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3 Powerful Employee Hiring and Vetting Tips For Business Owners

Hiring the right people to help your team flourish and perform is crucial to the success of your business. Negligence or oversight in the hiring process can put your business in a risky situation: you can’t afford to hire people who lack the skills or certifications that you require, exhibit poor performance, pursue unethical or abusive behaviors, or are simply not qualified for the job.

In this post, you’ll learn three helpful hiring and vetting tips to help you make the right decision as a business owner when it comes to employee management and safety.

1. Perform a Thorough Background Check

Don’t miss the opportunity to investigate the background of your applicants—no matter how excellent their credentials are, and especially if the position is risk-sensitive. With a transparent background screening program and an objective hiring assessments process in place, applicants may respond to the hiring process with more honesty and transparency, too.

While background checks can be time-consuming, so is missing critical information during the hiring process. Your business could get involved in paying for punitive damages or defending against a lawsuit because of missing this important step. Handling such a case can run into thousands and millions of dollars—not to mention the stress, time wasted, and impact on the image and reputation of your business.

Here are some of the compelling reasons why you need to run background checks on all applicants:

• Performing criminal background checks is a good opportunity to collect and verify information provided by the job candidate, revealing intentionally or mistakenly omitted details—including residency in other states where criminal records might be located.
• Background checks help confirm attendance dates, certifications, and degrees earned, and they can help unlock specific and relevant information about previous employment.
• A thorough background check helps your business provide a safe workplace for your customers and employees.
• Hiring the most qualified applicants will help you grow and expand your business, saving your operation from unnecessary trouble, including a lawsuit.
• Background checks encourage honesty during the application and interview process, discouraging applicants who have something to hide and eliminating uncertainties throughout the hiring process.

2. Ask the Right Questions

As a business owner and employer, you need to ask job candidates the right questions. A one-on-one interview is your chance to determine whether a job applicant is a solid fit for the position and your company. However, getting the right information depends on asking the right questions.

Here are a few strong questions that you can ask in your next sit-down interview session with a potential employee:

• Which major skill makes you the most qualified applicant for the position? Asking this question will give you an idea of the core competencies of a candidate, plus a chance to confirm the applicant’s proper understanding of the duties and particulars of the job role—especially if you’re building a core team for a new business.
• What are your professional achievements, and what are you most proud of? Asking the interviewee about his or her professional history will give you a better idea of the strengths and degree of determination that a person possesses, which is a plus factor for your business in building loyalty and dependable team talent.
• What is the most challenging situation that you have experienced in one of your previous jobs and how did you overcome it? Knowing how an applicant copes with a difficult situation is crucial because it can have a meaningful relationship with retention, employee management, and weighing business risks during hiring.
• Do you prefer to work independently or within a collaborative approach? Asking this question will give you an idea of how each applicant prefers to handle tasks, making sure that you won’t hire somebody who might wreck the structure that you’ve already set in place.
• Why did you leave your last employer? This question is tricky because nobody wants to bad-mouth a previous employer or boss. However, asking this question will give you valuable insight into a candidate’s professional history and help you identify red flags, such as complaining endlessly about the workload or the boss—responses that show the applicant isn’t the best fit for a demanding job.

3. Use Pre-Employment Assessment Tools

Pre-employment assessments, such as requests for work samples, job knowledge tests, and cognitive ability tests, are effective predictors of potential job performance. You can administer these assessments easily and quickly through well-designed software. If you haven’t used pre-employment assessment tools yet, it’s time to re-examine your hiring practices.

Here are some of the best recruitment assessment tools to help you in selecting qualified applicants to interview and hire.

• Berke: This customizable test measures a person’s intelligence and personality. You can build “hiring profiles” or lists of the desirable behavioral traits you’re looking for in each employee.
• Athena Assessment: This test evaluates the judgment of a candidate, which may indicate whether a candidate is an effective fit for the job. You’ll instantly get a report on the results once the applicant has completed the test.
• HireSelect: This assessment was designed by Harvard psychologists to help employers assess job candidates more objectively. It includes online pre-employment aptitude assessment, skills tests, and personality tests.
• Saberr: This tool helps you assess a candidate’s cultural fit using analytics, determining whether an applicant has similar values to your team.

Conclusion

Don’t rely on instinct alone when hiring your future employees. Always keep in mind that your  applicants may be highly skilled at pretending to be pleasant and qualified while hiding a fair share of skeletons, including harmful work ethics, criminal records, frequent absenteeism, and abusive behavior. Employing a thorough employee background check, asking the right questions, and leaning on pre-employment objective tools during the hiring and recruitment process can help you make an informed hiring choice to defend the safety and success of your business. If you’re looking for a simple way to accomplish this, try hiring a staffing agency like Corporate Job Bank to do it for you!

Bio Description

Michael Klazema is Chief Marketing Technologist at VODW.com and has over two decades of experience in digital consulting, online product management, and technology innovation. He is the lead author and editor for Dallas-based backgroundchecks.com with a focus on human resource and employment screening developments.