few. Once you reach this point, you need to use your own intuition to pick the one who rubs you the right way. You shouldn’t go off of how much you personally like the person but how they will be as an employee. And maybe get a second opinion.