President of Simply Driven Executive Search A member of the Sanford Rose Associates® network of offices, Kent Burns, Featured in Finding The Right Job, Two Big Plays to Improve Your Hiring Process

Dallas, TX 2/10/2015

By Dawn Papandrea

Everyone assumes that finding the right candidates for your open positions is the hard part when the real hurdle is really what comes before that. To improve the time-to-hire, cost-to-hire and interview-to-hire ratios, you have to stop winging it and put a real gameplan in place, says Kent Burns, President of Simply Driven Executive Search.

Take a look at what he says are the two things that will improve your entire hiring process so that you don’t miss out on the quality candidate catches that come your way.

1. Huddle up.

“Make sure all the stakeholders are aligned on the hiring criteria – hard skills and intangible attributes,” says Burns. You’ve probably been down that road before, in which you do all of the legwork to find and bring in quality applicants only to find out that the department head or executive team changed their minds about the level of employee they want to bring on board. “So much time, energy and money gets wasted due to lack of alignment,” says Burns. If you find yourself conducting interview that you know are never going to go anywhere, it’s time for a team meeting to get everyone on the same page.

2. Figure out the play-by-play.

In other words, agree to a hiring timeline in advance. There’s nothing more frustrating to a job seeker than a hiring decision that drags on for weeks, or in some really bad cases, even months. And, it doesn’t paint your company in a great light since it indicates a lack of organization and planning. That’s why Burns recommends actually setting deadlines for every part of the hiring process, from candidate presentation, to phone interviews, to face-to-face interviews.

Read more: http://www.findtherightjob.com/employer/two-big-plays-improve-hiring-process/