Expert Speak: Mr. Ajay Wahi

Recruit for productivity, not for numbers

You will reap rich dividends if you follow this learning to the hilt. A SME needs people who think out of the box, are creative, and are perfectionists. For all critical roles, you need the BEST. So, unlike in large organizations where recruitments are conducted by the dozen, I believe SMEs should recruit only the BEST for critical roles, even if that means some delays in the recruitment process. Do not fall into the trap of recruiting people just to increase staff size. Also, do not rush into recruiting people with lower than required skills just for the sake of delivering products faster. A product made by the best person, even if delayed due to late recruitment, would pose far fewer challenges than an inferior product developed fast by virtue of recruiting quickly the less-than-best person.

Invest time to hire the best

Recruiting the BEST is not easy. You need to make time and put in effort to take multiple rounds of interviews to identify the BEST to whom you will finally offer the position. So the first step is to mentally prepare yourself, your executive team, and others who will be involved in the interviewing process for a number of interviews. Without this mental preparation, you will probably rush through the interviews, and end up selecting someone out of sheer need to select a person. The chances are that such a person will not be the best! And if you don’t get the best, how will your organization become the best?

Streamlining of interview process

Next, you need to streamline the interview process. Ensure everyone is clear about who will conduct the first round interviews, who will participate in the second round, and so on. Often in SMEs, I have seen HR asking the department head what is to be done with short-listed candidates! You need to have complete company-wide clarity if you are planning to take many interviews, so that each step automatically leads to the next one, till the BEST person is selected.

Constitute crisp evaluation criteria

With the interview process set, one needs to chalk out very clearly the evaluation criteria to shortlist/select a candidate. This ensures that the company does not end up taking innumerable interviews without selecting a single candidate. I remember once we had taken over 100 interviews for a mid-level position and still had not made an offer despite a year having elapsed. At first, I was happy that so many interviews were being conducted, since that meant we were trying to hire only the best, till I actually ran through the evaluation criteria, only to be shocked to learn that no one was clear about them! The result: most candidates were short-listed at the first stage, and they were all rejected at the next stage! I then convened a meeting of the HR and various department heads and supervisors. We brainstormed to come up with clear and coherent evaluation criteria, and bang! We short-listed the right candidates and eventually made an offer to the best one.

Diverse interview panel

Depending upon the role you are recruiting for, your interview panel should be broad-based, because if so many interviews are to be conducted, and only a limited few conduct them, the panelists would be overloaded with interviewing duties. So expanding the pool from which the interview panel is chosen not only reduces the load on interviewers, but also motivates others to be good enough to be empanelled, creating a sense of pride and importance. Let’s face it: if the interview process and evaluation criteria are clear and well defined, you can conveniently delegate the interview process to lower levels of the hierarchy.

Collaborative recruitment effort

You can achieve all the above provided your leadership team and other seniors are with you on this journey to recruit the best .Get them together and ask them one question: Would they like to lead teams of many normally-skilled employees, or would they prefer fewer BEST-skilled ones so as to boost the quality of their teams? Most would choose the latter, where high earnings can be distributed among a smaller team of star performers rather than amongst a larger team of average employees. Someone said: A person is judged by the company s/he keeps. That is true for companies too.

To sum up, get the entire organization to realize that for critical roles, it is best to select only the BEST. Then, standardize the interview process, decide on key evaluation criteria, broaden the interview panel, and see interviewers take pleasure in their ability to select the BEST, rather than viewing the interviewing process as a liability.

Caution

You need to correctly identify critical roles before you can apply this learning.

It may take a few weeks to spread this vision across all levels of the organization.

Sum up

The interview process can be delegated to lower levels of the hierarchy. This would speed up the process and enhance quality of the recruit. Employees take pride in their ability to select the Best candidate(s) for the job, and have a personal interest in seeing their recruit succeed.

The contributor of this article is Mr. Ajay Wahi, author of management books like 'and the award for the BEST SME of the year goes to...' and 'Get Noticed Get Promoted'.

He can be contacted at 9810027979 or awahi2010@gmail.com