How To Hire The Right Person

How do you select the right person for your business? How do find the “right” person to pick an order in the warehouse or run a forklift? The next district manager of your retail chain? There’s no perfect answer of course, but some of the key steps to finding the right person to fill a position in your retail business include:

• Determining your need to hire a new employee. Are you properly utilizing the skills and talents of your current employees? Do you know what needs to be done? Can your business growth support a new employee?
• Conducting a thorough job analysis. What are the job's essential functions and key performance criteria? For example, if you’re ready to hire a full time store manager then you’ll want to make sure you know the type of person you need to entrust that type of responsibility.
• Writing a job description and job specification for the position based on the job analysis.
• Determining the salary for the position, based on internal and external equity. Is the salary comparable and proportional with the salaries and responsibilities of other positions inside your company as well as similar positions out in the marketplace? What do other retail companies in your area offer? You want to be fair - but not overpay either.
• Deciding where and how to find qualified applicants. What are the recruitment techniques to be used? What is the time frame for conducting your search? Remember, advertising is not the only, or necessarily the best, way to recruit.
• Collecting and reviewing a fair amount of applications and resumes and then selecting the most qualified candidates for further consideration.
• Interviewing the most qualified candidates for the position, based on the job's description and specification.
• Checking references.
• Hiring the best person for the job.

Hopefully, after reviewing all of the resumes, you will be able to pick and choose a select number of qualified applicants to be interviewed. (If not, you may want to expand your time frame and rewrite any ad copy and/or look at another recruitment technique.)

Now that you know where the interview process fits into the hiring process, let's take a look at the do's and don'ts of conducting a successful interview.

See also Hiring Employee FAQs.