Get Advice from Leading Household Staffing Expert Aleksandra Kardwell on Making Great Domestic Hires That Last
Developing a Clear Picture of Your Ideal Household Staff Member – the Key to Successful Household Staffing
Excerpt from Chapter 2.
One of the most valuable things that you can do to find the right household employee for your unique needs and preferences is to carefully think through exactly what you’re looking for at the very start of your employee search. This single factor — clearly defining what you’re looking for for the domestic position at hand — is, perhaps, the key element that leads to successful household staffing.
As simple as it may sound, the failure to properly define what and who is needed is one of the leading causes of frustration, unnecessary expense, and failed employer-employee matches. By being clear on your household position’s requirements and the type of domestic employee you want, you will massively increase your chances of finding a great person who will stay with you for years to come.
For example, if you have a primary and a secondary residence, and you’re looking to hire a House Manager who will travel to your secondary residence and work there seasonally on weekends, then you would want to find someone whose profile includes a willingness to travel between residences and a willingness to work on weekends. A House Manager with otherwise great experience but obligations or preferences that preclude travel and weekend work would not be a good fit for the position at hand. While this may seem like an obvious point, it is more common than one might think for details such as those just described to be improperly covered, especially during initial interviews.
Key Household Staffing Job-Related Questions to Ask Yourself
So, what exactly should you do to get clear about who and what you need? Hiring and Keeping the Best People by Harvard Business School Press offers sound advice on what questions to ask yourself to successfully gain clarity. Since Hiring and Keeping the Best People is focused on business hiring, I’ve modified the questions to make them applicable for domestic hiring.
- What are the main responsibilities and tasks required for the household job?
- What experience, skills, abilities, and education are necessary?
- Which personal characteristics are you seeking? Do you need someone who is hands-on, detail-oriented, classically trained, etc.?
- How would you characterize your household’s culture? Is it formal or informal, structured or more open?
- What is your personal management style (e.g., authoritative, consultative, participative, etc.), and what sort of person would be able to work best in the job given that style?
Three Strategies to Help You Determine the Household Employee to Hire
The late business staffing expert Robert Half recommended a number of sound strategies in his book, Robert Half on Hiring, and I believe his ideas apply equally well to domestic hiring. Three of the most powerful strategies to help you determine who would be best suited for your household job are listed below.
Identify two or three characteristics that you believe are most essential to a candidate’s ability to do the job well. By determining in your mind the key characteristics required, you’ll help yourself to stay focused on what’s most important during the domestic hiring process.
Identify two or three negative aspects of the job, and then think about what sort of individual could best handle them. Examples of what might be considered negative aspects (at least for some candidates) include a requirement for occasional night work; a requirement for six-day work weeks with long hours; and the need to travel to multiple residences throughout the year.
Think about past high-performers. If you were happy with the last household employee (or the last couple of people) in the position you’re looking to fill, then it’s a good idea to determine what, specifically, led to their good performance. Then, note these characteristics at the top of your requirements list. Of course, it’s important to guard against trying to find a clone of a successful former employee; you may be left searching for a replacement for a long time.
Super Predictors of On-the-Job Success
Assuming the domestic candidates on your shortlist each have the core experience, skills, abilities, and intelligence required for the job at hand, what factors should you look at most closely to optimize your chances of making a great, long-term hire? With the myriad factors available for assessing candidates, wouldn’t it be enormously valuable to know which ones you should think about most? Fortunately, current research can point us in the right direction.
Proven Tips for Reviewing and Evaluating Resumes for Domestic Staff Candidates
Excerpt from Chapter 5.
Resumes are usually the key written piece of information available to you to evaluate each domestic candidate, and it can sometimes be easy to lose sight of what exactly you’re looking for. Harvard Business Review’s Hiring an Employee notes that the three key things to remember as you’re screening applicant resumes are:
- A candidate’s past job performance is a strong predictor of their future job performance. Psychologists generally agree that past behavior is a good basis for forecasting future behavior.
- Together, the right experience; the right skills and abilities; the right personal characteristics (e.g., positivity and accountability); and the right overall fit for your household’s culture make for a good match.
- Be on your guard against aiming to hire somebody just like you, i.e., what psychologists call the “similar-to- me” bias. Instead, seek to find someone who is right for the particular position you need to fill (this point is relevant for managerial level and administrative domestic roles).
Challenges in Evaluating Resumes to Get to the Truth
The challenge when screening resumes is that they often don’t provide accurate representations of potential employees; rather, resumes can be viewed as job-seeker marketing pieces. In addition, it can feel tedious to read through stacks of resumes. As you read a resume, try to look past the surface information to get closer to what’s really going on. The unfortunate reality is that resumes often contain inaccurate information and/or leave out information that would be helpful for you to know (and that does not reflect favorably upon the applicant).
In a 2015 survey by the employment website CareerBuilder of more than 2,500 hiring managers, the survey’s authors found that 56% of hiring managers have caught lies on applicant resumes. It seems that the most common lie is the embellishment of skills or abilities. Upwards of 62% of the survey participants indicated that they came across such embellishment. Moreover, 54% of the hiring managers surveyed said that they found candidates misrepresenting the scope of their prior work responsibilities. About one-quarter of the hiring managers even came across applicants who indicated that they worked for employers for whom the applicants never actually worked.
Using Red Flags to Avoid Domestic Hiring Mistakes
You can gain a clearer picture of candidates by being aware of potential red flags as you evaluate applicant resumes. Here’s a list of common red flags that I recommend looking out for as you evaluate candidate resumes:
- Jumping from job to job (i.e., a pattern of short-term employment)
- Gaps in work history
- Lack of a logical work progression (i.e., a pattern of flitting about in different fields)
- Excessive self-promotion (i.e., “I’m a visionary house manager”)
- Poor overall resume structure and presentation (most relevant for managerial and assistant positions)
- Overly specific resume file names (i.e., “John Smith Houseman Resume” vs. “John Smith Resume” — in this case, John Smith may have experience that’s all over the place).
Have Two Different Staff Members Review Resumes
For household employers who rely on hiring staff to select their household employees, I highly recommend, when possible, having two different staff members review applicant resumes