No More Warm Bodies: Tips and Tools for Selecting the Right Employee

Think about the experience of hiring. Your team has a vacancy. Your employees clamor for you to fill that vacancy because they are stretched so thin. You then think about the justification process to fill that position and break out into a sweat. After all, there is a hiring freeze, but you can’t really tell your employees that, can you? 

Human Resources then reminds you that if you’d made better choices to begin with, you wouldn’t be in this mess of constantly filling positions. As you reflect, you begin to realize that your department has been a bit of a revolving door. People come, but don’t often stay for more than a year before moving on. Is HR putting blame on you—or maybe there’s a better way to better predict whether someone you hire will be successful.

If this pattern sounds familiar, it could be because you’ve fallen victim to one of the most common hiring faux pas: ”warm body syndrome.” You know how it goes: The position is vacant, the staff wants it filled, you jump through the hoops to get it approved, and finally you get to hire.

Change the pattern to a positive.

In many cases, it’s tempting to take the first living, breathing and qualified person to walk through the door. Don’t make this your mistake. Hiring to fill the position without assessing whether or not that person will fit into your culture is always wrong. You can change the pattern—and there are lots of ways to do it:

• Identify your top performers. List your top two or three. Ask yourself why you selected them and what traits made them stand out when you made your list. Was it because they are dependable? Nice to be around? A positive influence on you and your team’s day? Easy to work with? Note the top 5 to 10 reasons why.
• Describe the traits of a top employee from your perspective. Define what makes the ideal employee.  Dependable? Skilled? Great customer service? Rank each trait and compare it to your top performers. It’s likely you’ll see a strong correlation between the two lists.
• Develop interview questions. Armed with the traits you’re looking for, use this during interviews with prospective employees. Work with your Human Resources recruiter to refine a set of questions that will help you to refine your list of traits. 
• Involve your team in the interviews. With questions in hand, get your team involved—especially those top performers. They’ll know how to spot other people like them quickly. Also, ask this team for recommendations of qualified prospects. They usually befriend people like themselves, thereby increasing your chances of receiving strong candidates.

Try implementing these tips during your search process. You should begin to see a difference in the type of people that you hire. The more your employee base reflects the behaviors of your top performers, the sooner you’ll begin to create a culture that attracts and keeps the kind of people that you want. And the “warm body syndrome” will be a thing of the past. 

For more reading on this subject click here.

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