9 Must Have Hiring Skills For Managers And Business Owners

I have assisted many hiring managers over my years as a recruiter and have seen many good hiring decisions made. I have also seen hiring managers make the same mistakes over and over again, and wonder where did they go wrong.

In this article, I identify and explain 9 hiring and recruitment skills that hiring managers and small business owners need to have. These skills will help any manager succeed at hiring their ideal job candidate.

These skills are:

1. Verbal Communication Skills
2. Social Perceptiveness Skills
3. Rapport Building Skills
4. Ability To Judge People
5. Decision Making Skills
6. Not Being A Perfectionist (Dealing With Ambiguity)
7. Negotiation Skills
8. Planning And Strategic Thinking Skills
9. Being Comfortable With Smarter People

I am limiting this list of skills to those skills mainly needed during the recruitment process. By recruitment process, I mean the whole end-to-end recruitment process, from job applications to the final decision, and not just the job interviews.

Note that although there is some overlap, these skills are NOT the exact same for recruiters. A recruiter will work through the recruitment process with the hiring manager, but may never see the hired candidate ever again. The hiring manager will be the one ‘left holding the bag’ so to speak, so it is in your best interest as a hiring manager that the bag you are holding is a great one.

If you want to learn more about these skills continue reading, or just skip ahead to the skill you are most interested in.

1. Verbal Communication Skills

It should go without saying: if you are looking to employ people, you are going to need verbal communication skills.

In the case of recruitment, verbal communication, both speaking and listening, will probably be the primary means of you getting to know the job applicant. Whether it be an initial phone screening call or a job interview, you will be needing verbal communication skills as a base skill to effectively learn more about the job applicant. The better you know your job applicants, the better you can discern between them and pick the right one for the job.

The bad news is that there is no way around not having this skill. You will have to speak to your job candidate or new hire eventually. So if you think you are lacking in this area, you need to start improving it fast. The good news is that there are so many options and educational outlets to choose from to help you improve your communication skills.

2. Social Perceptiveness Skills

Tying in nicely with verbal communication skills are social perceptiveness skills. Even if you are great at speaking and listening to job applicants, it is of little use if you cannot read them before the recruitment process is finished.

The point of all the rituals in a hiring and selection process are precisely to allow you, the hiring manager, to be able to understand more about the job candidate. You can do this with what is being said, but also with what is not being said.

I’m not just talking about reading body language either, but about reading emotional states and interpreting answers to interview questions. Many times, you can tell what a person really means by not focusing on their words.

An easy example would be a job candidate who says they are “passionate about accounting” in a deadpan voice, without their eyes lighting up, and with a bored expression.

A more sophisticated example would be a job candidate who talks on and on about their achievements; are they really a team player who will celebrate their team’s achievements? Social perceptiveness skills will help you answer these types of questions. Doubts or points of interest highlighted by social perceptions can then be further explored. For example, you could ask a suspiciously self-centered candidate what they thought of teamwork.

Verbal communication is how you get to know the job applicant. Social perceptiveness is knowing what to look out for.

Unfortunately, there isn’t as clear-cut a way to improve your social perceptiveness. The best you can probably do is to get more exposure to social situations in general, and constantly question what you think the other person’s emotional state is.

3. Rapport Building Skills

Also going along with verbal communication skills are rapport building skills. It is one thing to interact with, learn more about, and finally access job candidates, but it’s another thing entirely to get the candidate to like you too.

You will be working with the successful candidate, so it will make sense to get them to like you too. Who knows, they might have applied for half a dozen other jobs too, and you need to stand out in the candidates mind as the one to take up. The recruitment process is as much a way for you to assess the job candidate as it is for the candidate to also assess you and your organization as a place to work for.

The fastest way to do this, given the limited amount of interaction time and reliance on first impressions during the recruitment process is through building rapport. Once a human connection is established, information between the candidate and you can flow better with more trust.

Ultimately rapport building does work both ways. You get the candidate to learn about and hopefully like you, and you get to connect with the job candidate and better understand if they fit your organization.

Just like social perceptiveness skills, rapport building skills don’t have a well-outlined roadmap to skill improvement. Hands-on experience in meeting new people, even in a social setting, will help to improve rapport building skills.

4. Ability To Judge People

Once all the initial communication between you and the job candidates have finished, and all the interview questions have been answered, there will come a time when you simply have to assess and judge your job candidates. You can only hire as many as your budget allows after all.

Broadly speaking, you should be rating your job candidates on some sort of score sheet or scoring criteria. If not, at the very least comparing your candidates with each other.

More specifically, the ability to judge people (technically known as “Judging the Value of Things, Services, or People”) refers to translating the things the job candidates say about themselves, and their answers to your interview questions, into a skills rating.

For example, if the candidate says that they can do tasks A, B and C, then how would their skills in this area look like on a scale of 1 to 10? How would this candidate compare to another candidate who claims they can do A, B, C and also D?

Increasing your ability to judge job candidates increases your ability to assess them and compare them. This in turn directly increases your chances of discerning the best person for the job among your job candidates.

5. Decision Making Skills

Once all the judgments have been assigned to all your job candidates, you will need decision making skills to make the final decision on who to hire. This is a big decision and you potentially have to live with the results of your decision (good or bad) for some time to come.

Oftentimes, you need to make this decision in a limited time frame as you are competing over your preferred candidate with other potential employers. You are also making these decisions with limited information as there simply is not enough time to know everything about a candidate. So, you are essentially making a best guess on who is the best person for the job based on the limited information you have gathered.

Furthermore, you are quite unlikely to get the world’s best, most ideal person for the job, where the choice of who to hire is clear. What is more realistic is that you will have a couple of final candidates with mostly pros, but some cons. You are going to have to decide between imperfect candidates who is going to get the job.

This is where decision making skills come in. The better you are at weighing all the facts, just purely making good decisions, and doing all that in a timely manner, the more likely you are going to end up with a good new hire.

Your recruiter can guide you along the hiring process, but they can’t make the decision on who to hire for you. You are going to have to make that decision and take responsibility for the candidate/new hire the whole time they are working for you too.

6. Not Being A Perfectionist (Dealing With Ambiguity)

As mentioned earlier, throughout the recruitment process you have to make a hiring decision with incomplete information in a limited time. On top of that, you are probably never going to get THE perfect person for the job.

You will get some who seem like they can do well on the job, and some who seem like they will excel at the job, but certainly nobody will be absolutely perfect. Every candidate will have a weakness of some sort, or even a weakness that they are hiding and not showing you during the hiring process.

I have seen hiring managers put too high a standard in their hiring criteria, and end up running through the recruitment process multiple times but not finding their one true job candidate. They were pretty much running in circles at this point.

I think it is far better to just take the best person for the job that you can find in a reasonable time frame, and endure the ambiguity of not fully knowing how this person will turn out, then “performance manage” them once they are working for you. As opposed to leaving the job vacant for a long period of time while tasks and responsibilities sit undone.

7. Negotiation Skills

Once you have offered the job to the preferred candidate, you are not out of the woods yet. The candidate has some say in their job offer and will often want to negotiate the salary or benefits of the job. This is where the often overlooked negotiation skills come in.

Salary negotiations are similar to any other type of negotiations. In this case, the job candidate is the seller of labor and will want the highest price for their services. On the other hand, you as the hiring manager, are the buyer of said labor and will of course want the lowest price possible while still keeping your potential employee happy.

In these negotiations, your bargaining chips are really only the salary and benefits. Salary is pretty much limited to just a number and how high and low that number can go. Benefits have many varieties from simply having more annual leave, to giving company share, to free dental (does anyone still do that anymore?). Benefits allow you to get more creative, although you will need to keep track of all the myriad of perks you give away.

There are few direct way to improve your negotiation skills for recruitment specifically, other than to experience it first hand. Obviously, general negotiation skills are transferable and will help.  

Another way to succeed at employment contract negotiations without really improving your negotiation skills is to come prepared. Indeed has a good write-up about these preparations and tactics.

Basically, you should start by knowing what is the mean/median wage for the job in question, so that you know where you stand in terms of offering a competitive salary. From there work out the lowest salary you can start offering (above minimum wages of course), and the absolute highest you can go. 

After that, assign your benefits a monetary value, and then figure out how these can mix and match with the salary amounts so you will have leeway in the negotiations.

Once the negotiations start, expect a moderate amount of offers and counteroffers. Don’t forget how your offer will stack up compared to those of your other employees. You can act as if employees will gossip and learn each other’s salaries (even if you don’t want them to), and thus offer a salary package equitable in relation to your current staff. Nobody likes “the new guy with a degree” being paid more than an old hat with tons of experience and company-specific knowledge

8. Planning and Strategic Thinking Skills

This skill seems like a departure from the other set of skills listed above. However, throughout the recruitment process, you always need to have the bigger picture and strategy in mind. This is where planning and strategic thinking skills come in.

Strategic thinking is important in recruitment because you need to know if the people you are hiring can match up to and deliver on the strategic goals you have. Sometimes the best person for the job is not the best performer, but someone who has the competencies that align with your goals or vision. Confused? Here is an example.

For example, let’s say you want your team to become more digitized and use more software tools as this makes your team more efficient. Are you going to hire an older, more experienced person, who may not know much about technological solutions and may not be likely to change their ingrained ways of doing things, or, are you going to hire a younger, rather inexperienced person, who may not have in-depth knowledge of the job and responsibilities, but is more tech-savvy and seems to want to grow in their career? 

If you are looking at it from the strategic viewpoint, you might be leaning more towards the young tech-savvy person, even if they are inexperienced, because it lines up with your goals. If you didn’t have strategic thinking in the back of your mind, this could have been a missed opportunity.

This is just one example. There are countless ways that strategic thinking can be applied to recruitment, from thinking of creative ways to structure the salary & benefits package to create an enticing job offer, to thinking about maybe even not hiring people if a robot could do the job instead.

If you are a manager of any kind or a small business owner, chances are that you already have planning and strategic thinking skills to some degree. The challenge here is how to apply it to the hiring process.

9. Being Comfortable With Smarter People

I cheated a little bit here as this is not so much a skill as a mindset. Still, this is a good mindset to have.

You as a hiring manager need to be comfortable with hiring and being around people smarter than yourself. In the words of Guy Kawasaki: “Hire better than yourself”. 

Why hiring smarter? Because the smarter people you hire, the smarter your company becomes as a whole. If you are an A grade manager, then hiring other A grade employees, or even A+ employees when you can grab them, should theoretically boost the performance grade of your work team as a whole.

The problem is that a lot of managers feel jealous, or even threatened, by smarter employees. They might hire an army of “yes men” in the worst case, or hire an army of clones at best. Either way, these work teams will be missing out on valuable talent who have valuable knowledge and skills if the manager only hires “downwards”.

It might seem scary to employ these “smarter people” as they could challenge your authority or start talking and implementing ideas that you do not understand. But if they are doing this from a standpoint of helping the team as a whole, then that is something you are going to start getting comfortable with. 

Ultimately, you will need the self-confidence to know where you stand and where to draw the line while leading these smarter people, and also the trust that when they do bring up a better way of doing things, they are doing so from a point of professional expertise and not malice.

In Conclusion

These are the top 9 skills that, in my opinion, are that any hiring manager or small business owner needs to have. As a recruitment specialist for 4+ years, I hope my opinion counts for something. However, there may be things that I have missed and this is not a be all end all list.

Still, with a good grasp of these 9 must-have skills, your recruitment and selection efforts will improve. At the very least they will help make the recruitment process smoother and easier for you.

The next step will be for you to get out there and start improving these skills.

In the meantime, if you want to know how to become a better job interviewer specifically, then check out my other article on that.

Sources

• https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/employer-salary-negotiation-tactics
• https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_recr-2/
• https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/306705