The hiring process is a complex sequence of steps taken on by the human resources department and middle management. Therefore the hiring process is not limited to the discretion of a single person. In order to overcome the obstacles associated with hiring, it takes a collaborative and committed effort.

If you genuinely want to find and hire the right candidate, you need to conduct preliminary research and be prepared to talk to a lot of people before you find the person suitable for the position. However, there are several psychological tips and tricks aimed at easing and expediting the process.

Follow these four tips below to have greater success in the hunt for the right candidate.

Be Specific

The first thing that can be done is to define the job description. Aligning your job description with the skills sought after will draw in the candidates that possess the skills in question. At the same time, if you fail to match your job description accurately, you could end up losing the right candidate simply because they do not see themselves suitable for the position. Hence, it is important that you work on getting your requirements right and straight to the point.

Remember, people tend to interpret everything they see through the prism of their own personality and experience, which means ‘a great team worker’ could mean thousands of different things to different people. When designing a job description, try to eradicate as much ambiguity as possible.

Use Job Satisfaction as Your Prime Factor

Over the last decade, job satisfaction, in particular, has become the central point of attraction to the best workers regardless of the industries they work in. Therefore, if you are interested in recruiting the top performers, you should focus on making job satisfaction the main attraction of your job ads. They need to be compelling and clearly highlight the position that you are able to offer in exchange for the excellent skills of a true professional. According to Lou Adler, ‘Job satisfaction is the primary driver behind how and why people look for new opportunities’.

At last, once you have met your ideal candidate and want to convince them to sign a contract with your company, it is essential that you make them interested in your offer. In order to do that, drive the conversation away from financial compensation and redirect towards job satisfaction.

Avoid Falling into the Interview Pitfalls by Diversifying Your Usual Questions

If you want to ensure that your candidate is genuine, dismiss the traditional questions. Instead, diversify your usual array of questions with some extra-ordinary requests that would show you the true personality of the person you are interviewing.

Try to strike your candidates with questions that they have not rehearsed in advance, so they act naturally. After all, you do not have to necessarily use the ‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years?’ question to see whether your candidate is ambitious or not. Instead, you could ask them adjacent questions that would help you to get an even more coherent and comprehensive picture.

A great way of testing your candidates’ interpersonal skills is by asking them questions based on associations. For instance, why not question what animal they associate themselves with? What might sound like a silly question at first is actually quite insightful. Different animals are associated with different personality traits, so you can gain some insight into their personality type.

On top of that, it is advised that you structure your interview in the form of a conversation as opposed to an interrogation. If you engage in casual small talk and give your candidate a chance to relax first, you will end up getting to know them better. Perhaps, include some anecdotes from your work life to make them less stiff and show them that you are a real person, too. That way they will be more trusting toward you and be more likely to perform true to their real abilities.

Strive to Avoid Cognitive Bias When It Comes to Making a Decision

The human brain is an extremely intricate thing and scientists are still not entirely sure about how it works. What is known, however, is that we are innately subject to a number of different types of cognitive bias.

The most common types of bias that are intrinsic to recruiters include the following:

• Anchoring bias (being too reliant on the information that was received first)
• Primacy and recency effects (you tend to remember the first and last candidates that you looked into better than the rest of them)
• Confirmation bias (it is normal for people to look for information that supports our existing beliefs)
• Salience bias (you tend to use available characteristics to judge a person or a situation)

As you can see, there is a whole array of different factors that can prevent you from making an unbiased decision and hire the right candidate. Therefore, you need to do everything possible to minimize the aforementioned biases and choose the person objectively.

Some of the best ways to tackle this problem would be by asking someone else to assist you in the hiring process so you could compare and contrast your opinions on the candidates.

On top of that, it is also useful to record your thoughts straight after the interview in order for them to be fresh and unaffected by the subsequent interviews. After that, you can go back and review those notes again.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, a lot of these tips are aimed at making it easier for the recruiters to get a better understanding of the candidate’s personality and give them a fairer assessment based on who they are and whether they will fit into the team well.

If you use one of the tricks and tips laid out above, or even combine several of them, you will get a better insight into the characters of the candidates to apply to your jobs, and therefore be more successful in hiring the right candidate!

Author Bio- Lilian O'Brien is a passionate journalist who enjoys writing about psychology and human relationships. Over the course of her career, she was a regular contributor to major media publications, and currently, she serves as an editor for onlinechatdatingsites.com.