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
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
Structured vs. Unstructured Interviews
There are two basic styles, or models, of interviews employers usually use when hiring new employees: structured and unstructured interviews. Just like job candidates, each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. But do the advantages of a structured interview outweigh the advantages of an unstructured interview?
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
Hiring Process Checklist: A Step-By-Step Guide
Talent acquisition is more competitive than ever today. Employers face the tightest job market in history: low unemployment rates, high job mobility and a wide skills gap. It's more difficult to fill critical jobs. Companies large and small need to develop an efficient hiring process to attract, identify, and hire people with the right skill sets and attributes to fit your team.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Understanding Dominant Personalities at Work
Are you looking for strategies to work with or manage a dominant personality in the workplace? Or maybe you’re more dominant by nature and are seeking tips to improve your work relationships and job performance. Whatever your reasoning, this post will help you identify and communicate effectively with dominant personalities, as well as recognize the benefits of having one on your team.
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
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
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
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
