If you want to hire an impact person, your approach — or your process in hiring — is really important. The place to start is using best practices in screening resumes.
The wrong hires result in costly turnover — a waste of money and time. Before you start interviewing, the place to start is your screening of resumes. Don’t take shortcuts.
Rather than get overwhelmed by the avalanche of resumes, take baby steps. Budget adequate time to scan resumes to screen for the people you’d like to interview.
Five basics to consider in your resume screening:
1. The track record and potential to meet your needs.
Look for ways they helped their previous employers succeed as organizations. Their pasts are indicative of the future.
Screen for resumes of people who show a pattern of success, and visualize if they can help your culture and organization.
A word about stability: In this economy, there might be extenuating circumstances if the applicants seem to have had too many jobs.
So if everything else looks good, it might a good investment of your time to put them in the “to-be interviewed” pile.
2. Passion in managing details.
A focused, well-written cover letter and personalized resume for your company are good indicators of applicants’ attention to details. Poor grammar, typos and misspelled words will also be the result of their work in your behalf if you hire them.
You also want indications that the applicants expertly managed details in their prior responsibilities.
3. Level of education.
Perhaps your opening doesn’t require a degree or post-graduate study. But if it does, make sure the applicants made the right choices in education.
Consider the quality of the university. Even if accredited, for-profit universities don’t provide the quality that nonprofits do. Nor do online schools where’s there’s no give-and-take with quality professors.
If it’s a critical position, make sure the persons’ studies are relevant. Also, an omen is the level of extracurricular activities.
Another good sign is whether the persons worked in school instead of solely relying on student loans.
4. Consider where the applicants’ live.
If it’s urgent that you hire someone as soon as possible, a person who is planning to commute a long distance to work is less desirable than some who lives locally.
Further, relocation is taxing emotionally, physically and financially to search for a home, research schools if there are children, and the work preparing for the moving day.
5. Scan their LinkedIn accounts.
For resumes you like, compare the applicants’ submission materials with their statements on LinkedIn for more clues. It wouldn’t hurt to Google the persons’ names, either.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are related tips:
9 Image-Building Steps that Will Attract the Best Workers — Quick fixes to attract the best workers.
Need to Hire a Professional? Advertising Tips to Attract the Best Talent — Whether your business has grown so you need to hire a key professional or you’re replacing a person, there are certain advertising-recruitment tips to use. To avoid wasting your time, you must plan.
Hiring for a Small Operation? Conduct Behavioral Interviews — In this economic environment, whether you run a small operation in a big company or you own a small business, you’re wearing many hats. So you need employees who can successfully wear multiple hats, too. What does that entail? It entails several things.
Checklist – Top 18 Attributes of the Best Salespeople — What’s needed to be effective in sales? Merely having a gregarious personality will no longer cut it in the 21st century. As a manager, if you want to improve your company’s sales performance, become a winning sales organization and review your recruitment techniques in hiring salespeople.
“Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus”
-Jim Collins
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