Employees are and have always been the backbone of a business. Your employees are the ones who help your business blossom, but unfortunately, there are always a few candidates that slip through the interview process that will make it wilt. Interviewing is much different now than it used to be, and there are a variety of tools available that help make it possible. Instead of just having a sit-down conversation with a candidate, you can now instantly access their personal life (through social media such as Facebook), their work history and their contacts (through LinkedIn or job hunting sites). It might seem like a tedious step, but there is a litany of reasons why vetting your future employees is so important.
Think of the last interview you held. You received their resume, gave them a call, and decided to bring them in. Then you spend an hour or two going over their history and future goals and get to know them a little bit. In that hour or two, you might think that you get a good feel for who this employee is as a person and whether or not they’ll be an asset to your company – but you’re really not. The interview is a time for that individual to put on their absolute best face in the rat race that is employment hunting. Sure, they might have accomplished a massive sales goal in their last position but did they also mention that they spent 4 hours of each day chatting it up at the water cooler? Probably not.
With vetting your future employees, you can find out infinitely more than you can from a face to face interview. Vetting employees is a process, and fortunately, there are great companies who specialize in it to help you out, but the basics of it are that you’re trying to find out what potential employees are not telling you. By checking out their social media (something that nearly 30% of recruiters do), you get to see if they spend their free time harping on their management or company online or volunteering at local charities. By looking into their work history and talking to a friend of a friend or a former colleague, you can see whether or not they actually put 110% into their work (and aren’t just telling you that they do).
In our experience, vetting potential employees prior to making an offer, or even setting up a formal interview, will save you time and money in the long run. Calling a reference and finding out that your candidate was actually let go for drinking on the job instead of the layoff they had told you could be the difference between an employee that helps your company, or one who causes headaches.
To learn more about vetting, contact us at (702) 827-3800.