“Good help is hard to find” or is it? Scott Wintrip, staffing expert and author of High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant says that help is available, but your beliefs about hiring are preventing you from filling jobs quickly and keeping them filled.
If you are struggling to fill positions, Wintrip urges you to examine your beliefs about hiring to ensure that you aren’t buying into hiring principles that don’t benefit your team. That starts with countering these four common hiring myths:
The skills shortage is the cause of hiring delays
Hiring delays indicate a problem with your selection process, not a talent flow issue. Since there are never enough qualified candidates to go around, you can’t afford to engage in the old way of hiring that involves keeping a job open until the right person (finally) shows up.
Instead, you should be cultivating top talent and then waiting for the right job to become available. Realize that a job becoming available is a when situation—not an if situation. Make sure you are planning for the when.
Hiring is exclusively an HR function
Employee selection is a leadership function that is supported by HR (and the talent acquisition team, if there is one). That means that you should communicate thoroughly what you need and make hiring decisions swiftly, while HR and the talent acquisition team supply you with talent and facilitate the process.
You must hire slowly and fire quickly
Unfortunately, this well-known business cliché is almost always bad advice. Wintrip explains that people who are slow to hire operate out of fear of making a bad choice. They have experienced the consequences of poor hiring choices, and in attempts to avoid that mistake again, they slow down the hiring process and come to believe that speed and accuracy are mutually exclusive.
As a result, talented candidates move on and open jobs remain open. Instead Wintrip advises, “Be fast to hire and quick to inspire.”
This is how it’s always been done, so it must be right
Many organizations keep doing things the same way, even if that way is ineffective. For example, some companies have unwritten rules, such as reviewing a slate of eight to ten candidates before making a hire, even when a highly qualified candidate is identified among the first few candidates.
Old processes often bog down the process and send top talent to faster competitors. Instead of sticking with the status quo, keep what works and replace the rest. Be willing to change and evolve your processes as needed.
“The skilled worker shortage will only become more noticeable in the future,” concludes Wintrip. “As globalization increases, borders will matter less, creating a talent competition unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It’s crucial to immediately disengage from those myths around hiring that prevent you from efficiently finding good employees. Once you counter the myths that are slowing your selection process, you’ll see that good talent really isn’t hard to find after all.”
About the Author:
Scott Wintrip has changed how thousands of companies across the globe find and select employees, helping design and implement a process to hire top talent in less than an hour. Over the past 18 years, he built the Wintrip Consulting Group, a thriving global consultancy. Scott, the acknowledged leader of the on-demand hiring movement, is pioneering improved methods for recruiting and interviewing job candidates. For five consecutive years, Staffing Industry Analysts, a Crain Communications company, has awarded Scott a place on the “Staffing 100,” a list of the world’s 100 most influential staffing leaders. He’s also a member of the Million Dollar Consultant Hall of Fame and was recently inducted into the Staffing 100 Hall of Fame. Scott and his wife, Holly, live in St. Petersburg, Florida.
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