Have you ever been to a casino and done some gambling? Played any roulette? If you have, then you know the odds are always in the House’s favor. But there are things you can do to improve your odds and get your chances of winning to something closer to 50%.
Making a ‘Good Hire’ is the same way. You can use the dart board method and maybe you will get lucky and find a winner. Great! But since the odds of that happening are extremely slim, maybe you do some things to improve your odds. These 3 things include some simple, thought-out techniques that will greatly improve your odds of finding the Good Hire you need.
First and foremost, this is where a staffing company, such as MaintenanceBest, can really make the process easier. We routinely do these techniques to find the “Best” candidates so you don’t have to. That’s why we’re known as MaintenanceBest. The things you can do include:
Prescreen the Candidates
We advertise on the MaintenanceBest jobs board as well as many of the leading jobs boards throughout the country to find the right candidate. We may get hundreds of applicants for a single position especially if the wage is high. We have screened through as many as 197 applicants to find the “Best” one. You too can wade through hundreds of resumes to find the one applicant that might meet your criteria or you can allow us to do that for you.
Then there are the phone calls. We always talk to the applicants first to make sure we have a fit, as per your requirements. This takes on average at least 2.6 outbound calls per applicant and that doesn’t include them returning calls. Each call on average lasts 2.3 minutes so that’s about 6 minutes per applicant. Even if you only have 100 applicants that equates to about 10 hours to fill one position. So here’s the question: Do you have 10 hours to spare to make phone calls or is your time better spent doing other things?
If your time is critical, then do rely on a company such as MaintenanceBest to pre-screen potential candidates for you. We screen out any obvious mis-matches so your hiring team company can concentrate on selecting the best of the strong potential candidates we find for them.
Don’t Trust Resumes
Too many people fabricate information for the resume. And background checks are now more difficult because the previous employer is limited in what they can tell you about the candidate. Individuals with red-marks on their record can even appeal and have the incident redacted from their record.
Resumes are not a good measure of a person’s skills. I can have all the right words and acronyms and not know a thing about what they mean. We once had a candidate that was applying for an industrial maintenance technician III position. He had all the right words on his resume. When we screened him, we asked what equipment had he worked on that had PLCs. His question to us, “What’s a PLC?” Needless to say, we terminated the screening.
Use Temp-to-Hire
Northwestern University did a study on how to reduce the number of Bad Hires a company was making because a Bad Hire could be extremely costly for a company. Career Builder reports that a Bad Hire could cost a company on average $14,900, while Undercover Recruiter estimates the number could be much higher at about $240,000 in expenses related to hiring and other costs. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that a Bad Hire will cost a company 30% of their first years’ annual wage.
In the Northwest Study, their #1 recommendation was use Temp-to Hire. They equated it to “Try Before You Buy.”
Using a temp-to-hire approach may be beneficial for some roles. It provides the opportunity to hire someone on a temporary assignment to evaluate if the candidate is able to meet the needs of the job prior to making a longer-term commitment. This approach can work well for entry-level roles when candidates have little, or no, relevant work experience. It can also be a great option for administrative positions where organization, time management, and resourcefulness skills are imperative. Evaluating a candidate in a real-world scenario is always be more reliable than interviews and assessments alone.” (Northwest University, “The Cost of a Bad Hire,” )
So, think about your hiring process. You can do the same that many do that go to Las Vegas. You can go unprepared and maybe you really can hit that lucky number at roulette. But if everyone did that, then who would pay for the lights?
Or you can try the three easy steps mentioned and make that next hire a Good Hire. If Career Builder and the Department of Labor and Undercover Recruiter are correct, then in the long-run you save yourself many hours of time and thousands of dollars in expenses using these three simple strategies.
For more information, contact Jack Evans (623) 777-0701 or jackevans@www.maintenancebest.com
