With 46 percent of all new hires failing in their first eighteen months, evaluating your hiring and onboarding process for the coming year is time and money well spent. As the New Year approaches, making a personal resolution to hire better can reduce employee turnover and save you money. Here are four ways to step up your hiring game.

1. Know what you need
   Very often companies haven’t fully defined what they are looking for in an open position. By understanding what the position truly entails, you will be better positioned to hire candidates with a greater chance of long-term success. Hiring the right candidate the first time around limits employee turnover and ultimately saves you money.
2. Look for fit with existing team
   Hiring for skill is necessary to make sure work gets done, but knowing the social requirements of a position is equally important. Getting a true sense of a candidate’s values and integrity is important and aids in establishing a company culture conducive to achieving great things. For certain positions, skills can be acquired on the job. Personalities on the other hand, are much harder to change and can be a catalyst for unnecessary friction.
3. Diversify your search
   In Hawaii, nearly half of all businesses claim word of mouth and/or referrals as the source of their new hires. Though there is some comfort in receiving a referral for an open position, referrals aren’t always the best choice. Hiring family members or friends of friends can also impact your company’s culture in unanticipated ways. Diversifying your search and utilizing everything from online job boards to local staffing companies to get an accurate sampling of the talent available is necessary to ensure you find the right candidate.
4. Be creative
   The hiring process is disliked and stressful for both employers and employees. Reimagining the hiring and interview process might just lead to a new way of finding the right people for your positions. Starting an interview in your office and continuing it with a walk to a coffee shop allows you to see the candidate in different situations. Bringing the candidate a real or fictitious problem your business is facing and asking them to come up with a quick solution tests your candidate’s creativity and also demonstrates a level of trust and willingness to elicit feedback. Challenging the candidate with a pointed comment or question to see how they respond—for example, “I’m not sure this position is a good fit for you,”—can all help you to see what your candidate is made of.

By widening your search net and making efforts to truly understand a candidate, we here at Real Jobs hope your 2017 will be one of continued success, happiness, and fruitful hires.