Communication Can Make Hiring Easier

Ryan Mann

November 3, 2014

Though I don’t possess a crystal ball, here’s a confident prediction for you: Hiring will not become easy anytime soon. Hiring is hard work. Attracting & reviewing candidates. Interviewing, negotiating, and onboarding candidates. Because humans are, well, humans, hiring will always present hardship at some level.

There are things that can be done, however, to make things easier. And one such critical ingredient within a hiring team is communication. Clear, open, and thorough communication will save a company time, frustration, and money during the hiring and recruiting process.

I’ve worked with a few companies on search projects recently, and it’s become evident that even highly reputable companies struggle in this area. Maybe the powers that be don’t agree on the job description (for Mashable’s thorough how-to article on writing a job description, click here). This leads to wasted time and resources, as candidates are interviewed who could have been weeded out if the interviewers had really discussed their must-haves and deal-breakers.

Maybe the HR contact receives a resume and screens a candidate that he or she believes is within the salary range. All seems great, but it is discovered later that the Hiring Manager doesn’t really want to pay as much as the candidate is asking, and this discrepancy is only discovered after an offer is presented! The hours of time invested in such a candidate could have been prevented if better communication had been present.

So hiring teams that don’t communicate well on requirements or compensation potentially create more work for themselves down the road, especially as the growing skills gap raises the demand for qualified professional candidates. I imagine that there are many other areas where better communication can make things, well, better! Let communication between your decision makers be the fuel to move you in the right direction—not a roadblock that causes you to backtrack.

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