Today, your hiring success is more important than ever!  You can ill afford underperforming employees that cost you valuable profits!  Here are 12 strategies to increase your hiring success:

1. Commit to becoming better!  Better hiring is a skill that can be learned, practiced and improved.  Talk to hiring experts, read books, and attend seminars.
2. Take your time.  Do your due diligence.  Mis-hires will cost you lots of time, money and frustration.  By conservative estimates, 3-6 times their salary.
3. Begin with the end in mind.  If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll take anything you can get.  Decide the exact employee you are looking for…create a profile of the expected results, skills, behaviors, attitudes, non-negotiables, etc.  And then score the candidates you interview against this profile.  Tip…assess your current top performers and make this the profile.
4. Re-hire your team.  Regularly assess your talent.  Continually ask yourself this Zero Based Thinking Question: If I had not hired this person, knowing what I now know, would I hire them back again today?  If the answer is no and they are not receptive or responsive to coaching and improving, then nudge them out quickly or terminate them.  They will only bring the rest of your team down.
5. Start with the right attitude.  An important part of the hiring process is to determine if the person has the right attitude and behavior style to mix with your company and team.  Look for proactive, responsible VICTORS versus negative, blaming VICTIMS.
6. Always be hiring.  That is, constantly look for “A Players” and keep a drawer full of resumes of top performers who could be your next great employee.  This way, when you need to fill a position, you will have a better resource than just running a quickly placed help wanted ad.
7. Require an application.  When people submit their resume to you, have them fill out a well crafted application that helps you obtain information you want to know that is not included in most resumes.  This will help you reduce the resumes to only the best candidates for your position and cut down on your number of telephone interviews.
8. Know the law.  That is EEOC laws.  A simple rule is that if it isn’t job related, then don’t ask it.  This includes questions about age, marital status, race, sexual preference, previous arrests, etc.
9. Don’t buy before you are sold!  Conduct at least three interviews at multiple locations and with multiple people conducting the interviews to ensure you get an accurate view of your potential employee.  Once you have decided they are the right employee for you, then sell them on how great your company is and why they should come to work there.  If you do this too early in the process, you are apt to get caught up in your enthusiasm and overlook some glaring deficiencies.
10. Check references early in the process.  Brad Smart suggests having them call their previous bosses from the past decade and arrange the reference call.  Think this will help to ensure honesty during the interview?
11. Coach, praise and reward.  Ensure you have good methods of onboarding and training new employees.  It is vitally important to start them off strong.  Coach and train often…lead by example…don’t over manage…catch them doing things right…give and get regular feedback.
12. Test, measure, refine and improve.  Remember…this is a skill.  Document your process.  Test and measure your results, such as reduced turnover, greater productivity as a result of better hiring, etc. Consistently review, refine and improve your process.

We’ll be discussing these steps in greater detail in coming weeks, but for now, take 1 minute and write down three things you will begin doing immediately to increase your hiring success!