Recruit and Select Employees
The ability to effectively recruit and select good quality people stems from an organizational effort to hire the best people. This does not mean the most skilled or most accomplished. By creating the necessary awareness about your company, instilling the right company culture, and learning pick the best people, your company will begin to thrive and become a highly desirable place to work for.
Awareness
To improve the odds of selecting a good candidate, there must be a solid pool of candidates to choose from. To accomplish this, there must be a high level of awareness of who you are. To raise this awareness, you can have a booth at popular job fairs, ask for referrals from your top performing employees, and let your whole team of employees be aware of the available position, or register and speak to colleges about what your company does.
Take these actions long before you need to hire someone. This will ensure that you will have ample time to properly interview and select the best candidate. When you have fewer candidates and a short time frame of selection, you increase the odds of making a poor choice.
Company Culture
Having a strong culture within your organization goes a long way toward satisfying the need to new employees. This can be done by the retention of your quality people and from strong recommendations from them. When you take care of your employees, you have less people quitting to work elsewhere and you also get a higher level of work being accomplished. The result of this is having less of a need to look for new employees. However, when your business is thriving, you will have a group of happy people that are spreading the message to friends and family of what a great company they work for. This leads to an improved quality of prospects to interview and select from.
Selection Process
The idea here is to balance skill and education with attitude and desire. When you hire based on attitude and desire you increase the odds of hiring a quality and long term employee. Skills can be learned, but attitude is inherent. Desire allows a person to learn new knowledge and put that knowledge into action.
Southwest Airlines, renowned for its strong company culture and customer experience, practices this method. In an article for Fast Company, Peter Carbonara writes that hiring specialist "José Colmenares is not looking for a fixed set of skills or experiences. He's searching for something far more elusive and much more important---the perfect blend of energy, humor, team spirit, and self-confidence."
