There are many different components to a successful hiring process. There are some people who don’t realize it, but identifying top candidates is a crucial component. After all, if you don’t know who the top candidates are, then how do you expect to hire them? Or to put it another way, if you can’t spot top candidates, then how do you expect to hire them?

That’s what makes identifying the right candidates so important. Because once you identify the right candidates, you can engage them properly and hopefully make an offer of employment to one of them at the end of the process.

And when we talk about identification during the hiring process, we mean at any stage of the process. A hiring manager or practice owner could notice something on a candidate’s resume or they could notice something during a phone screen or face-to-face interview. Or it could be all three of those things. The key is to know what to look for. If you don’t know what to look for, then you’re not going to find it.

The first thing that a hiring manager should look for on a candidate’s resume is a history of being rehired by former employers or being referred by former co-workers, including former bosses. This is a sign that the candidate is not afraid of what former employers will say about them.

Instead, they’re confident that former employers and co-workers are going to say good things about them. This indicates that the candidate provided a tremendous amount of value to past employers and will more than likely provide tremendous amounts of value to future employers.

There are other things that a hiring manager should notice on a candidate’s resume to indicate they might be exceptional. First, the candidate has a number of different roles at the same employer. This means the organization trusted the person to do many different things and also trusted them to increase their skill set to accomplish those things. Trust is a valuable commodity.

Second, the resume shows that the candidate has received a lot of formal recognition. This includes awards or bonuses or any other public form of recognition for achievements. They could be achievements earned in college or in training or achievements on the job, although employment-related recognition should be weighted more heavily.

Third, the candidate has a track record of accelerated growth and learning in terms of technical skills. This means the candidate gets promoted more often and into bigger roles. For another, they’re involved with bigger and more important projects.

Once again, this is because their employers trusted them with more responsibility. Their employers trusted them to perform and come through when it counted the most. That is the very definition of an exceptional employee.

If you’re looking to hire, we invite you to connect with our team today and see what The Doepker Group can do for your organization.

We also invite you to click here to find out even more about the many services that we offer to employers.