I always love when we can partner with others in the retail industry to bring great information to our readers. Smart Retailer is thrilled to sponsor its first webinar—a three-part series on Employee Engagement and Retention from One Step Retail Solutions and retail expert Tina Praino of Engaging Retail. The first installment was this morning and everyone who attended received some great tips! Tina is engaging and interesting. So for those of you who missed it, here are my Top 10 Tips from this morning’s Boost My Hiring Process webinar:

1. Build a description of the perfect person for the job; make that part of the job description.

2. Allow the job description to be flexible; include verbiage similar to “duties may change as assigned.”

3. Leverage social networking sites to find good candidates. Today’s younger generation networks digitally in many ways. Consider LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in your search.

4. To find great candidates, print up a business recruiting card that says “Wow! You’ve really impressed me. We’re always looking for good people. Give us a call.” Pass these out to anyone who has delivered great service.

5. Once you receive your pile of resumes, start by weeding out poorly written resumes or poorly completed applications. Do you really want those people on your staff?

6. Use short phone interviews to narrow down the candidates even more. Your time is valuable and you want a workable number of applicants for in-person interviews.

7. When interviewing, use experiential or behavior-based questioning to help find strong candidates for the job, not just those that are good interviewees.  Ask for a specific example of when they participated in something. Have them give you specific dates, tasks and people involved. If they can’t give specifics, they might not be telling the truth.

8. Use consistent questions among all interviewees to avoid possible legal entanglements. If you decide to hire one person over another because that person truly had the appropriate skills, the other person could say they weren’t hired for a certain reason because they weren’t asked the exact same questions.

9. Extend the offer in writing rather than just on the phone, and include verbiage that says the job is contingent on background checks, etc. You don’t want to pay for these expensive checks until you’re absolutely sure you have the right candidate.

10. Finally, be sure to check references, do background checks, review social media sites, and even conduct credit checks if the person will be in a financially-responsible position. It’s amazing how many people hire a person that sounds good initially but then they find that person has a history that repeats itself.

Watch for the next two webinars in this series May 7 and May 14. Click here to register—there’s still time!