You can’t build a great business without great people. Yet many business owners still aren’t as rigorous about hiring as they are about other aspects of their business. Why? Well, mainly because hiring can be a MAJOR pain in the you-know-what.
Spending hours crafting the perfect job description just for thousands of unqualified applicants to come flooding through the door? Yep, we know how it is—and it can feel pretty soul destroying when you’re going through it.
But the last thing we want you to do is give up entirely and just keep doing it yourself. That approach is a one-way ticket to burnout city and for the long term success of your business, hiring it’s a must.
You also don’t want you to end up in a position where you’ve hired an employee who just doesn’t fit the role or the culture of your business. Making a bad hire is going to cost your business—not just financially, but in time too. Not to mention the awkward conversation where you have to let them go…
Luckily, the hiring process is about to get a whole lot easier. To help you narrow down your applicant pool from thousands to the best-qualified few, we’re giving you the actionable tips to help you fill roles with ease and ensure you find the *right* person for the job.
Avoid One-Click & Easy-Apply
“One-click” or “easy-apply” applications are hands down the worst thing that has happened to both job seekers and people looking to fill positions. Candidates using these features tend to be passive, lazy, and completely unqualified for the role. And as an employer, you’re going to need a pretty big sieve to filter through all those applications…
When you take the “easy” option, there’s inevitably a price to pay. And if you do decide to use it (which we strongly recommend that you do not!) it’s going to take a heck of a long time to weed out the best applicants.
Anyone who’s just clicking an easy-apply button and not doing anything else to learn about you, your business, the role, and what you’re looking for, is not the type of person you want on your team.
It’s definitely worth saying “do not apply through the site, use this email address to apply” so that you don’t get bombarded with one-click applications. This is also a sneaky little first test because if a candidate doesn’t read and follow that direction, they’re not going to be the A player you’re looking for anyway!
Include Mini Tasks
Including mini tasks like we just mentioned above is a great way to help you weed out applicants who don’t read or follow your instructions.
Including specific instructions for the application is a very useful tactic to separate the wheat from the chaff. For example, you might ask candidates to use the words “green smoothie” in the subject line. Yes, it can be this ridiculous and irrelevant to the role! The point is to see if the job seeker has read your entire job description and is following the instructions, which is important because no matter what role you’re hiring for, you want someone who can follow basic instructions.
One business owner even asks applicants to include their MBTI type (Myers-Briggs Indicator Type). Not only does this request give the employer some information about the applicant’s personality, it also shows they took the time to research, take the test, and provide the answer to your mini task. This is a smart move because ultimately, you want someone on your team who is going to be proactive and do the research before coming to you with every single question.
Sometimes it’s tempting to consider candidates who followed some but not all the directions. But remember: If they can’t follow the simple tasks, then they probably don’t have a great eye for detail and that’s not someone you’d want on your team!
Set Up a Separate Email Address & Auto Response
So if there’s no more one-click applications to deal with, you’re probably thinking, “but isn’t my inbox going to be overflowing with people I’ll have to respond to individually?” This is where we recommend setting up a separate email address dedicated solely to job or role applications.
You’ll also want to set up an autoresponder that goes out every time someone sends an email to that address. It can say something like: “Thank you so much for applying! Due to the volume of applicants, we’ll only be able to reach out to people who are a good fit for this position. If that’s not you, thank you again for applying and best of luck in the future.” Keep it friendly and positive
Trust us, this simple act will make your life sooo much easier and prevent important business emails getting lost in a sea of applications in your normal inbox!
Do a Video Screening
Video screening is an important step to help you find out more about potential candidates, why they are interested in this role, and if they are a good fit for you and your company.
Ask candidates to send a Loom video so that you don’t actually have to get on a Zoom call or a phone call. Save the interaction (and your time!) for the next round of interviews.
In the video, we usually ask people to give us a bit of background about them, who they are, what their previous experience is, and a description of their ideal position.
Screening questions tailored to the person’s role can give you a sense of how the candidate thinks and approaches certain tasks.
Do a Phone Screening
There are a LOT of people who look good on paper but when you actually interact with them, they’re…not so good. That’s why you might want to consider doing a phone screening to dig in a little deeper.
You can ask what types of projects they are working on and have worked on in the past. Do they have favorite types of projects to work on? What excites them about this role? You want to understand why they are interested in your company and working with you rather than someone else.
Phone screening can help you see if they are a good fit both culturally and skill-wise. Getting them to describe in their own words the work that they’ve been doing and the work that they want to do can help you recognize if this is going to be a good fit.
If your team works remotely, ask the candidate if they have remote work experience. If so, what did they like and dislike about it? Do they like having autonomy to get things done or do they require more collaboration and guidance?
Some other great questions include: How would you describe your communication style? How do you keep yourself organized? What would your current and previous supervisor tell me about you in one sentence?
Ask them to tell you what they know about your company. Obviously, you’re not expecting them to know everything about your company, but they should have a baseline understanding of who you serve, what you’re offering, and what your service or product is.
You should also expect people to have questions about the role. If they come with ideas for your business already, that’s great! But if the only question they ask is how much time off they get…that’s a bit more of a red flag. And if they ask NO questions at all, that’s, well, quite disconcerting. How can you not have questions about this role and what you’re going to do?!
Aim for your call to last around 15 or 20 minutes as we want to preserve your time as the business owner.
Give Them a Test
It’s incredibly easy to write down that you know how to do something, or to say that you know how to do something, but you do also need to have proof of it. Testing allows you to see what the quality of a candidate’s work is before hiring them. The worst scenario is onboarding someone, only to find out that they actually have no idea what they’re doing or their skill level is much lower than what they said that it was.
For that reason, our next step is a test—not a long test, but one that is geared toward whatever role they will be fulfilling. We look for tasks that will take anywhere from a half hour to an hour, but no more than that.
Testing that is geared toward the role gives you further insight into the skill set and capabilities of potential candidates. It allows you to get a sense of their research and strategy and when you give them just the baseline information, it leaves room for them to ask questions or say “based on what you gave me, this is what I would do, but I’d also want to know X, Y, Z.” This gives you a great insight into their thought process and helps you to identify the true the A-players.
Pay Them To Take the Test
Don’t ask applicants to do all this work for free! You’re not that kind of business owner (we hope). Plus, if there’s any chance that you could use anything that these candidates give you, you are morally obligated to pay them!
Paying people for this test says something very positive about your business and about the way that you treat your teams.
Give the test to only the cream of the crop of the people who passed your phone screening. That’s likely a maximum of six people. Depending on how much you’re paying them, you’re probably looking at $50 an hour. So, okay, it could cost you a couple hundred bucks. But it’s a small investment to help ensure that you get the best possible candidates!
Also, you don’t want to lose your best candidates just because you were asking them to do free work.
Ask How Long the Test Took
Asking candidates to tell you how long they spent on the paid test can be another indicator of whether this person is a good fit for the role.
Some applicants may spend way too much time on something trying to do their very best. But you’ll also get candidates who complete something a lot faster than they should.
Time is not a perfect indicator by any means, but it should be something that you factor in. You can’t just look at quality. You need to bring on someone who does amazing work but also does it in a reasonable timeframe.
Conduct the Final Interview
At this point, you should hopefully be narrowing your pool of applicants down to two or three candidates and the last step is to interview them.
By now, you should have a good understanding of what the candidate knows about your company. You have tested them, you know they can do what they say it is that they can do. So the next stage would be to ask situational questions like “tell me about your time that you failed.” This type of question allows you to see the candidate’s thinking and how they would handle themselves within your company.
More open-ended questions gives the candidate an opportunity to show how they would handle themselves within your company. Do they have examples that they can pinpoint? You might go on to ask if they owned up to it when they failed. Did they apologize for the mistake and then fix it? You don’t want someone who just says they “never fail”. Or it wasn’t their fault. Or who puts the blame elsewhere. You want someone who takes ownership for their work and is open to learning, growing, and fixing the mistake.
Those situational questions give you insight into how people truly act when things happen in the moment because so much of business happens in the moment.
The more that you can make a situational question specific to something that would actually happen in their position, the better. Look at things that have happened in your company, maybe places where people have dropped the ball, and ask the candidate what they would have done in that situation.
Whether you are hiring someone to be on staff full-time, part-time, or someone to do some hourly freelance work, following this process (without skipping any steps!) will make it so much easier to fill your roles with the right people. Because you and your business deserve A-players.
Watch More
On this episode of the Energize Your Online Business podcast, hosts Nicki and Kate dig deeper into finding the right person to hire for your business and some practical strategies to narrow down the applicant pool.
Your Turn!
Do you have any successful hiring strategies you can share? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below!