7 tips – How to make a good hiring decision and succeed in closing the hire?

"How to make a good hiring decision and succeed in closing the hire?"

This is the question everyone is trying to find answers to. Is there a formula, that makes you to make always the right hiring decision?

Let me tell you this straight away:

When we talk about people, we can never be 100 % sure about success.

The main reason is that being a human is an ever changing concept. Your values, interests and attitude might change due to different things at work or personal life. Also, the concept of making great hiring decisions is not only about doing everything right during the recruitment process, but also nailing business planning and talent management (= for example, how to keep people motivated).

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Making great hiring decisions is not only about doing everything right during the recruitment process, but also nailing business planning and talent management.

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During my career, I have learned a couple of things you might find useful and that will help you to make better hiring decisions.

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7 tips to making good hiring decisions and succeed in closing the hires

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1. Define your recruitment need

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It’s a different thing to recruit what we want, instead of what we actually need.

Sometimes the team  might have different opinions of the hiring vision than you, so it is crucial to talk with the team members, stakeholders, board members or even investors. For example, you want to hire Head of Marketing, but actually the biggest need is in content creation. These are very different roles.

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2. Evaluate candidates in relation to your need, not by comparing them with each other

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It is easy to compare candidates with each other: “This one is better in this and the other is better in that”.

But when you do this, you might end up to a never-ending loop, where you forget the actual recruitment need. If it seems that candidate has something you absolutely love, it’s time to go quickly to back to the step 1, and re-evaluate if that is what we need. You just might have to define the profile again.

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3. Understand your own past experiences to be aware of biases

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Is there some experiences in your past that might affect on how you see other people?

And yes, we all have these things called biases. If you ignore them and just go with the first feeling you get, that might threaten your success in making the right hiring decision.

The point is not to become a perfect person with no biases, but to be aware of them. You might think, for example, that 40-year-old men can’t succeed in this role, or that you must know a specific tool to master some tasks, etc. Try to figure out what makes you think what you think, and be aware of how these biases might affect on your evaluation. Your thoughts aren’t always the truth.

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4. Understanding the candidate’s motives

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I have learned, that one big thing is to understand WHY the candidate is interested in your company and the job.

Are they running away from their current career situation? Why? Why would this job  be the best next step for this candidate? What do they want to learn next? When you truly understand the talent's motives of changing jobs, it makes the candidates feel heard and you get important insights about their situation right now.

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5. Respect the talents

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Successful employment is about mutual respect.

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Asking your talents how they feel after each interview also increases the contact points between your company and the candidates, and engages them to your process.

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This applies also to the recruitment process. If you treat candidates poorly during recruitment process, the best ones might withdraw from the process. That does not increase your chances of hiring the best person for the open role.

Communicate with candidates every week, try to keep the hiring process as short as possible. When you respect the candidates and are genuinely interested in them (for example, you ask talents after each interview how are they feeling), they can feel it. This also increases the contact points between your company and the candidates, and engages them to your process.

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6. Use data, not your gut feeling

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The data doesn’t beat around the bush, and neither should we.

Did you know that 28% of hiring managers admit that “gut feeling” is their main determining factor in making hiring decisions. How to get the data to prove that your gut feeling is right (or wrong)?

We came up with a solution: in the beginning of each recruitment process, we make an excel and list all of the must-haves for the role – all of the more or less obvious ones.

For example, now when TalentBee's a startup, everyone has to have an "always-be-selling" mindset. Then you still need to figure out how to measure the quality or trait during the recruitment process.

Btw, based on research, the best ways to validate candidates are:

• work sample tests
• structured interviews and
• cognitive ability tests

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We have exit criteria for each recruitment step (when the candidate can be moved to the next phase based on detecting the must-haves). Then after each discussion we go through the list of must-haves, and make our decisions.

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7. Make an outstanding job offer

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Many talents have multiple job offers on the table at the same time. How to outstand the competitors?

We make a Growth plan for each candidate we want to hire: in a powerpoint slide deckwe go through the candidate’s unique values and motivational factors, strengths, and where to grow based on how we have understood them. Then we present and explain the role and give details about the offer.

Only after carrying out this phase carefully, we send the actual employment agreement. I can tell you that this one works – it has brought us 100 % job offer acceptance rate at this point!

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