Whether to employ someone or not is one of the most important decisions a member of the human resources team or an employer will make. This is when they have taken on the role of staff engagement. Another part of coordinating the process will be to arrange employment screening. This can be a check on an employee’s lifestyle and their health, amongst other things. The Illinois employee drug testing laws are strict, so employers will need to have a handle on them and make the right employment decisions as a result.
Let us then think about 5 tips that will help us, when employing someone, that a company will later rely on.
Check the Presentation and Accuracy of a Resume
If the job requires someone careful to carry out a job, then it can be a clue to how careful someone is by how many grammatical or typing errors exist in their resume. Should the candidate suggest that they are known for their accuracy and attention to detail, then you will simply know that is not true when unchecked errors exist.
Presentation is everything because those areas where mistakes exist will stand out more than any badly formatted document. We are talking about glaring errors that most people would have noticed. Then, when we proceed more into the detail, errors a certain type of position would demand to be right, it could highlight to an employer that they might not be suitable for the job.
We have to bear in mind, though, that many resumes are written by someone else on behalf of a candidate, so the good ones may not reflect a candidate’s mindset or abilities. It is very much a reader beware with resumes.
Pre-Interview Skills Check
The skills possessed by a candidate will often go beyond those learned in education. They will relate to their experience in another position of employment. It will be the job of HR or an employer to compare relevant and useful skills between candidates, in terms of a job specification’s requirements. Invariably, you will rarely find a candidate that possesses all the skills that are asked for, so it can be a case of choosing those that possess most of them, or at least the ones specified as not being just desirable but essential to have.
A tip then is to study in detail a resume and count up skills. Do not just look for the obvious, though, but think how a candidate might be able to explain what they have are useful skills. In a sense, you are predicting what the answer to an interview question might be. It is not possible to entirely enter the mind of the candidate, without even seeing them, but this approach might help you to find the best people to interview that will turn out to have the skills you need, after all.
Screening
Do not omit the processes of screening for health and drug abuse. Every employee should be fit to work at the moment of employment and for a good amount of time into the future. This is ideal when an employer is to invest time and money into an employee’s training.
Drug testing will identify any recreational drugs, as well as prescription drugs, in a person’s system. It will be able to identify anything on the day of testing and also from a short while before. If someone is a habitual drugs user, then they will be detected because of the levels in their system. No employer will want to be a party to something illegal or to risk the welfare of any of their staff. It is not worth taking the risk. Health and safety laws, anyway, will forbid the use of machinery when under the influence of any illegal substance.
Ask the Right Questions
Asking the wrong questions will invariably result in the wrong answers. This is rather like the philosophy of computing where GIGO stands for garbage in, garbage out. It is the job of HR or the interviewer(s) to guide candidates to the right answers.
Not all candidates will come up with their best answers due to nerves and so without guiding candidates to the answers they have within them, we might be losing a very good potential employee just because of their interview ability. It is not the interview that is going to be doing their job, so it is important to be mindful of that fact as an interviewer.
What are the best types of questions to ask candidates? Below, we have come up with a few sample ones to help.
Possible interview questions:
- What can you tell me about yourself that might be important?
- Why did you apply for the job?
- What work experience have you had that relates to this job and what do you consider your key skills?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- Why are you the right person for the job, and how do you see yourself fitting in?
- Where do you imagine yourself in five years?
These half a dozen questions should get you started with what to ask. Throw in a few double questions, like question number five, to see if the candidate is paying enough attention to remember to answer both parts.
Your first question will generally be to put the candidate at ease. By making it very general, you may well get an answer that tells you something about a candidate that you would never have found out otherwise.
Knowing why someone applied for the job can often reveal the skills they believe that they have, which may not be the same ones that they have already told you about. These could be skills that make them perfect for the position for which they are applying.
Any work experience and skills that a person possesses you should know about already, but, with the third question, you are giving the candidate a chance to expand on how they can relate their skills to the position on offer. Leading onto strengths and weaknesses, you will want to know about what the candidate has missed out from their resume because they will not want to perhaps highlight their weaknesses or do not know how to make them sound better. We always need to know how we can improve a staff member and the likelihood of doing so, not waste time and money investing in someone who is never going to be suitable for a position.
An employer might have an idea why a candidate is suitable for a job, but it can be a useful exercise for the candidate to say why. There may be something that employers or interviewers had not thought about. This will give a candidate the chance to inform the employer. The candidates have taken the trouble to attend the interview, so they are keen, and we owe them that chance to explain and sell themselves to us as a company, which might have a place for them.
The question about where someone sees themselves in five years ought to say that they will still be with the company they are applying to. Otherwise, it is unlikely to be a job-winning answer, unless a company is used to only ever employing their staff for a short period and then seeing them move on. It is good to know a candidate’s plans, though, particularly where a high level of investment is required in an individual. Training is expensive and only worth doing if it is going to produce an employee that then becomes useful to the company and not another company instead after they have been trained.
Do Not Reject Without an Acceptance
Always ring the candidate that you are offering the job to first. This will save the embarrassment of changing a decision for someone else if that person decides not to take the job. The interview is, after all, a two-way process that also provides the opportunity for the candidate to ask questions. They may not like something that they found out and reject the job offer on that basis.
Another point about rejecting without an acceptance is that the candidate next in line may not take kindly to not being the first choice. They will only find this out if you rejected them first.
Hopefully, the above tips will get you started if it is your job to interview candidates for a job or you are an employer of a small company and take care of employment matters yourself.