When your company is growing, it can be all too easy to get sloppy about your hiring practices. As someone who has worked in the Employee Relations and Payroll Services world for much of my career, I can tell you to slow down and pay attention. The time you save up front will come back to haunt you later.

Inc Magazine had a post about just this subject:

“Four hiring practices of highly successful organizations
The study revealed that the organizations with the most effective hiring policies were more likely to use the following four practices:

• Job interviews in which candidates are asked to describe specific examples of their skills
• Automated resume screening and search
• Assessments that predict whether candidates are motivated by the factors associated with a particular job or a company’s values and ways of doing things
• Simulations that gauge specific job-related abilities and skills

“Organizations should be using the four key hiring practices more, because they make it much easier to find the best candidates,” Burton says. “The current news of layoffs may be creating the illusion that it will be easier to hire good people, but that’s a mistake. It may be easier to get a mound of resumes, but it will continue to be difficult to find the right people for the right job.”