Hiring the right candidate for a position is an incredibly important decision for any company. Candidates are potential employees, employees mean productivity, and productivity means money and success for the company. Therefore, time and diligence should be invested in the hiring process.

One great tip to plan out your interviews is to first determine exactly what you are looking for: what tasks will the potential candidate need to accomplish within the first year? This not only makes it ultra-clear to you what exactly the job entails and what characteristics a candidate needs to possess, but it also creates a bigger, long-term picture of the goals of the company and where you see the candidate standing in that picture.

We are excited to announce that Nikos Livadas has joined Nexxt as Vice President of Strategic Alliances. With more than 20 years of experience as a leader empowering cross-functional teams, developing strategic plans, and implementing successful global sales initiatives, Nikos will head Nexxt’s strategic alliances team to work hand-in-hand with partners towards the shared goal of bringing candidates and employers together.

There has recently been hard debate surrounding generalists vs. specialists and who’s a better fit for your workplace.

The well-rounded truth is: both.

Yes, it’s important to hire workers who fit in well with your team from a cultural standpoint. However, it is possible to overdo it in a sense. Trying to only hire “clones” of your current workforce isn’t the best idea, even if it has been working out for you so far, because you run the risk of missing out on even more qualified candidates, as well as other pitfalls. Take a look at some of the following ways diversification can work wonders for your company, and how choosing to only hire for direct cultural fit can deprive you of such benefits:

The pressure of having a career and a family has become a difficult balancing act for most families. In fact, in 2018, 63 percent of family households with children had two working parents. For that reason, perks for new parents have become an important discussion for most companies. If companies are not able to support working parents and encourage a balance between home and work, they may lose out on a significant portion of the work force.

Hiring skilled employees results in the company making more money, right? Perhaps in the long run, but throughout the hiring process you’ll need to be prepared for some hidden costs that can really add up. Let’s go over some recruitment costs that you’ll want to consider before beginning your hiring process.

Time and money are the easy hiring costs to identify. Dedicated HR staff compensation can be pretty costly per year, and less cost effective for smaller businesses. If your business is too small for a dedicated HR team, you’ll likely need to assign recruitment work to other employees in the office, which eats up time that could be spent on their normal day to day activities. Additionally, creating advertisements for the position takes time and planning, as employee qualifications need to be carefully considered before posting the position. Apart from time, the advertisements themselves can also be upwards of a few hundred dollars per day. If your ad is poorly written, it can deter the right candidates or bring in the wrong candidates, resulting in a longer hiring process in which the ad cost per day really starts to add up. On top of these costs, you’ll also be spending money on any equipment the employee will need, such as laptops, tablets, software, and other supplies.

Nowadays, the workplace is changing.  Jobs are changing, some even becoming “obsolete.” A large part of this flux is due to artificial intelligence being the new normal, increasing productivity and altering traditional job roles.  

More than ever, hiring managers have to look at what positions can be entirely filled with robots, and which can be assisted with the help of AI to produce more and cost less.  This means that who is being hired is being impacted.  The conundrum of AI vs human labor is one that sounds like the plot of a movie.  The evil machines have taken over and people who have years of manual labor experience find themselves jobless and left to fight the big bad robots and the corporations that tossed them aside.  But it isn’t a movie, it’s truly happening, just not necessarily with everyone losing their jobs in the end.  Being conscientious of the use of AI in your workplace and how to hire to utilize it without losing human labor could be a vital step in keeping business booming and people employed.

Finding the best possible candidates for a role in your company is incredibly important, and of course, interviews are crucial for this. And while understanding who to hire lies heavily on the head of the person being interviewed, there are mistakes you could be making that are turning-off exceptional workers. Here are five things interviewers do that candidates can’t stand:

In a job market like today’s, where skilled workers are in high demand and employers are having a hard time filling positions, offering workplace flexibility is something to consider in order to attract top talent.  The idea that flexibility invokes laziness is an old school one and has since been proven untrue. Employees are far more likely to rate their job positively and use their hours productively when they have some control over their schedule. Here are some easy ways you can give your employees the flexibility they want.

Generation Z is the first generation that can barely remember a time before smartphones and the internet. They hold many qualities in common with millennials, but have been greatly influenced by coming of age during the Great Recession. Understanding how these factors make them unique is the first step to understanding how they will change the workplace.