There’s a lot of hype around the Agile way of hiring. You may even think it’s too much and that there are too many processes and practices. But if you’ve got your own company, you know that it takes careful planning to get the best talent for your company. With so much competition, how do you ensure that you hire the right people for your organization?
Agile hiring is an approach to streamline the recruiting process and find the right person for the job. In an agile hiring process, you find people who are a good fit for your company and hire them quickly.
Instead of spending weeks or months vetting applicants, you get to know them in just a few days so you can move forward with their interview process if you’re impressed. Agile hiring allows you to understand how well potential employees will perform in your dynamic work environment by testing their critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and collaboration abilities.
It also helps you reduce time spent on low-value activities that don’t add value to your organization or better optimize your workflow. To be able to hire top talent for your organization, you need to follow some simple strategies and use technology to your advantage.
An effective agile hiring strategy reduces turnover, provides measurable performance metrics, and eliminates cost from your recruitment process.
Finding and retaining talent is your biggest challenge
If hiring is your biggest challenge, you’re not alone. In fact, hiring is the number one challenge of companies both big and small. If you’re struggling to hire great employees, your business will likely suffer as a result.
Finding and keeping top talent is a significant concern for many companies of all sizes — especially in the tech industry.
You may spend a lot of time and money hiring new people who may not be a good fit for your company culture or who may not be with you for long. Your business will suffer from a lack of efficiency if you don’t have the right people in the right roles.
It’s critical to find the right people for the job. So, how do you find the right people for your company? You need to start with an agile hiring strategy. An agile hiring strategy is flexible enough to be responsive to candidates’ needs.
It also provides structure for interviewing candidates and helps hiring managers learn about them as people.
If you have a hard time finding and keeping high-quality employees, your business suffers. You may spend a lot of time and money hiring new people, only to see them leave your company quickly.
You may be losing customers because you don’t have the staff to provide them with the level of service they expect.
Agile hiring is flexible and dynamic
Agile hiring provides a structure for interviewing candidates, but it’s also flexible enough to be responsive to candidates’ needs. You can cut and extend interviews if candidates need more or less time to complete them.
If a candidate has a scheduling conflict and can’t make a particular interview, you can reschedule it to another date and time. While interviewing, you can get to know candidates in a variety of ways depending on your needs.
You can conduct telephone or video interviews, or you can meet candidates in person. You can even switch up the order in which you conduct the interviews. The important thing is to get to know candidates as well as possible so you can make informed hiring decisions.
Change the Recruiting Paradigm
One of the first things you need to do when hiring is change your recruiting paradigm. This means that the interviewing process will be different, and you’ll need to do things differently to get the best people for your company.
Let’s look at some of the ways you can do this.
Hiring Managers Should be Testers
Automate as much as possible
Don’t make your process too long
Leverage your Smart Toolkit
When you’re hiring for the best talent, you need to start with the end in mind. You need to know the qualities of the people you want to hire, what type of experience they should have, and what their skills and abilities are.
When you have this information, you can start the process with sourcing and recruiting.
This can be done with marketing and hiring managers or a recruiter. You should also put in place a strategy for how you’ll vet candidates, what information you’ll ask for, and how you’ll go through your hiring process
Hiring Managers Should be Testers
Depending on the type of work you do, you may want people to have been testers or have a testing type of job. At the same time, you want people who are good at their jobs and understand the technology you’re using and how to use it.
If you’re hiring testers, you want people who have a proven track record as testers and have worked with the technologies you’re using. At the very least, you want them to have a basic understanding of the technologies. Not only does this make testing easier, it also makes your hiring process far shorter.
Automate as much as possible
Depending on the company and the type of business you have, you may have to do some hiring manually. If you do, make sure you’re doing them as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Hiring managers and HR can help you automate your hiring process as much as possible. This includes everything from information you want candidates to fill in on your job boards to the types of tests you want them to complete. Doing this helps you avoid any human error when hiring and makes your hiring process far quicker.
Continuously learn about candidates beyond just their resume
Your hiring managers may want to see a candidate’s resume, but you also need to learn about the candidate’s interests. You can do this by asking questions like “what brought you to this field?” “what are you passionate about?” and “what do you enjoy about your current job?”
Candidates may feel pressured to provide stock answers to these types of questions, so you can also ask them to tell you stories. These types of questions provide you with a better glimpse into candidates’ personalities and interests.
You can also get to know candidates better by asking them open-ended questions that require more than a one-word answer.
Dynamically test critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills
You can use a variety of tools to test the critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills of each candidate.
You can give candidates scenarios and ask them to come up with potential solutions. You can also ask candidates to brainstorm with you or with other candidates.
Alternatively, you can use automated skills testing tools to conduct behavioural assessments.
Behavioural assessments were designed to help hiring managers predict how well candidates will do in specific roles.
They use a variety of different techniques to assess problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration skills, including situational judgement tests and peer review surveys.
Be transparent throughout the process.
Transparency is a crucial part of hiring great employees. It may seem like an obvious suggestion, but many hiring managers fail to be transparent with candidates during the process.
If a candidate asks you a question, you should always be honest and transparent with them. Candidates appreciate honesty and transparency, and its hows that you care about them as people.
It shows them that you’re not just trying to fill a position — you’re trying to hire people who will fit into your company culture.
Incorporate cultural fit in your testing process.
You can incorporate cultural fit into your testing process by asking candidates about their work history, interests, and hobbies. You can also ask candidates about their values and what they think a company’s culture is like.
Candidates may not be sure how to answer these types of questions, so you can help them out by providing examples.
Your recruiting team can also provide you with their feedback on candidates so you can understand how well they fit into your company culture.
Don’t rely on technology alone to make hiring decisions.
Technology can help you track candidates and hold them accountable for certain milestones in the hiring process. It can also be used to dynamically test critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
But don’t rely too heavily on technology to make hiring decisions. Technology isn’t capable of making the human connections and emotional connections that are necessary to get candidates to accept jobs with your company.
Don’t make your process too long
When you’re looking to hire the best talent,
you want to make sure you don’t make your hiring process too long. Take a look at how long your competitors are taking to hire new people and make sure you’re not hiring any longer. At the same time, make sure you’re not hiring too quickly.
This could lead to hiring the wrong people for your company. Consider having a hiring manager or someone else in HR make a quick decision to hire a select group of candidates. This will help you avoid hiring the wrong people and shortening your hiring process.
Leverage your Smart Toolkit
Finally, at the same time as making your hiring process as streamlined as possible, you want to leverage your smart hiring toolkit. With everything from hiring candidates to background checks integrated into one platform to a video interviewing software, you’ll have everything you need to make the best hiring decisions.
This will help you avoid any mistakes in the hiring process and get the best people for your company