8 Accurate Ways to Assess Your New Hire’s Performance
Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you’d like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
Today’s Question: How do you gauge a new hire’s success during their first three months on the job ?
The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.
1. See If They’re Taking Initiative
That’s the No. 1 thing I look for: Is the hire taking steps toward the changes they talked about making during their interview? It doesn’t have to be a full program implementation, but it does have to be a different, more thoughtful way of approaching the challenges of their work. Otherwise, I worry I’ve hired a dud.
In order for a new hire at Aligned Signs to be successful, it has to be about give and take. It is our responsibility to lay out the role, responsibilities, and authority the new hire has. It is their responsibility to make sure they are clear on what is conveyed. Usually, we can tell early on that it’s a good fit if the new hire is engaged, actively asking questions, and proactively addressing milestone tasks.
As you bring new people into your business, a good sign that you are hiring successfully is how often you have to second-guess and worry about what work is getting done. The best hires will get to work and deliver results on time. Those whom you have to continually ask after and hover over are likely bringing in more problems than they are worth.
As a marketing agency, a big part of our business is to track where all of our hours are spent, so we have a lot of data about how much time certain tasks typically take. If someone’s taking much longer than that — or, if their work is resulting in others needing to spend much more time on editing and oversight — we know early on that it’s not a good fit, much as we might like the employee.
The best way to track a new hire’s progress is to put an onboarding plan in front of them from the start. Start with the key tasks that they need to be able to accomplish on the job. Define the metrics you will be using to evaluate their success. Then set a timeline and goals and ask the new hire to be accountable to this plan.
Assuming the work they employee is doing is sufficient in both quality and quantity, I look closely at how they interact with the other people in my business. Are they meshing well with office culture, or do they seem like they’re an outsider? Do coworkers enjoy the new hire’s company, or do they go out of their way to avoid them?
Whether it’s in person or via Slack, I can tell whether someone is contributing to our overall success based on the questions they’re asking and the comments they’re making. If they are genuinely concerned and interested in how we do business, why we exist as a company, and in our objectives, it will show in how they interact with me and everyone else on our team.
