Recruiting remarkable talent and keeping them engaged is an ongoing challenge for organizations of all sizes. Whether your company is worth $1M or $1B, you can’t afford to make mistakes during the recruitment process when trust and transparency are such core values in business. Like a bell curve, your weakest employees may be dragging down your top performers, lowering the average of your overall workforce quality.
Did you know employee theft costs Canadian businesses $1.4 billion annually? Over 500,000 employees steal in the retail sector every year. From permanent management staff to hourly workers, spending time building out a thorough talent acquisition process will help you reduce the risk of hiring poor performers and draining your resources.
Red flags run deeper than resume gaps
As part of the initial review process, identify crucial questions that will help you screen out unsuitable applicants. Know the job details and the benchmark core competencies. Ask intuitive questions so you can gauge whether the person has the appropriate values, skillset and intellect to adapt.
Are you able to read the red flags and identify why your front-line applicant has only stayed in a job for six months at a time? Is there a legitimate excuse for a two-year gap in employment?
Most trustworthy applicants will identify the reasons. For example, they might have returned to school, or travelled and worked abroad. Don’t dismiss gaps immediately as soft skills can be overlooked; know how to assess the concerns. You can do this by asking follow up questions in the interview or through background screening.
As part of your early screening and due diligence, conduct background checks even if you love the candidate. If mistakes are going to be made, it’s usually short-cutting by foregoing reference checks that may have unearthed poor performers. Managers may want to fill hourly employee gaps quickly, but the cost of turnover can be even greater with a bad hire. It’s estimated that replacement costs are on average 20% of a mid-level workers’ salary, and that doesn’t include other soft costs.
For hourly and seasonal staff, it’s important to have pre-screened candidates ready to go at a moment’s notice. While you want to avoid turnover, sometimes people’s shortcomings slip through the cracks–and that’s perfectly normal.
There are other ways to safeguard your hiring.
Creativity in the interview process could save you money in the long-term
Since the internet became a popular resource, candidates can plan for–and dupe–hiring managers by rehearsing and answering common questions. And a bad hire is a drain on your organization’s morale and revenue.
In the hospitality industry, managers should think outside the box during interviews to more reliably assess a candidate’s agile thinking, how they answer unexpected questions, and if they’re responding truthfully. Don’t ask questions that have a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Open-ended questions drive candidates to provide real life and practical examples in response to specific scenarios. It’s a great way to gauge an hourly employee’s strengths, weaknesses, and fit.
Mindfield can help you with your end-to-end recruiting needs, and our services include screening out bad hires, looking for red flags, and ensuring references will give you employees you can trust.
About Mindfield
Mindfield is a Recruitment Outsourcing solutions provider that partners with companies to create powerful hourly workforces. Our solutions combine a recruitment team, simple to use technology and a data-driven hiring strategy that promises to improve the quality of your hourly workforce. This approach focuses on tying business outcomes such as sales performance, tenure, and engagement to the selection, hiring and measurement of quality candidates.