It’s the dilemma each employer faces with each hire. How do I find the right fit for this position? Where do I look? Should I post my job online? Where?

So many questions, so little time. Considering how much the wrong hire would cost your small business, you’ll want to focus on these tips before you post your job ad. Hiring the right people, will contribute to the overall success of your business.

1. Calculate your hires and the cost of your mis-hires. Business owners need to be as careful and calculating with candidates and hires as they are with their equipment and business technology. “When a piece of equipment costs $500,000, we are accustomed to calculating a ROI. Including doing comparisos and planning the installation. So, companies should only move forward and hire with the same type of caution.

To assist business principals in measuring the ROI for employees, You can check these four online calculators: the hiring success calculator (calculates percentage of high performers hired and promoted), the talent projection calculator (calculates the number of people you’ll have to hire and fire in order to achieve a 90 percent success rate), the mis-hires calculator (calculates your typical cost of mis-hires, and your typical number of hours sweeping up after mis-hire) and the organizational cost of mis-hires (calculates how much it will cost you to replace underperformers with your current methods versus Top grading methods).

2. Create a detailed and intriguing job description. Your job description in an ad will determine what types of people will be attracted to it. Write a good ad to get top results. Post a vague job ad and you will get more unqualified applicants. All hiring managers should be careful to put in the extra time required to make the job description as detailed and appealing as possible.

When job descriptions are vague, hiring managers who will are affected have not been clear about what they’re hiring someone to do. Conversely, candidates are also confused. They might apply, only hoping that they figure it out once they start the job. What you get are completely avoidable and costly mis-hires.

3. Recruit from your network and use your connections. “There are a slew of advantages of recruiting from within your own networks. It’s much faster (dial the phone, send some e-mails, scour social media), better (maybe you know someone and they are known to be a high performer) and cheaper than posting expensive job ads or using third party recruiters.

You should be forming a network of A-players you’ve worked with, JobShouts recommends having a separate network of people called connectors. “Connectors are people who know the people you want to reach and they can often refer that top talent right to your inbox.

JobShouts recommends that every hiring manager build and maintain a list those A-players and ten or more connectors—people who are not suitable for your business, but who know a lot of high-performers you might hire. This connector group can include former employees who stay in touch with their peers, also a lot of talented people. Even vendors with an eye for great talent can often point you to talent or other connectors. Also, your professional associates and former peers who know lots of potential talent.

4. Avoid those generic competency questions.  The face-to-face interview is the weakest step in the hiring process. Why? Competency interviews often fail because a typical competency question is, ‘John, Please provide me with an example of when you felt a lot of passion for your job?’ Seriously, anyone can come up with some examples of this and anyone can claim more passion than ultimately exists.”

We’ve seen senior managers at a recruiting firms who spent a lot of time coaching their candidate on how to successfully sell themselves and even tell outright lies during the interview process. Shocking to say the least.

5. Push a candidate to set up a reference call. Of all the methods we have seen, this one we like the bet. It is done using a TORC (threat of reference call). This involves asking the potential candidate to schedule the reference call. A call between the hiring manager and the candidates former employer or referral.

Often this ‘threat of reference check’ will scare off those unqualified players.  Less than stellar players will have difficulty getting their former bosses one the phone with you and most likely would not want them to talk to you anyway. Decades of real world experience confirms that top performers will get their bosses to talk and are quite happy to schedule the call. JobShouts advises recruiters to remind each candidate through each step of the hiring process that reference calls and checks will be setup by them.

6. Use JobShouts.com. We work really well, your first ad is free and we think outside the box. Job ads do not have to cost $200 each. We deliver the same results for a fraction of the cost.

You might think employers want to stay as far away from discriminating practices as possible. What you don’t know is that many are using a legal strategy by which to discriminate, often times unfairly. I’m talking about credit checks in the hiring process. Many employers have begun using this as a way of determining someone’s “reliability” or worthiness before making an offer of employment. What’s wrong with this picture?

Let’s review:

dis·crim·i·nate

–verb (used without object)

1. make a distinction in favor of or against a person or thing on the basis of the group, class, or category to which the person or thing belongs rather than according to actual merit; show partiality.

–verb (used with object)

2. to make or constitute a distinction in or between; differentiate.

Since employers are using credit checks to separate classes of people, by definition it’s discrimination. It’s legal and it’s an ugly practice, especially in a time of economic turmoil and record numbers of home foreclosures. This type of hiring practice not only perpetuates discrimination but it further injures our economic recovery as a nation.  There are so many still unemployed that there was recently another extension on unemployment benefits for those that have exhausted theirs. During that time of receiving unemployment, do you think those people were able to keep up with their credit card payments?  Now they face losing job opportunities for making the choice to feed their families instead of maintain their credit score.

Since when did hiring someone to do a job have anything to do with their credit? Since when did hiring someone have anything to do with anything other than their qualifications and abilities? Now more than ever, employers continue to use this form of discrimination as a way to narrow the pool of candidates. There’s only one problem with this type of competition – it leaves the most unfortunate victims of the economy out of the game altogether.  I find HUGE fault with eliminating a hard working and qualified candidate because their house is in foreclosure or they haven’t been able to keep up with credit card payments. First penalized by the economy, now penalized by employers. How is the workforce supposed to recover? We should be questioning laws that allow any kind of discrimination in the work force. Employers need to get their heads out of the clouds and start looking at people instead of credit reports and numbers.  I don’t care what some psychologist says about credit being a basis for knowing if someone is reliable or trustworthy. I don’t care what your CFO says about keeping hiring costs/risks down – discrimination is discrimination. Spade. The end. Is that really the picture you want to paint of your organization? “Oh, we’re a really great company to work for – as long as you have good credit!” This is the real world, perhaps you should join us.

Here’s what you need to know if you’re a job seeker:

1. Employers can legally request permission to run a credit check on you.

2. Employers are REQUIRED to get your signature on a permission form to do so. This could be on a job application too, so READ CAREFULLY what you are signing!

3. The credit check isn’t detailed, but gives the employer your credit score and # of delinquent accounts.

4. Get a copy of your own credit report.  Being proactive about your credit is a better approach than being reactive.

There are a lot of ways employers can silently discriminate against you but this is by far the most widespread and legal way it’s done. Now, tell me your thoughts on how we can fix this….

The title of this blog might seem ridiculous; of course you want ROI from recruiting budget. ROI might be added functionality, added scalability, added hires, added something which ultimately adds to the bottom line. What about job boards? How are you measuring your ROI on those?  For years there has been debate among recruiting professionals about measurable ROI from job boards.

As a former recruiter, my ROI from job boards was nearly nil. Job postings became more time consuming than time saving. Every year the job boards got more expensive and every year I had more unqualified candidates to sift through. What’s wrong with that equation? My objective was to place as many people as possible as quickly as possible; that’s the only way I generated revenue for both my employer and my wallet. The job boards didn’t seem to care. They just continued to get more expensive and impose more limitations. What do you mean I’ve exceeded the number of searches allowed? It was just BOGUS.

Someone needed to change it all and I got tired of waiting for it to happen.

I’m sure there are those that think I only talk so much about JobShouts! because it’s my company. While that’s true to some extent, a larger part of why I talk about it so much is because I get really excited about changing the experience for recruiters. And producing results! I’m excited to be a pioneer in this industry. After years of using job boards and knowing what didn’t work, I’m now in the thick of creating what works. It’s working so well, that the “big” job boards ought to be running scared.

It’s a well known fact that our job postings are indexed by job search engines. We’ve continued to perfect the “formula” by which we operate – including quality of job ads, categorization, link love and so on. Apparently, we’re pretty attractive not only to the job search engines but also to candidates as well. I was so excited about our latest report from Indeed which showed we averaged 4.5 clicks for every 1 click on non-sponsored ads. Essentially, the only way to get better exposure for job ads with the job search engines is to pay for sponsorship on those sites.

Good Stuff:

This is only 1 of our distribution channels and we are highly successful on so many more.

Sharing metrics is important to me. I want our customers to expect a better recruiting experience. I want them to pay less and receive better quality candidates. I want them to have access to the most innovative and effective recruiting tools available.  After 15 years of pounding the internet, learning and using Boolean and other x-ray techniques, I’ve learned a thing or 2 about what’s actually effective. My knowledge is your pearl in the oyster. Get that elusive ROI you’ve been after for so long. Use it, love it, share it!