Work.com Small Business Community Blog

How to Hire Employees: Resume Search

Looking to find the best job candidates for your business? Get tips from an expert. Rob Feinstein, Vice President of Product for Work.com and Business.com, and former General Manager of MonsterTRAK, the college recruiting division of Monster.com, wrote a guide to resume search. Learn how to scour resume databases, job boards, Google, and sites like Linked In and Dice to find the best candidates.

Here are Rob's insider tips about find great hires through resume search:

• Don't try to get too cute in your resume search by loading it up with lots of search terms. That's much more likely to exclude good candidates than limit your results to perfect matches. The reason: not everyone describes themselves the same way. Try broader searches (e.g. marketing Los Angeles) and skim results to find the candidates that look best to you.
• Use the most common language that people would use to describe their professional background. You may want your new sales rep to be a real go-getter. But don't try a resume search for the term 'go-getter'; odds are most go-getters don't use those words on their resume.
• When your resume search yields a great candidate, treat it like a sales lead. After all, you'll be trying to sell the candidate on your opportunity. So don't just leave a message or write an email that says "call me".
• HR people will tell you there are active job seekers and passive job seekers. Active ones are looking right now; passive ones aren't actively looking, but are open to hearing about new jobs. Most resume databases will show you the most recently posted resumes first, so you can assume most are active job seekers right now. But your resume search should also fetch resumes that were posted months ago. Those people may still be receptive to your opportunity.
• Your most powerful resume database should be of the one already in your file cabinet (or hard drive, as it were). Save all the incoming resumes you get, even if you have no openings at the time. Those candidates have already expressed an interest in working for you, so don't lose them. Don't initiate a search from scratch when you don't have to.

Technorati tags: resume search, employees, hiring employees

Hiring Employees: If Not Interviews, Then What?

According to the Harvard Business Review, 80% of turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions. This is really important when you think about the time and money you invest in training a new employee about your business, your products, and your customers. In a small business, the entrepreneur often selects new employees, especially the first employees, because of his or her gut reaction during an interview.

"Seems like a really nice guy," is a common reaction after the interview. "I think he can help me." Poof, the new employee is selected. Bad move.

In his Guide to Pre-Employment Testing, Work.com Editor Daniel Kehrer suggests that putting pre-employment checking to work for you can make you less dependent on your gut reaction to candidates. In Recruiting and Selection Tips, David Meyer, Ph.D. suggests that job analysis will help you match the right person to your job. And developing a large candidate pool gives you more potential employees to select.

Maggie Rauch makes key points about the importance of background checking in her Guide to Checking Backgrounds Before Hiring. So does  W. Eric Martin in his Guide to Checking Job References. You would be amazed at how many employers don't do these background checks.

A large study conducted by John and Rhonda Hunter at the University of Michigan on the predictors of job performance found that a typical job interview increased the likelihood of choosing the best candidate by less than 2%. Bad hiring decisions can be avoided. If the interview is not golden, what is?

(Source Study:  John & Rhonda Hunter, "Validity and Utility of Alternative Predictors of Job Performance", Psychological Bulletin, July 1984, p. 90.)

Note from Shara: Susan Heathfield, Work.com Employee community leader, is a management and organization consultant who specializes in the people side of business, and is the owner of Heathfield Consulting Associates in Williamston, MI.

Technorati tags: HR, employees