In a competitive field like commercial real estate, it pays to hire the right talent for your team. But what’s the secret? Your hiring track record isn’t bad, but you want more than that. You want to hire rockstars. So, how do you make better hires?
Let’s check out some surefire ways to up your hiring game and land top talent for your team.
1. Try Out Different Strategies
If you’ve experienced mixed results in the past, change up your strategy. Simply put, a hiring strategy is the thoughtful and creative approach you take to identifying, attracting, and converting job prospects into employees. There are many hiring strategies that can help you land the best people for your role.
- Leverage social media by posting job listings, starting conversations, and showing off your corporate culture with photos.
- Create an employee referral program with incentives such as bonuses or prizes.
- Target industry-related meetups like tradeshows and job fairs to network with the cream of the crop.
2. Switch to Behavioral Interviews
Traditional interviewing is aimed at asking job candidates how they would respond to various situations. After all, you want to know if they are qualified, right? But you can shift this to a more indirect line of questioning to reveal so much more about a candidate.
Behavioral interviewing is a powerful alternative that instead asks candidates how they already have responded or behaved in previous situations. This allows you to observe their past behavior to identify key values, competencies, and traits in past roles. Dig deeper into these stories for an even more vivid picture of this person and how their past might predict their future on your team.
3. Prioritize Personality Over Skill
It may sound counterintuitive, but hiring for skills can lead to less qualified hires. If you want to improve your hiring game and make better hires, focus more on their personality.
Character makes all the difference in business. And character is a function of personality, not training. When you hire for personality, you can always train them for required skills. Some key personality traits every hiring manager should look for are:
- Positivity
- Open-Mindedness
- Flexibility
- Independence
- Collaboration
4. Ask More Creative Interview Questions
So much about interviewing is scripted. It’s like a dead, ritual exchange of information. But if you want to ensure better hires, ask better questions. Flip the script. Instead of talking past each other, open a genuine dialogue with creative interview questions like:
- What adjectives would your co-workers use to describe you?
- Does magic exist, and if so, how would you define it?
- If you were interviewing me, what questions would you ask?
5. Engage a Recruiter
There are many ways to go about hiring, but successful companies know that engaging a recruiter is the proven route to landing a highly qualified team member in a relatively short time period. And the reason for this proven success is in how a recruiter works.
Recruiters don’t start looking for your new hire when you give them the job description. They began way back when they started their business. Years ago, your recruiter began amassing a database of highly qualified professionals, segmented according to a myriad of criteria, and has since nurtured relationships with those people. Engaging that recruiter means simply plugging into a long-standing network and receiving only highly qualified prospects.
Each of these methods have been proven time and again to improve your hiring efforts and land top talent in your field. No need to keep spinning your wheels. Use one or more of these methods to land better hires and build a better team.