Ken Garratt

How to Hire in todays Economy

With unemployment high and thousands of qualified applicants how does a business owner find the best candidate?

How do you hire a new staff member? We have a process that has been successful that I wanted to share with everyone. Hiring today has become more challenging with the high rate of unemployment. Due to the high unemployment you will get dozens of applicants and in some cases over 100 applications per job posting. So, how do you go through all the resumes to find the best candidate? When we are ready to hire a new employee we put together an ad for Craigslist.com We chose Craigslist first because it is a free advertisement. We start with a brief yet informative job description listing the title, description, duties, requirements, education, and benefits. We describe several requirements for replying to our ad. First they need to attach a cover letter and resume and copy and paste it into the body of the email. It is amazing to me how many people do not follow this simple request. I need this because some of the attachments will not open for me. This also tells me can they follow directions. This will eliminate 10 – 30 % of the applicants. Do not list the name of your company or any contact information. Use the auto reply provided by Craigslist. If you choose to list company info you will get more calls than you may want at this time.

After reviewing the responses send out a reply email (we reply with an email account that is not connected with our business) with about 15 specific job interview questions we ask that the applicant answers all the questions with a colored font such as green or red. Always put a deadline reply by Friday October 9 by noon. At this time we let them know that we will look through the responses and will call to set a phone interview with the chosen applicants by Tuesday October 13th. This way the applicant will know by Tuesday if they are still a contender without you having to call them back.

Once we select the applicants that we liked we call to schedule a phone interview. In today’s economy most employees will need to have excellent phone skills. If your opening requires phone use we will call the applicant if they answer we will schedule a return call date and time or leave them a message to call back with preselected available days and times. Why do we do this? We want them to call us back we will not answer the call this will prompt the applicant to leave a message for me to return the call. This tells us if they are comfortable leaving a phone message and how do they sound? Do they sound enthused and excited or do they mumble and you cannot understand what they said? It’s amazing how many people do not know how to leave a message for someone. If they sound great call them back and conduct a phone interview. At this time we give them a link to our website and ask them to review it prior to our phone interview.

A key tip: always GOOGLE the applicant’s name. You can learn a lot about someone on the web.

If the phone interview goes great then we schedule an in person interview. Remember to ask them questions about your website this will tell you if they looked into your company. If they did not review your company they probably are not interested in your business. Depending on the position we may have up to three personal interviews before making an offer. We have found that we learn who can follow directions and most importantly will they be on time. With each step we lose 10 -22% of the applicants. Again this says a lot about the applicant.

By the time we have our first in person interview we have narrowed the applicants down to the top 10% professional applicants that would be a great team player.

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