Candidate Preparation

Why Are Qualified Candidates Bypassed?

When staffing professionals start their search, most often we focus on the “main components”: the education and experience. While this is the basic part of the search, it’s important to understand your clients company culture. Why you may ask? Because, the most common reason a hiring manager bypasses a qualified candidate in an interview is due to “fit”. When a hiring managers simply state a lack of fit they usually mean the candidate will not fit into the culture and the team. Sometimes, they will use the term fit, other times they’ll say they didn’t get the right “feeling” from the candidate, or perhaps they’ll say that they’d make a “connection” with a candidate. Most often when you drill deeper down, all this means that they do not feel the candidate would fit into the culture.

Even if your candidate is hired, are you home free? Absolutely not, because the reason most new employees are terminated, it is not due to a lack of technical skill or experience but again back to the “fit”. The most common reason for terminating a new hire is because they do not fit into the team or organization. And not fitting into the culture often comes from a combination of simply not fitting in and a lack of soft skills.

So it is important for staffing and recruitment professionals to look at the soft skills and assess a culture fit when searching for resources. From HR perspective, this makes sense, because it is always easier to teach technical skill and provide on-the-job training for skills gaps, than to try to change personality traits and culture. For example, if you were asked to hire a sales person for your client in the paper industry. It would be far easier to hire a sales person, who is naturally friendly, outgoing and then provide training on product knowledge rather than higher someone knowledgeable in paper products, but who was very introverted.

To be able to screen for a good cultural fit you must first understand your client’s culture.  In our next post we will cover some ways for staffing and recruitment professionals to get a sense of your client’s company culture.

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