Kelly Cantwell

Kelly Cantwell

Partner, Hire Success®

Kelly Cantwell is a growth strategist and entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience building and advising successful businesses.

Throughout his career, Kelly has led initiatives in SaaS, data consulting, and talent strategy—co-founding one of Indiana’s fastest-growing ISPs and directing data services at a national consulting firm. At Hire Success®, he’s focused on helping organizations improve hiring accuracy with data-backed systems and practical insight.

Kelly lives in Indiana with his family and spends his time exploring new ideas, outdoor trails, and better ways to build great teams.

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Understanding Dominant Personalities at Work

You are hiring for a pivotal leadership role. One candidate grabs your attention. They have what you’re looking for: confidence, ambition, and the assertive style of a go-getter and a winner. A thought lingers, though — will they work well with your team? Will they pair disruption with empowerment?

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

Structured vs. Unstructured Interviews: What Are the Differences?

Structured interviews and unstructured interviews are two styles of conversations with potential employees that help you choose the best person for a given role. Each style has pros and cons, but which works better for finding the right person more quickly?

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

Hiring Process Checklist & Guide

The hiring process has entered a new era. In today’s competitive job market, speed and a tech-savvy strategy give you the edge in finding the best talent. At a time of skill shortages, low unemployment, and the rapid rise of AI usage, by both employers and candidates, the whole hiring process is changing quickly. Making your hiring process more efficient and engaging will improve your ability to source and screen candidates.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

How to Create Skills-Based Assessments for Hiring

Companies are taking a closer look at the skills they need employees to have, and how to best assess those skills. Having a degree or certification in a certain area is not an accurate indicator of candidate capability. This new awareness has led to what Harvard Business Review calls a “reset in hiring practices.”

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

Why Hiring Takes So Long and How to Speed It Up

Talent shortages and increased competition made hiring difficult in a pandemic. Top candidates were often swept off the market quickly, meaning businesses who failed to act fast were left to hire from a smaller, less-qualified applicant pool.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

10 Common Interview Problems & How to Address Them

Have you ever discovered that a person you hired to do a job – someone you felt you really “knew” after an extensive resume review and interview process – turned out to be totally different than what you expected? If you find yourself with consistent bad hires, your interview process is likely to blame. It may be time to evaluate your interview method, make sure you're asking the right questions, and decide what kind of answers produce the most successful hires. Let's take a look at common challenges with your job interviews (in person and remote) and discuss how to overcome them.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

How to Measure and Assess Soft Skills

Hiring the right person for the job goes beyond identifying candidates with the required technical skills. You also want to find someone who will fit your team culture, thrive under pressure, and contribute beyond what’s listed on their resume. But how do you assess soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence when resumes and traditional interviews can only tell you so much?

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

How to Avoid Bad Hires & Their High Cost

Hiring the right people to fill your team is always a challenge, and it’s even harder today. But can you afford a bad hire? Hiring the wrong employee could be one of the worst things to ever happen to your company. The negative energy from one bad hire can impact your whole office space, sink your productivity, and even damage your business’s reputation.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

Pre-Employment Screening Process and Methods

Pre-employment screening can dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your hiring process by helping you and your team make informed, objective decisions about who should make your shortlist and, ultimately, who you want to hire.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

Do College Degrees Impact Employee Performance?

When you browse job listings, you quickly notice that employers are still looking to hire college graduates for many office jobs. Most white collar job postings and many trade jobs list a bachelor’s degree or higher as a requirement.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

What Is an Applicant Pool and How Can You Improve It?

Attracting an applicant pool is the first step to filling a position. Finding well-qualified applicants isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Because the value of the hire depends heavily on the quality of your applicant pool, it’s worth the time to ensure you have outstanding candidates before interviewing.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

How to Reduce Employee Turnover

Losing valuable employees is expensive, disruptive and time-consuming. Between severance pay, temp coverage, hiring expenses and training new employees, the costs of losing staff — especially top performers — can quickly add up. If you’re like many managers, you seek strategies to keep your people happy and reduce employee turnover.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

10 New Employee Warning Signs You Shouldn't Ignore

Not every new hire is a top-performer and not every bad hire is a catastrophe. However, hiring mistakes are always costly. The productivity of your team is at stake. The sooner you can replace a bad hire, the better.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

What is Succession Planning? Process and Steps to Take

Succession planning is a contingency plan for the future of your company. When a key employee leaves without sufficient notice, the company could be left in the lurch. Even long-term employees may leave their jobs at any time. The pandemic, for example, caught a lot of businesses by surprise.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

6 Best Practices for Using Pre-Employment Tests

During the hiring process, employers often misdirect their initial review efforts on resumes. In other words, they focus solely on candidates' experience, background, and education.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

Effective Interview Questions to Ask Your Next Hire

An interview is usually a limited opportunity for employers to learn about an applicant well enough to make an informed, accurate hiring decision. Employers too often tell Hire Success that applicants looked great on paper and said all the right things in the interview, but it was a different story once the interviewee was on the job.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

Best Assessment Tools for Recruiters

If your primary recruitment assessment tools include stalking a Linkedin profile and drafting email queries, you can spend a lot of time without identifying the best possible candidates. Given the importance of identifying the right people quickly to edge out the competition, yesterday’s approach to recruiting might be costly to your reputation and business relationships.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

How to Shortlist Job Applicants

You’ve posted your ad and received a big stack of applications from job seekers. But now, how do you decide which prospects are top candidates and deserve to come in for an interview? Below, we’ll take a look at why and how to shortlist job applicants, including how to establish your selection criteria for shortlisting applicants, and how to remain objective and fair during the process.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

When to Hire Your First Employee

You took the leap, became an entrepreneur, and founded your own company. Your customer list has grown, and you’re beginning to see real results — and also starting to feel swamped. Even if you realize you need help, you may be feeling anxious and wondering, “How do I know if I am ready to hire? What if something goes wrong?” These feelings are natural, but there are some telltale signs that let you know when a small business should start hiring.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

How to Write a Successful Job Ad

Creating an attractive job ad can be challenging, but knowing how to write a job advertisement is critical to attracting top talent to your organization. Let’s take a look at why job ads are so important, how they differ from job descriptions, the necessary elements, and some tips on how to write a job advertisement that will get the attention of the best candidates.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

How to Develop an Effective Job Description

Putting together a clear, thorough, and well-developed job description takes time and effort. In fact, many organizations fail to recognize just how a job description is different from an ad/posting and how valuable effective job descriptions are. And many companies don’t put in the work necessary to create them.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

7 Hiring & Recruitment Mistakes to Avoid

When it comes to hiring new employees, the stakes are high. Every time you make a bad hire, you’re left with the costs of recruiting, onboarding, and training a replacement.

Kelly Cantwell
Kelly Cantwell

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