Many companies and organisations make statements about their people being their greatest asset, and creating a culture which nurtures and develops employees and leaders.

The reality, especially in these economically straitened times, is often different. Rounds of lay-offs, hiring freezes wage freezes and cuts, benefit reductions and more have hurt employee morale even when they have been vital to the organisation’s survival.

Now that the Bermuda economy is beginning to slowly recover and some jobs are being added, the need for intelligent recruiting has never been greater.

Yet many employers continue to give more attention and due diligence to the purchases of IT systems and the construction of new facilities than they do to hiring, even though employee costs are often the biggest expense a company has and the biggest investment a company will make.

Having been involved in hiring decisions for about 20 years, I can say that I hired some really fantastic people in that time. I also made some bad decisions. The great hires paid for themselves time after time. Fixing the problems caused by the bad hires was much more time consuming and difficult than the initial hiring process.

As a result, I spent a lot of time trying to understand what we did right and what we did wrong. No hiring process is perfect. You will still make mistakes, both in whom you hire and sometimes, in the people you fail to hire.

But these are seven points that I have learned should play a role in all hiring decisions.

Some involve avoiding mistakes. Others concern finding the best possible people for your organisation. These are two different things, and the latter is more important — but learning to avoid mistakes often comes first.

1. Don’t settle. Don’t hire the first person to come in the door or the best available candidate if they really aren’t what you are looking for. Spend time finding the best person for the job, even if it means leaving a desk open for months. Never hire out of desperation. The right person will come along.

2. Do your due diligence. Reference checks, speaking to former employers, supervisors and colleagues are critically important, but it is amazing how often even good employers don’t bother and simply rely on the candidate’s own words.

3. Do more than one interview, and have the candidate be interviewed by more than one person (always have two or more people in the room for interviews — that way one person can ask questions while the other can observe). Some of our clients do as many as six rounds of interviews and while this may be overkill in a small organisation, a second and third interview will reveal strengths and weaknesses that are not always evident in a more formal first interview. Involving more people, including people working in similar roles or in the same teams, is helpful, both for seeing if the candidate will fit in the team’s culture, and because the candidate will relax and show more of their true personality with those they consider their equals or their inferiors.

4. Skills can be taught. Ticking all of the boxes is important, but it is not everything. Some people may meet all of the technical qualifications for a job but lack the personality for the role, or have other character flaws. I used to think that it was important for journalists to have a university degree. But some of my best journalists did not — so I was wrong on that. In journalism, skills can be taught, but some of the traits that make a great journalist cannot — like an insatiable curiosity. The same holds true in most other industries.

5. Behaviour and personality matter. Behaviourial testing and interviewing is important and a guide to hiring, although over-reliance on testing is dangerous. I’ve seen people do well on personality tests and bomb out in the workplace. But behaviourial questions are helpful. Asking people how they would handle a particular situation can qualify or disqualify candidates who look good on paper or who seem not to meet all the job requirements but have something more valuable like an abundance of common sense, or a different way of looking at a problem. Asking people what their strengths and weaknesses are has become somewhat overworked but is still helpful. The person who claims to have no weaknesses will not get hired, and the person whose strengths lead to boasting and arrogance won’t either.

6. Performance matters more. Recruiting consultant Lou Adler, who writes frequently on LinkedIn, makes a compelling argument that performance matters more than anything else. A simple question here can produce revealing answers:

“What single project or task would you consider the most significant accomplishment in your career so far?”

This question, properly pursued and explored, can produce valuable insights into how a person will perform on the job. For more on performance based interviewing, see Adler’s article here:

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130117183637-15454-the-most-important-interview-question-of-all-time

In the end, even the best hiring decisions involved a little bit of luck. But following the steps above improve your odds of making a great hire and avoiding a disaster. Remember that it is your employees, more than anyone or anything else, who determine whether you will succeed or fail.

Bill Zuill is a director of Bermuda Executive Services. Find more of these articles at www.bermudaemployment.com or e-mail him at marketing@bes.bm