Collaborative hiring, or the process of soliciting input from your entire team while bringing on a new member, can vastly increase your odds of hiring success. By making this one change, you’ll bring significant benefits to team productivity, ease the transition for everyone, and ensure that the new person you choose and bring aboard represents the best possible match. Here are a few of the specific benefits you’ll gain when you make an effort to bring everyone to the table.

It demonstrates trust and strengthens your existing relationships.

Hiring decisions are essential, and they come with high stakes for the company. If something goes wrong, or you choose a candidate who doesn’t fit in and leaves within a few months, the results can be costly and damaging. That makes it all the more meaningful when you tap your employees and specifically solicit their input and feedback. It shows you trust their opinions and instincts when it counts the most, and it shows that you’re listening and interested in providing them with the resources and support they need.

It helps you home in on cultural matches.

It matters if your new employee gets along with the team, and it matters if he/she doesn’t. So don’t try to size the person up on your own and make wild guesses. Instead, introduce the team and then ask them to provide their assessments. For example, if your culture is driven, cold, and impersonal, your employees may not take well to someone who is warm, collaborative, and here to make friends. The opposite can also be true: a chatty, friendly, laid-back team may not be interested in taking on a self-interested cool customer.

It spreads out a blanket of accountability.

Team decisions may take longer to make than individual decisions, and they may bring higher levels of risk and more moving parts, which increase the number of potential failure points. But they also come with an upside: When everyone takes a small portion of responsibility, no one person has to bear responsibility for the entire process. Both credit and blame and shared, and so are long term outcomes, both positive and negative.

It increases overall flexibility.

When your team has a hand in choosing the new employee, they’re more likely to be flexible and accommodating during the unpredictable early stages of the transition. If they don’t understand the person’s motives or tumble into a miscommunication, they’ll be more willing to ask the right questions and patiently work through the issue. If the new person is thrust upon them, they may be more resistant to change and adaptation.

Merritt will help with your hiring needs!

For more on how to make a candidate selection and onboarding as easy and successful as possible for everyone involved, turn to the staffing pros at Merritt.