When hiring employees, negligent hiring practices can doom the process. Learn from your colleagues’ successes – and avoid their pitfalls.
Smart interview questions, well-written job descriptions, and sharp interviewing result in hiring employees that work out well, AND make you look good in the process.
“Hire for attitude, train for skill.” That’s the one craze in recruiting job candidates, and I’m sick of it. Attitude is easy to fake. Someone can walk into an interview bubbling with enthusiasm, full of bright questions and observations. What they lack in hard knowledge they make up in soft appeals to my ego.
Some employers schedule multiple interviews due mostly to tradition and habit, which can waste managers’ time, alienate top candidates and unnecessarily lengthen the hiring process. Use the following guidelines to create a strategy for conducting multiple interviews and determining how many are too many:
Some employers schedule multiple interviews due mostly to tradition and habit, which can waste managers’ time, alienate top candidates and unnecessarily lengthen the hiring process. Use the following guidelines to create a strategy for conducting multiple interviews and determining how many are too many.
If you’ve made it this far into the worst economy in decades without experiencing a layoff, chances are you’re out of the woods. Most economists agree that while businesses won’t be hiring much this year, they also won’t be firing much. Could this be the time to ask for a raise?
Supervisors may think they know all the candidates for promotion so well they can select one without actually interviewing the interested employees. That’s a big mistake. Chances are, if one of the disappointed applicants sues, the supervisor will have to answer very specific questions about the hiring process.
You can help prevent hiring lawsuits with one simple tactic: Have two company representatives sit in on interviews. Then have both reps deliver the news when you have to tell an applicant she wasn’t selected. As this case shows, that extra effort can be insurance against a nasty “he said/she said” lawsuit.
You seek input from colleagues before picking which job candidates to hire or which workers to promote. It's admirable that you solicit their insights and impressions. There's just one problem: Their input may not necessarily reflect a dispassionate or accurate analysis.
Employers are increasingly using web-based social media—such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter—to screen potential employees, in addition to the usual applications, interviews, references, and background, credit and drug tests. But they don’t always recognize the potential pitfalls and risks.
Retail managers often spend most of their time doing the same work that hourly employees do, such as running cash registers. Even so, they may qualify as exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Why? It’s the quality of the management work they do that counts, not the number of hours they spend doing it.
The EEOC has published its final regulations implementing Title II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA). They take effect on Jan. 10. The new regulations clarify when employers may be liable for acquiring genetic information.