Hire with Confidence

How confident are you in your ability to hire people with the right knowledge, skills, and abilities required to do the work you need? How confident are you that your hiring process is supporting your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and not actually working against it? Do you want to level up your hiring skills?

For many of us, we learned to hire simply by copying and pasting another company's ads, questions, and process. Sometimes we find great candidates. Other times we aren't so fortunate. Even more times, it can feel like flipping a coin might produce the same kind of results, and save us a whole lot of time and energy.

What if there was a way to craft a hiring process that aligned with your values AND gave you confidence that those you were hiring had what you needed to move your organization forward? What if you didn't need to just hope for the best? Or hope that you don't have to fire another person? Or hope that they won't leave in less than a year and you'll be back doing this all over again?

What if it didn't have to be this way? What if you could hire with confidence? Confidence that the time and money you dedicate to your hiring process and interactions will yield candidates with the right mix of knowledge, skills, and abilities to contribute to your organization's work, whether your organization has 5 or 500 people? What if you could be confident that your hiring process was working in alignment with your values, not against them?

When approaching hiring challenges, have you ever heard someone say:

• "We just can't find the right people."
• "When I post a job I always get the same kind of candidates."
• "We don't have time to conduct a search process, we needed someone doing the work yesterday!"
• "Everything I know about hiring I learned from watching the movie Office Space, so yeah, I've got this." (Oh, this last one is just me?)

All of this can leave us thinking, there *must* be a better way.

Maybe that "better way" comes from hiring a search firm? Or by attending an executive education program? Maybe.

While there are many great options available, they can be cost prohibitive for a lot of us. Search firms often charge employers north of 30% of the candidate's total annual compensation. Adding routine search expenses, that bill can start at $40,000. Yowza! And executive education courses can cost $3,000+. If you're running a small business or just graduated and now realize your program didn't include a course on hiring, $3,000 can be a heavy lift when every dollar counts.

Well, maybe you can just take your chances and flip that coin? The costs of a bad hire can reach upwards of 30% of the person's first year earnings. Yowza again! And nearly 75% of companies who admit they've hired the wrong person for a position say they lost an average of $14,900 for each bad hire. That's expensive proposition just to end up right back where you started... that is, with less money and still no closer to having someone doing the work.

Hiring Into the Future

Hiring just got a lot more complicated in 2020. The global pandemic created a whole host of changes to the way we work and live. We might've had a great hiring process in February 2020, but now we need to retool it to be virtual, with little interaction in 3D, and that aligns with our newly-stated anti-racism values. How do you build that process to adapt for bias and unintended consequences?

As we come into a new stage of the pandemic, many people are also looking to leave their current employer to better align their personal and professional values. Because of this, it's all the more pressing and important to construct a hiring process that can attract, assess, and onboard the right candidates for you and your organization.

• How can you retool your current hiring process to adapt for virtual interviews, and for workplaces where candidates likely won't be able to interact in 3D with their potential coworkers during the process?
• How does your organization's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion *tangibly* show up in the how your hiring process is crafted? Where is it in the structure you set and in the questions you ask?
• How can you use your hiring process to help "operationalize" your organization's commitment to anti-racism and anti-oppression?

In "Hire with Confidence," we'll explore how you can create a hiring process that's uniquely suited for you and the needs of your organization right now, whether that organization is 5 or 500 people, whether you're searching for seasonal volunteers, board members, or full-time employees. Through the "Hire with Confidence" playbook lessons and challenges you'll work step-by-step to build a bespoke process that works for you and that you can implement today: from identifying the hiring team, identifying the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the role; drafting the job posting, evaluating application materials and interviewing candidates... all through to the person's very first day and curriculum and support you use to set your new coworker up for success.

Join the adventure!