Finding the right candidate for your company is never easy. Not only that you have to make sure that the person you hire can help you lead your company to success, but you also need to find someone who’s going to represent your brand in the way you want them to. And if you lack experience as an interviewer, you may not always be able to recognize such a candidate. That said, we have come up with five tips that can help you choose the right candidate for your company.

Find a career-oriented person

When running a business, you need to have someone who shares your ambition by your side and that’s why hiring a career-oriented person is recommended. If a candidate has switched a lot of jobs recently, it means they’re not sure what they really want to do and chances are they won’t be staying with you for long. Therefore, looking for someone who will view the job in your company as a way to advance their career is a good idea.

Look for the right skills

Think about the position a candidate is applying for and make sure they have all the right skills for it – simple as that. Of course, the skills you’ll be looking for depend heavily on the work they will be doing. For example, if you’re hiring an employee for your customer service team, you might want to look for someone who’s polite and talkative. And in case you’re hiring a manager, you need someone with good leadership and decision-making skills.

Run social media checks

We all use social media and platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be a great tool for running a background check on your candidates. Sometimes, a candidate’s tweets and photos might just be able to tell you whether they’ll fit in at your company. Some people keep their social media profiles private, but it’s worth taking a shot. If a candidate has a LinkedIn profile, you can use it to check whether everything in their resume is true.

Run background checks

While social media can help you determine what kind of person a candidate is, there are more background checks you need to run before hiring someone. Firstly, you need to contact their previous employers and check whether everything in their resume is true. Once you do this, you might also want to get a police clearance certificate for any candidate you wish to hire. That way, you’ll ensure you don’t hire anyone who can hurt your company’s reputation.

Make sure they fit in

When hiring, you always need to make sure you opt for someone who’s a good cultural fit for your company. This means you need to find someone whose social skills aren’t going to disrupt the atmosphere in the office. Ideally, you’ll find a candidate who can add to it. This is where you’ll want to ask interview questions that’ll help you figure out whether a candidate is prone to conflicts at work. Talking to their former employers about it should also do the trick.

With these five tips in mind, you should be able to choose just the right candidate for your company. Even once you make your final decision and hire someone, keeping a close eye on them during the first couple of weeks is an absolute must.