Many of my entrepreneur women clients are hiring right now and finding it an extremely frustrating process. From applicants who claim that they are “expert” at everything they put on their resume, to new hires that don’t follow company policy, many women entrepreneurs and questioning the benefits of having employees.
In a period of great unemployment, this is not good. Whether you are hiring or looking for a new job, it would be beneficial to polish up your hiring and application skills. Here are three hiring tips I give to small business owners when they are in the hiring process.
1. See if the applicant can follow instructions. Test them during the application process. If you’re looking to hire an administrator with basic email skills, ask them to send their resume as an attachment. If you’re looking for a technical wizard, ask them to describe the most interesting technical problem they have ever encountered and what they did to solve it. If they can’t follow instructions, don’t go any further.
2. Check basic communication skills. Make sure that part of the application process includes some written requirements. If the person can’t be bothered to use the spell check device, he or she probably can’t be bothered to get the details right on the job. Make them leave a voice mail message for you. Are they courteous? Pleasant? Is the message complete? Granted, some people have an easier time with communication than others (for example, salespeople are more glib than engineers), but you’ll get an idea if the person can meet the communication requirements for the job. If they can’t, don’t go any further.
3. Check references. Checking references has gone out of favor because of legal hassles faced by employers. Even if the company can’t tell you much more than when the employee worked at the company, you’ll find out how flexible the candidate has decided to be with the truth. If you have any question in your mind, don’t go any further with the hiring process.
Adding these three steps will actually save you time because you will eliminate mis-matches much earlier in the process and not have to wait, as one of my clients did, to find out after hours of interviews that the applicant couldn’t spell and couldn’t use the spell-check feature.
