3 Tips to Help You Hire the Perfect Remote Candidates

The Screening Source, LLC.

If you’re hiring an employee for a work from home position, there’s a good chance you’ll be conducting the interview remotely, as well. Often, this means a phone interview, but sometimes it can mean an interview over Skype, or a flight into town to meet the whole team. Since you can’t rely on body language cues the way you might in an in-person interview, how can you make sure you’re hiring the right person?

Here are three tips to help you choose the best candidate for your remote job:

1. Hire a Great Communicator

If the person you’re interviewing has a difficult time expressing him or herself at the beginning, it will be bad news further down the road. Because all later communication will be done via email, phone, chat, or another tech, it’s vital that your candidate can communicate online. He or she needs to have a good handle on proper netiquette, plus have the ability to establish thoughts, ideas, and handle conflict well if your team will be successful.

2. Look for Somebody Who is Self-Motivated

When one person struggles to stay on task, the whole team suffers. It’s important for bosses to conduct surveys to better understand morale and gain an impression of where individual improvements can be made within your remote team. A candidate who can’t set his or her own work goals and deadlines and drive projects to completion is an employee whose poor work will cause other people’s quality of work to decline You’re looking for a candidate who has a proven track record of working from home successfully or successfully leading things like group projects.

3. You Need a Digitally Proficient Candidate

This is not a time to hire somebody who has trouble handling attachments or figuring out new coworking apps, simply because that person won’t have anyone nearby to show him or her what to do! Out of the gate, you’ll need somebody who is comfortable and proficient on the existing types of technology your company uses, and who won’t mind learning new systems. All the great communication skills in the world don’t help if your new work from home employee can’t figure out how to use the company’s chat feature!

Employees are clamoring to work remotely, which is great news for anyone hiring and looking for a high-quality candidate pool! Make sure to look for somebody who is a great communicator, self-motivated, and digitally proficient, and you’ll be well on your way to growing a great team.

Using pre-hire assessments that test for characteristics like motivation, self-confidence, focus, and other emotional intelligence traits will also help you narrow down which candidates are a fit for your remote team. Good luck!

6 Ways to Handle Employee Resignation With Tact and Ease

The Screening Source, LLC.

It’s always a bummer for your company when one of your star employees makes the decision to pursue another opportunity. She’s a top performer in the sales department who always seems to be ahead of her game, zestfully trains the new hires, and regularly boosts office morale. Now what? After you move through the five stages of grief and come to terms with this new change, here are some topics to consider when a top employee resigns.

Don’t Worry

There will be others! Break the news to your team in a diplomatic and respectful manner. Acknowledging the loss of your employee helps to begin the transition and allows everyone to process the change. Reassure your team that you will all manage the transition phase together in a way that is productive for everyone and the company.

Accept and Reflect

Take this time to reflect on the impending change happening in your company and evaluate areas for further growth and opportunity. As a business leader, look toward this as a chance to build upon the key strengths of your other employees and communicate this as an experience in which positive movement can be drawn from.

Manage the Transition

Transitions can be a challenge for a company when a top employee resigns. Who will take over Mr. Employee’s clients moving forward? What do we do with the existing open accounts that he’s working on? Who will bring donuts from now on?!

Typically a top employee will provide significant notice before departing and will take of closing out ongoing projects so as not to leave customers hanging. If this is not the case, you may have to attend to damage control with haste.

A great way to effectively manage the transition period is with collaboration amongst the team. Evaluate what’s most important and consider moving team members around to address the most pressing tasks. Take care not to overload a departing employee on the last two weeks of his job, instead have him help with his departure. You’ll also want to encourage him to work with his colleagues to manage taking over tasks that he’s got on the table.

Explore the Advantages of a Counteroffer

A healthy counteroffer should be used to keep a top employee from resigning if the costs of him leaving outweigh allowing another employee to take over.  While this is a very grey area that oftentimes comes down to salary negotiation, best practices in regards to counteroffers warn against getting into a compensation tug of war and instead suggest focusing on the true wants and needs of the employee. Research shows, time and time again, that the main reason employees leave is for a better opportunity anyway, and not necessarily just an increase in pay, so why even go there.

Make Exit Interviews Standard Operating Procedure

If you’ve developed a culture of communication within your organization, you probably can have an honest conversation with your employee about their reasons for leaving. Of course, if you’re one of the reasons your employee has decided to bail, this task is easier said than done! Make it a practice to include another distanced employee or supervisor as part of the exit interview to help elicit honest feedback.

Again, use this opportunity to hone in on the reasons for your employee’s intended departure and evaluate if you may be able to accommodate those wants and needs. Allow yourself to be open to suggestions and use what you learn moving forward. This can serve as a good time to re-evaluate roles and challenges in order to better forecast for the company’s continued growth.

Well Wishes

Lastly, you want to make this time as positive of an experience for everyone as possible. Your top performer is likely excited about taking on new challenges, and while you and the team are sad to see him go, it’s best to maintain an air of respect and gratitude for the time spent together. Remember, you want an ambassador for your company, so don’t burn any bridges! You never know when your paths might cross again and this once top employee can serve as a catalyst for future business opportunity.

8 Highlights of a Great Resume

The Screening Source, LLC.

How You Know You’re Looking at a Stellar Resume?
Resumes are fun to read, aren’t they? But what makes a resume good? What makes a resume so good that you want to contact that person out of the sea of other resumes from eager and hopeful candidates?

Quantified Effort
Sure, you led a team and increased profits. But this other guy managed, trained, and coached a team of supervisors-in-training and increased quarterly profit margins from 25k to 45k in less than a year while also reducing costs by 30%. Pretty impressive, no?
Candidates who are able to quantify their efforts help paint a clearer picture of their actual on-the-job effectiveness. While it sounds great that candidates are able to increase profit and lead a team, it sounds even better when you can actually get an idea of how much and how well they did this.

It’s Original and Interesting
Lots of candidates write down their interests or objective in their resume. There’s nothing worse than reading how much someone wants to “contribute to the company’s overall success” or “utilize my skills to help your company.” ZZzzzzZZ.
Tell me about your pet kangaroo or how you’re the jalapeno popper eating champion in your hometown. Something original goes a lot further to describe your personality and what that might look like in the workplace than a generic description that sounds copy/pasted from a resume writing tutorial.

It’s In Reverse Chronological Order
The most important positions and projects should be listed first, as they’re the most relevant and pertinent to what a candidate has been up to recently. Resumes that list important positions starting from the earliest and ending with the most recent can be pretty confusing to follow, and that never makes a good first impression.

It Contains Pertinent Keywords
All recruiters know that a resume is only as good as its keywords. Important keywords are crucial to describing a specific role or set of tasks that candidates were/are responsible for in their previous or current position.
If you’re searching for an engineer candidate, chances are your results will be flooded with various resumes with that keyword. Using specific keywords, such as “audio engineer” and experience with “architectural acoustics” and “electroacoustics” that can be found more easily and weeded out from the rest is key to good resume content.

Company Description
It can be very helpful when a candidate provides a brief description of the company or type of company they’ve worked for. Unless it’s Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, many hiring managers have never heard of “So-and-So Incorporated” and if this candidate was the VP of development, it leaves many to wonder what exactly he/she and company developed. When your candidate provides a (brief) description of the company or industry they’re in, this can provide some context from which they are coming and help in deciding if this person is an experience or culture fit.

Bullet Points
Let’s face it. A resume should be a breakdown of the most important tasks a candidate has performed or accomplished within a job. No one wants to read a 5 paragraph essay! Bullet points should be brief, listing important keywords and quantified accomplishments within the position to be most effective and have the greatest impact on a hiring manager.

White Space
Similar to using bullet points, utilizing white space is more of a cosmetic preference but does help the document flow. White space on a resume indicates that only the most important topics, bullet points, and positions are highlighted, and the information is to the point.
Resumes should not be entirely full of text or pictures and should not be difficult to read or follow. Resumes should flow smoothly and transition nicely between positions and responsibilities.

No Objective, but Maybe an Executive Summary
Including an objective in a resume is almost redundant. It is assumed that the objective is to sway the hiring manager enough through the viewing of the resume to contact the candidate and offer an interview and then the position to which said the candidate has applied. Pretty obvious, right?
An executive summary, on the other hand, can be a brief paragraph that highlights select accomplishments and responsibilities throughout the resume in one succinct fashion. This allows the reader to decide right from the beginning if they’re interested in reviewing the rest of the document.
Resumes come in all shapes and sizes. You can be sure that you’re viewing a good resume when it contains enough important information (in bulleted form), with specific keywords and quantified accomplishments and still has some white space left on the page to ensure easy readability.

On Squirrels Crossing the Street and Assessment Testing

The Screening Source

When it comes to hiring a new candidate, you have a lot of options. Assessment testing, for example, is one of those options. Testing candidates is a great way to assess your talent pool to further gather information about your candidates and make the most informed decision possible.

Choosing the Right Assessments for Your Company

Choosing the right pre-employment assessments for your business will ultimately depend on the type of roles you are looking to fill and what you are looking to measure in your potential candidates.

Before selecting you pre-hire assessments, take an inventory. What are the most important skills, experiences, or aspects of the position? How are these things usually measured?

Ability Assessments

Ability assessments are great when you want to know more about whether your candidates have a specific level of competence to manage a job or task. You might seek out information about a candidate’s people or interpersonal skills, communication skills, and sales or management know-how.

Ability measures allow you to identify areas where your candidates excel and where there may be room for improvement if you’re willing to train. These are also great for identifying skills in younger employees or recent graduates who have little to no work experience.

Personality Assessments

Having the right personality fit for a position is crucial to long-term success and employee engagement. If someone enjoys the work they do, they’re more likely to stay in the job for an extended period and, although not always, are usually pretty good at whatever they’re doing.

When you measure a candidate’s personality fit before hiring, you gain insight into where this person will fit within your company, how they might get along with others, and how they will contribute to your company’s overall culture.

Emotional Competencies or “Soft Skills”

Emotional competency is one of those things that you can’t touch or see, but know it’s extremely important and related to success. Emotional competency suggests that your candidates have the motivation, drive, and focus for high-level achievement. Emotionally competent individuals operate efficiently, understand others, and then use that understanding to get things done. If they don’t see a way or solution, they make one. The rise to the occasion, whatever the occasion may be.

Measuring emotional competency in your pre-hire testing program is a great way to identify those individuals who will push the limits, think creatively, and ultimately help take your business to the next level.

Skill Tests

Skill testing is a quick and inexpensive way to screen candidates. You can find skill tests that measure attention to detail, sales knowledge, logic and critical thinking, computer skills and programs like Microsoft Excel and Outlook, data entry, math, and reading and writing.

Utilizing these tests before spending the time to interview someone is a great way to narrow down your candidate pool so you know you’re only meeting with people who are at the skill level you want them to be, and not spending time with those who aren’t.

In other words, don’t make bad hiring decisions when it’s so easy to make good ones. Don’t be the squirrel who waits until a car comes to cross the street. Interested in exploring how pre-hire testing can help you hire better employees? Get in touch with us today to try out a demo.