Establish the Profile of the Ideal Candidate

This is a simple process that allows the people who know most about the job you are hiring to full to identify the kind of person you want to hire. There is a tendency to hire for hard skills and fire for lack of soft skills and this approach focuses on finding the right soft skills up front.

Develop a job description 

You need to be really sure exactly what you expect from this position. What are the duties and how do you expect the person to spend their day?

If this is a replacement for an existing employee you need to review whether you want to change the duties; if it is a new position, you need to be very clear about what you expect.

Edge has software that will take the pain out of this process.

Agree a Key Accountabilities statement   
 
The job description sets out the overview of what you want in the position. To select the best candidate you need to be clear about what is most important.

You may be hiring a person who has customer contact and also does research/compiles reports. Which is more important in the position? Experience suggests that people are good at one or the other.

Establishing clearly and definitively what is most important is essential up front before you even start the selection process.        

Create a Benchmark for the position

Once you have the job description and you have gone over the Key Accountabilities with your team, and then you can create a benchmark that describes the Behaviors, Values and Core Competencies of your ideal candidate.

To complete this benchmark, each of your management team can go online to complete an instrument that asks a number of questions designed to identify exactly what you are looking for in the person best suited to do the job. This looks at talent and aptitude rather than experience, which is something that you will overlay later.  

Once these individual reports have been reviewed to ensure there are no wide disparities, they are merged to create a report that identifies exactly the kind of person that you are looking to hire.

The report also has a number of interview questions that you can ask to upgrade your interview process.