Team dynamics play a vital role and therefore need to be considered while hiring. Many firms are taking the right steps by conducting personality assessments to gauge the ability of a hire to work well in teams

Despite all precautions, there is no way to tell accurately whether a new recruit will be able to perform. It is a gamble. To reiterate, the performance delivery of an employee is dependent on so many factors-most important being empowering an employee to take decisions. Delineating the job responsibilities is also a sensitive process. If it is far too complex, it may scare the wits out of the prospects. It is also important to link the job responsibilities with the business goals.
 
Team dynamics play a vital role and therefore need to be considered while hiring. Often, employees who have been in the organisation (where the entrepreneur is at the helm of the affairs for a long time) resist change and can prove to be a bane when the firm's business model changes. Their emotional attachment to the past (and the entrepreneur) will make it impossible for the organisation to move ahead for executing its strategy. This is mostly the case in those organisations that are not process-driven. Such employees may no longer fit in the new scheme of things. The matter needs to be handled with utmost sensitivity. Such employees will have to be retrained. Expectations from them have to be realistic.
 
Candidates are smart nowadays. They are well-informed (thanks to the Internet and social media) and so they use all their ingenuity to overstress their strengths and underplay their weaknesses. Candidates with king-sized egos can find it a bit of a challenge to settle quickly in a new organization. Mr Surendran, a consultant who worked for Personal Search Services, says that candidates who have worked in multinational firms find it difficult to adjust and adapt to the organizational climate in start-ups and Indian firms.
 
Many firms are taking the right steps by conducting personality assessments to gauge the ability of a hire to work well in teams. No employee can afford to bad mouth his present organization in front of his potential employers. However, recruiters can seek honest feedback from candidates about the real reason for leaving. Candidates are well-advised to give honest opinion that is constructive and subtle. For instance-instead of saying that the current organization does not reward talent, a candidate can say that the organization has a policy of not discriminating between performers and non-performers.
 
The values in an organization are greatly dependent on the CEO and his outlook (this is more so, if it is a sole proprietorship firm). Hiring candidates who can meet the long term goals of the organization is a good strategy. If one is focused too much on hiring candidates with similar skill sets, then this may not always lead to a successful outcome. Placing more emphasis on the future is also a step in the right direction. Too many recruiters focus on what the candidate has done in the past. Very few look at what the candidate can deliver in the future.
 
In India, there is a tendency for recruiters/organizations to look down upon people who voluntarily apply to an organization. Recruiting is an on-going process. Even if there is no vacancy, firms can preserve resumes and source them when there is a potential opportunity. The response given to such candidates says a lot about the mindset of the top teams.
 
Use of social media, tapping the information in journals and magazines, sourcing candidates from the membership details of professional organizations, using industry trade shows to spot talent-these are some of the innovative hiring techniques used by some organizations. What a candidate does after office hours is also gaining credence as part of the recruitment process. The locations for conducting an interview are also changing. The days of an intimidating interview panel asking questions to a candidate sitting across the table are over. Informal interviews in coffee shops and restaurants are in. This is a welcome change for sure.
 
Let's end with an interesting story of mindless hiring process that got corrected on the spot. A past president of a Tata Group firm used to tell interviewers "be friendly with candidates and ask relevant questions". He told an instance where as an observer during an interview, he noticed that the interviewer was asking the candidates questions which were not relevant. The interviewer continued to frame some more similar questions that bordered on the absurd. At that time, the president politely asked the candidate to wait outside and informed him that he will be called back. Then he asked the interviewer, "will you please give me the answers that you put to the candidate?"
 
The interviewer was shocked. He did not expect such interruption from president but mumbled "sorry sir". The president patted him and told him to refine his interviewing skills by preparing relevant questions and then called the candidate inside. The reframed questions elicited correct answers and the candidate was selected and became one of the top executives in the company. In this episode, the guidance of the president is to be appreciated.
 
In another instance, a group of supervisors and a HR person were interviewing candidates for the post of fitter, turners and machinists.  The supervisors were happy with the candidates whose basic knowledge was sufficient to get work out of them. But the HR person suddenly asked "who is the prime minister of Sri Lanka?" which baffled the works manager who was observing the procedure. He got up and courteously called the HR person outside the room and told him "If the candidate is so much knowledgeable to know politics and know names of presidents and prime ministers, he could not have stopped from ITI course-the crowd in ITI stream is lower middle class who cannot afford a newspaper. He further said "Am I right in suggesting that to this type of candidates, we will stop short of asking basic technical questions?" The HR person acknowledged the guidance of the works manager.