What You Need to Do to Make Confident Hiring Decisions

Being involved in hiring or recruitment can be stressful. Your organization won’t thrive without the right employees. Thus, your hiring decisions play a major role in the company’s success. You need to confidently make the right choices.

That may not always seem easy. Plenty of hiring managers and recruiters occasionally doubt their abilities to identify the ideal candidates for open positions. That doesn’t mean you need to be plagued by doubt. There are many steps you can take to feel more confident in your hiring decisions.

Coordinating with experts is one of them. For example, if your company is in need of a new CEO, you may want to get help from an outside executive search firm. Working with an executive search firm gives you the opportunity to delegate some of the work associated with hiring. You’ll also be able to compare your thoughts about candidates with the impressions of professionals who make a living helping companies make smart hiring decisions.

That’s just one example. The following are additional ways you can overcome your doubts and feel more confident when making hiring choices:

Focus on Competencies During the Interview Process

Whenever possible, it’s a good idea to interview candidates multiple times before deciding to offer a given role to someone. There are many reasons this is the case. One is that single interviews don’t give you the chance to thoroughly explore every aspect of the position’s requirements and the candidate’s experiences. The result is a vague conversation that’s too broad to offer any real insights.

You should instead hold multiple interviews with different goals. One of those interviews should be exclusively dedicated to assessing the competency of an applicant.

Before the interview, thoroughly discuss the role with all relevant team members to determine what specific competencies and skills a person will need to succeed in the position. You can then develop questions related to those competencies.

For example, if you’re filling a management position, your ideal candidate may need to be able to manage a remote team. You can thus ask applicants about instances when they have done so.

Ask them to describe specific processes they use to effectively lead remote workers. How often do they conduct feedback sessions? Which feedback tools do they use? How do they assign projects so remote workers can complete them without the need for constant supervision?

Competency-focused interviews help you separate the candidates who merely make the right impression from those who genuinely have the skills their job may require. You’ll feel more confident in your hiring decisions when you know you’ve hired people who have proven they are qualified for their roles.

Use Data to Your Benefit

Many factors contribute to how successful an employee may or may not be at a given organization. Someone who is a strong worker at one company may struggle at another due to a poor fit with corporate culture.

This can make identifying strong candidates seem more difficult than it needs to be. How can you confidently say people will thrive in their roles if there are so many factors affecting their potential for success?

For starters, you can leverage technology. Before starting the hiring process, identify workers who have succeeded in roles that are similar to the one you will be filling. Conduct an analysis of their employee profiles to identify factors that seem to be common among your most successful workers. It helps if you have access to an artificial intelligence data analytics tool when doing so.

There’s a good chance you may have overlooked some of the contributing factors for success when initially hiring them because you didn’t think they were relevant. For example, perhaps your organization is devoted to making positive changes in the world. Your most engaged and successful team members might thus be the types of people who have volunteered or worked for non-profits in the past.

Identifying these factors will help you develop a more accurate profile when considering what you’re looking for in a job candidate. While you don’t want to immediately reject a candidate simply because they don’t possess a certain trait that’s common among your strongest employees, you can be more confident as a hiring manager if you take advantage of the insights yielded by data analysis.

Avoid Overconfidence

Hiring the right employees is essential. There may be instances when you don’t genuinely feel confident in your ability to make a hiring decision alone, even after taking these steps.

Don’t fake confidence in these situations. Instead, honestly admit these are circumstances when you need additional points-of-view. By coordinating with others at the company, enlisting the help of an executive search firm when necessary, and keeping these lessons in mind, you’ll develop your confidence as a hiring manager or recruiter naturally.