Recruitment and Hiring: How to Painlessly Hire The Best Candidate For The Position

You have just been promoted to a managerial position. You were given the responsibility of conducting your first interview and the hiring process is new to you, so here are some tips on the recruitment and hiring process.

Keep in mind that your goal as a manager is to find the best person for the position and for your company. You have collected a number of resumes, but the process of actually hiring someone seems overwhelming. Where do you start? First, what should you look for in a resume?

The Resume:

There are a number of items to look for when reviewing resumes to determine which candidates would be the most qualified for the position you are looking to fill.

Are the candidates name, phone number and address given on the resume? Believe it or not, people actually forget to include contact information on their resumes.

Is the candidates career history complete? It should include the name of the companies they worked for, their dates of employment, their title, their responsibilities, accomplishments, education, designations and any additional skills or technology that would relate to the position.

Are there gaps in employment? This could be a red flag unless the gaps are explainable (i.e. pregnancy, military duty, returning to school, etc.).

Look carefully at the candidates job tenure, especially their two most recent positions. Reliable applicants have held two or fewer jobs in the past five years. Job hoppers always have a reason why the position ended, but studies have found it is usually an employment trend rather than a run of bad luck.

Review the candidates promotion history. Did they progress in a logical manner? The most attractive candidates were promoted up in a quick, but realistic amount of time. If a candidate held a number of positions within one company, be sure to find out how long each position was held.

Review the candidate’s progression of responsibility. A quality candidate must not only be promoted in title, but also in responsibilities within those titles. As an example, when looking at a manager’s resume, if you see the individual started managing a 250-unit property, moved to a 400-unit property, and then was promoted to a 650-unit property, that person is typically your stronger candidate due to a progression of responsibilities.

Did the resume give a good description of the candidate’s employment history? Some resumes are merely skeletons of past employment. You can’t determine what the person’s responsibilities were or how they relate to your company’s open position.

Look for awards, designations, and specific accomplishments that are quantifiable. These are a big plus, as they can set apart one candidate from another when job and responsibility descriptions are similar.