In working with small business owners one of the most common issues they face is recruiting, hiring, and retaining of employees. Most of the small businesses I deal with don't have a human resource department or human resource experience so they use the traditional methods to hiring people. Today, I want to tell you about a method of recruiting and hiring employees that I've used with great success to reduce employee turnover. Actually, just about everyone who has used this system had dramatically decreased their employee turnover. We'll leave the retaining of employees to another day. Before we go into the 8 step process let's take a step back and look at how most small business owners hire staff.

The Typical 4 Step Process

Most small business owners I've spoken with use a 4 step process to hiring people.

• 1. Place an ad on the internet, newspaper, or what ever medium they prefer to announce the available position.
• 2. Hopefully they get overwhelmed with resumes or people coming in to see them. (I say hopefully because if they don't get a lot of responses the employees they end up hiring are really scary.)
• 3. Review all the resumes from potential employees and call 2 or 3 in for a telephone or in-person interview.
• 4. Hopefully, all the candidates show up and they end up picking one of the candidates they interviewed. (Often times people don't show up so they have to repeat step 3 and 4 a few times)

What I have found is that this process is time consuming and often doesn't lead to the greatest results. When faced with hundreds of applicants the owner may get overwhelmed and make a rash decision just to end the process. Typically, the person with the best resume is likely to get the position.

8 Step Process for Recruiting and Hiring Top Notch Employees

Let's look at the hiring process that many have found to significantly reduce employee turnover. One of the keys to this process is that it's got a process of elimination component that brings out weaknesses in applicants.

Here are the steps:

1. Advertising the available position. People typically use Craigslist, Monster, Restroom Advertising, and/or newspaper. The key is to get a large pool of applicants. Hopefully you receive between 100 and 200 resumes from applicants.
2. Invite any applicant whose resume meets the minimum requirements to a group interview. Tell them they made the first cut and the next step is a group interview. Let them know what to expect at the group interview.
3. The Group Interview Part 1 - Part one of the group interview is to tell them about your company, its mission statement, vision, and details about the position you're hiring. It's important to tell the good and the bad. This step is a key way to eliminate the pretenders.
4. Take a 10 minute break. Before the break let the applicants know what's going to happen in the upcoming Group Interview Part 2. Encourage anyone that doesn't think the position is perfect for them that during the break is a great time to leave. You're hoping that half the people leave during the break.
5. Group Interview - Part 2 - This is the Question and answer period of the group interview. You have to come prepared with questions to ask the candidates that are relative to the available position. You should have everyone that is involved in the decision making process attend this portion of the process and take notes about the applicants. Typically, I stand in the front of the room, ask all my questions, and the people helping me make the decision sit in the back of the room. I look for candidates who are participating and answering question correctly.
6. Pick your top 4 to 5 candidates and run the DISC Personality Profile. I find the DISC Personality Profile to be helpful with eliminating people who are good interviewers. The DISC Personality profile helps to make sure a candidate's personality fits the job. As an example, someone who doesn't like to deal with the smallest of details shouldn't be handling my accounts receivable. On the same token I don't want to train someone for sales position who is an introvert. This step usually eliminates one or two people.
7. Final interviews with the remaining 2 or 3 candidates. During this step I'll typically do phone interviews with the remaining candidates to address any concerns that I have with candidates. Most people will bring in the remaining candidates and let each person involved in decision making process interview the candidates individually.
8. It's time to pick a winner.

I've used this process to hire people twice and both people worked out great. From the group interview to the final decision only took 2 days but more importantly we got it right both times. I hope this helps you recruit and hire high quality people.