While many people have been busy making their own personal New Year’s resolutions, organizational leaders should also be thinking about setting some key goals for the upcoming year. One goal might be to standardize and improve your employee selection procedures.

This is particularly important if you are leading a small organization and do not have access to the advice of a human resource professional. Standardizing your employee selection processes is also particularly important as a protection against breaking the law.

What are some of the challenges that inexperienced organizational leaders face when they are interviewing candidates? One of the most common issues that interviewers face is the failure to plan interview questions based on the job at hand. This lack of planning often results in questions being asked that are inappropriate and/or are not job related. For instance, asking questions about where an individual candidate grew up or more specifically, asking for data on a candidate’s birthday and/or place of birth are not job related and are therefore inappropriate.

In addition, you cannot ask questions regarding marital or family status, religion, name change, ethnic origin, pregnancy, race, sex, or disability. It is also inappropriate to ask if a candidate drinks, uses drugs, has received psychiatric care or if he/she has been hospitalized for emotional problems or has received workers compensation benefits.  If any of these questions are asked of a candidate, they may well lay a complaint against your organization with the Human Rights Commission.

Another area of challenge for inexperienced interviewers is that of taking notes. If you do not have a specific interview record document there is always the danger that an inappropriate comment will be written onto a candidate’s resume. For instance, comments related to age, race, nationality and/or physical features could once again end up being the basis for a complaint. And if there is a complaint, you will be asked for all documentation related to the search process.

In one situation with which I am familiar, evaluators made derogatory comments regarding a candidate’s age and occupation, as well as making an assumption regarding the candidate’s personal beliefs. When a complaint was made on another related matter regarding the search process and all documents were reviewed, these remarks were discovered and of course, caused the employer a great deal of difficulty as well as some financial pain.

No one wants to find themselves in this position but at the same time, many inexperienced leaders do not know where to start with the recruitment process. It is certainly a lot more complicated than simply creating an advertisement and then interviewing all the candidates. The following basic guidelines will help you to get started toward developing an effective recruitment process.

First of all, start with the job description. Do you have one and if so, is it current? If you don’t have a job description then begin by documenting all of the tasks the new employee will be undertaking, estimate the time spent on each task, the knowledge and expertise required, the types of problems you would wish this individual to solve on their own and which problems you would expect them to consult with a manager. Next, identify the skills and competencies required for the job. Use this information to develop a “candidate profile” and use this profile to create your advertisement.

Create a document that lists all of the skills required and then develop a selection criteria checklist with which to screen the resumes. Only those resumes that meet at least 80% of your selection criteria should be considered. Next, telephone each of these candidates in order to confirm the information on the resume. This gives you an opportunity to assess each individual’s personal communication style. Use the results of this informational interview to determine which candidates you will meet face to face.

Finally, create a set of questions for each of your selection criteria. Be sure that the questions require the respondent to provide examples of how they have used their skills. Their answers will help you to compare what each candidate has to offer.