Candidate Preparation

The quality of candidates you send to your clients is determined by sourcing quality candidates as well as the validity and reliability of your candidate evaluation methods.  Again, why is this important?  Because ultimately, the quality of your candidate represents the quality of your staffing company and your work as a recruiter to your client.

In our last posts, we provided recruitment tips and covered easy to implement methods that staffing agencies can use to evaluate a job interviews.  In this post, we are going to discuss the common errors made by interviewers when evaluating their candidates.  The interviewer errors below come from my experience guiding hiring managers in interviewers, debriefing with hiring managers as well as agency recruiters.

Evaluation Traps

As interviewers, we all strive to be an impartial, fair and consistent. However, as unprejudiced as you may be, we all have our biases that might influence the way we evaluate our candidates. So how do we ensure we are not negatively influenced by our own personal views? The first step is to be mindful of common interviewer mistakes made when evaluating candidates. Below are a few very common mistakes made when rating interview responses.

Leniency – This is the “Mr. Nice Guy” interviewer who gives high scores to every candidate on every competency. The problem with this type of evaluator is it is difficult to distinguish between candidates. The truly strong scores are not evident with this method.

Strictness - This evaluator is what I like to call “Mr. Stingy”. He is the opposite to the “Mr. Nice Guy”, in that he gives every candidate a low score. With this type of evaluator not only is it difficult to distinguish between all the low scores but they often want more candidates cause the ones they evaluated were “all bad”.

Extreme - This evaluator is a combination of the “Mr. Stingy and Mr. Nice”. This evaluator is extreme by only giving really high scores or really low scores.

Central Tendency - This interviewer rates everyone as medium. He is what I like to call “Mr. Fence Sitter” because he likes to stay in the middle.

Similarity - We tend to like those who appear sound look like ourselves. So as an interviewer, be aware of this trap and be open-minded to candidates that may not be similar to yourself.

Halo Effect - This is when we one rating influences the way we rate all other areas. For example the candidate impresses us in one area and then we rate them positively on all other areas. This can also go the other way, where the candidate freezes on the first question and then we rate the candidate poorly in other areas. This kind of error comes from interviewers who make the following logic mistake “if I scored her excellent in leadership, then she must have good communication skills too”.

Attractiveness - Quite simply, we rate attractive people more positively. Unfortunately “packaging” does influence our decisions. But choosing a customer service person who is attractive but has poor communication, conflict resolution skills or with no empathy is a recipe for disaster. This is not a model search, this is an interview.

As mentioned, the first thing you can do to prevent these common evaluation mistakes. Additional preventative steps you can take are to ask each candidate the same interview questions. By asking your candidates the same questions you can more easily make an “apples to apples” comparison.

Another tip for recruiters and staffing agencies is to periodically take a look at your average score awarded over time and compare them against the interview team’s average. Doing this will help you identify your potential scoring patterns as well as repeat offenders.

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