Hiring New Candidates

Any company’s success is founded on the professionalism, devotion, and efforts of its employees. The main goal of every employer is to choose among all the applicants the best one and to be sure hiring the high-qualified employee. The employer should be very careful during the interview. He or she must determine in what extent the applicant appropriates for the job and if the candidate has enough qualification for the job responsibilities. It is a difficult task in consideration of that fact that, as a rule, the job interview is a first meeting of two unacquainted people. The employer must have a lot of knowledge, which will help him to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the potential worker at the first sight. He must clearly understand what skills the job will require from the candidate and in light of this he must determine if the applicant has the suitable professional experience and personal qualities to undertake the work duties. It can be said that the future success of the company strongly depends on the employer’s ability to make the right decision regarding hiring new workers. This paper will discuss the hiring new candidate procedure and some of its aspects in the company that develops and provides the mobile applications for the small business. Sometimes this company faces the need to recruit the new hires. Although the employees do different things, the job interview is common for every new candidate. Thus, the analysis of the recruiting procedure is based on the knowledge and impressions about this company.

 Actually, hiring the new candidate procedure starts in absentia the employee. It begins when the employer decides that he needs to get a new worker. The vacancy is advertised for all the candidates, who consider themselves worthy to get the job and to manage its responsibilities. HR manager’s acquaintanceship with the potential workers begins when scanning candidates’ resumes. On the one hand, the resume can give comprehensive information about the candidate’s working history. It includes some personal background, education, work experience, responsibilities the candidate managed before, career achievements, working skills, some personal qualities that the employee considered necessary to note in the resume. Also, it shows the position the employee expects to get and the sentiments of what he or she feels. At the first sight, this amount of the information is enough to create an overall impression about the employee’s qualification and his ability to manage the job duties. However, on the other hand, it is important to note that there are many aspects that are not revealed in the resume. It does not disclose the reasons for leaving the previous place of employment. Also, it is impossible to know the candidate’s motivation for working and his approach to the job responsibilities. Often the employee’s personal attitude towards his job duties is the main reason for his own career promotion and the success of the company in general. Thus, hiring new candidate procedure begins with looking through the number of resumes by an HR manager, but it would be a mistake to make a decision based on the first impression.

The next step is the job interview. The candidates who have good resumes and seem like being suitable for the position pass the first stage of the selection process. HR manager invites them to negotiate personally for more information. What should HR pay attention to? Radjou, Prabhu, and Ahuja (2012) argue that there is the special quality that describes the candidate as a potential excellent worker. It is called "smartness". They argue that smartness is seen as vital to competing and winning in today’s knowledge economy. Yet companies need more than just textbook-smart workers to innovate and succeed today. They need to recruit new hires who are street-smart -- who can think on their feet and use their passion to improvise creative solutions for the many challenges of a hyper-competitive marketplace (p.123).

Also, he underscores five main qualities an applicant should have to become a good professional and be able to help the company to reach success. They are resilience, frugality, flexibility, empathy, and passion. That is the five main point HR manager should notice during the interview to make a right decision.

One has to examine each quality separately. The resilience shows if the candidate is able to look for, find and use the opportunities in the increasingly complex conditions. Nowadays a company has to face a huge amount of business problems, challenges, and the tough competition. Under such circumstances, all the parts of the company and each its member should be able to resist the external pressure and to manage the internal duties. The resilience shows if the candidate is able to seek opportunity in adversity. Thus, HR manager should look for the candidate, who can examine working risks from the different angles, who can search and find innovative and refreshing approaches to business challenges. When recruiting, the employer should ensure if candidate’s resilience was proved in the previous places of employment.

The next main quality the applicant should have is frugality. It means that a candidate should be able to find the ways to do more using less. To compete and win, the company needs to recruit employees, who know how to reach higher performance using fewer resources. It should be noticed that the frugality is the personal quality too. The frugal employee often is very well organized and very energetic person who understands what needs to be done and who is able and willing to work hard in order to reach the set goals. The frugal employee needs less time to manage the work volume because of his ability to organize his schedule.

Today a business has to deal with the highly-unpredictable environment. The markets are volatile and there is no stability. The company has to adapt to changing circumstances and contribute to change. The employees must be able to think and to act flexibly. They must not be afraid of the unpredictable outcomes that are the results of the creative solutions. The candidate must be able to challenge conventional thinking and generate absolutely new, unexpected propositions and the ways to solve the problems. HR manager can propose some quick test to check the candidate’s ability to be flexible. For example, he can ask the applicant to invent a fundamentally new approach to the value propositions. New hires must be able to manage this task immediately.

The one of the quality applicant should have to become a great employee is empathy. The company must feel the moods and find the way to serve the needs of its customers to reach a stable income. The company should pay attention not only to the middle class, but also for lower income users. The employee must have the empathy for all the customer classes, including marginal customers. If the company does not feel the needs of the people using its goods, it has a huge risk being overtaken by competitors. During the interview, HR manager should establish if the candidate is able to feel and correctly analyze the customers needs.

At last, it should be passion in the employee’s style of working. The candidate must be able to use not only the mind to solve different problems, but also follow the heart. As Pink (2006) argues, “the left-brain’s linear, analytical, computer-like thinking -- controlled by what we call our ‘‘mind’’-- is insufficient to help us decipher, let alone navigate, our increasingly complex and ambiguous world” (p. 11). The employers should notice and hire the applicants, who can trust their intuition, and are willing to take the risks. Good employees are passionate about what they do. They always believe that they are not only earning money, but they are pursuing a higher cause in their work. Radjou, Prabhu, and Ahuja (2012) argue that “recruiting smart employees who boast the five critical job skills above is the main secret of the success.”

Except determining these five qualities, the employer can ask some additional psychological questions. The candidates’ answers can reveal a lot of information to the experienced HR manager. The questions can be simple (What’s your vision? Where do you think our company should go in the future? How would you shape this role?) or confusing (“How many ping pong balls would it take to fill a 747 Jet? What’s the biggest misconception that people have about you and why?”), says DeZube (n.d.). This is certain peculiarities of the HR manager job. It involves knowledge of the human psychology and experience of the negotiation with the people. The employer must spend a lot of time to learn how to determine if the candidate has the necessary qualities at the first sight.

Hiring new candidate procedure is not simple. It starts from scanning a huge amount of resumes. HR manager should choose one candidate, who has the necessary skills. These are not only the working experience and the appropriate education, this is a number of specific qualities. It can be said that a recruiting new hires procedure is something of an art form, it has many nuances and things an employer should pay attention to.