Candidate Preparation

How many fantastic candidates have you found that looked like a sure deal until a surprise counter-offer or concern blindsided you?  In this post, we will provide recruiter tips on how to uncover and address candidate concerns.

In the recruitment and staffing industry, it is important to look ahead and prepare for the unexpected.  During your interview, it is beneficial to uncover any potential concerns from your candidate about the opportunity and provide clarification where needed.  You may do this by probing your candidate to find out if they have any concerns and determine what they are looking for in their next job/employer.  Some questions you may ask here include:

“Tell me what was the main reason why you left your previous position/employer?”

“What are some of the reasons causing you to look for other opportunities”

“What are you looking for in your next job?”

“When you review this opportunity, what concerns or reservations do you have with this job?”

“How long have your been dissatisfied at work?”

“What have you done  to resolve your sources of job dissatisfaction”

A good recruiter is often a good talker but a great recruiter is always a great listener. Once you understand your candidate’s concern and needs, you may better address them.  So for example if your candidate left her previous employer because she felt it was a dead-end job, it would be time to describe the growth and career development opportunities offered by your client.  Career development can include formal and informal opportunities.  Things like training programs, special project work, mentoring programs, tuition and education reimbursements and so on all fall under the career development topic.

It is a good idea to have an employer fact sheet made up for each of your clients with points of interest for potential candidates.  Things to include on this fact sheet can include employer awards, environmental position, community involvement, HR programs and so on.

If your candidate cites inadequate compensation as the motivator for leaving or looking for new opportunities, then you must be aware that such a candidate might be susceptible to counter offers.  The same applies if your candidate indicates that the source of job dissatisfaction is relatively new and if they have done very little to resolve the issues.  We will discuss counter offers and how to handle them in more detail in the next section.

While it is tempting to be want to think short-term and make a placement, it is important to help your candidate make the right decision for them whether or not this means you make a placement.  Putting your candidate first and being their career advocate and counselor will help you build long term success with both your clients and candidates through referrals and repeat business.  Successful recruitment and staffing companies know this and for this reason, clients and candidates choose to do business with them.

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Why spend our hours searching for the best candidate, only to send them to clients unprepared. Click on continue in demo below to find out how EmployPrep software can help you.

In this post, we will discuss how recruiters can close of the job interview. Closing the interview well is important since it leaves a lasting positive impression on candidates.   As such, we have provided some recruiter tips on how to close an interview effectively.

When you feel like you have obtained all the information that you’re looking for it’s time to close the interview will.  At this point it is important that you give the candidate a chance to ask you some questions.  The biggest turnoff for a candidate is to be grilled with questions for an hour and then only given a minute to ask questions.  So leave adequate time for questions.  Remember that your candidate is making very big decision that will impact his or her life.

As an interviewer, here is where you have to do your homework.  You must be prepared to answer your candidate’s questions.  This means you should know something about what makes working for your client special.  In addition to understanding the total compensation (based and variable pay, benefits, time off, etc.) You must also know something about the clients employee programs.

Employee Programs and Initiatives like:

Job shares, flex-time, educational reimbursements, compressed work weeks, training programs, developmental opportunities, exercise facilities, and so on.

To sell your client to your candidate, you need to be up to date on company news and information.  For example, has your client won any awards recently?  Do you have any examples of community involvement and environmental responsibility?  More than ever, corporate social responsibility is playing an increasingly greater role in our decisions as consumers as well as potential employees.

Your candidate is making a big career decision and it is your job to provide them with the information they need to make an informed decision.  Doing this will not only benefit your candidate, but will help your client prevent a bad hire due to poor fit.  Successful recruitment and staffing agencies understand the importance of providing long-term value over a quick placement

.

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Why spend our hours searching for the best candidate, only to send them to clients unprepared. Click on continue in demo below to find out how EmployPrep software can help you.

Setting the Tone

How you as a recruiter begin the job interview is very important since it sets the tone for the rest of the interview.  A good opening allows the candidate to feel relaxed enough to provide you the information you need to assess their fit for the job.  In this post, we will focus on recruiter tips on how to start an interview with a good opening statement.

Opening Statements

Good recruiters prepare opening statements before they interview the candidate.  Opening statements are statements that you begin the interview with.  It helps frame and focus your interview.  It also helps create a professional atmosphere and will help put your candidate at ease since in your opening statement you will explain the interview process.  Here is an example of an opening statement:

“So how do you feel about getting started?  Well my role here at ABC Professional Staffing is Senior Recruiter, I have been in the staffing industry for 15 years and  with ABC for 5 years specializing in information technology.  As you know today, I am here to interview your for the role of Web Developer for my client, a high profile employer in the Video Game Industry.  I would like to spend the first 5 minutes just getting to know you a bit better.  I would like to hear more about your background, education and experience.  In the next part of the interview, I will ask you some questions to get specific examples of  what you have done.  To allow me to determine job suitability for my client, I will need you to help me by making sure that you give me specific examples of things that have actually happened.  You can take your time when thinking of an example and if you get stuck just let me know and we can skip that question and circle back.  If have any questions about the position, I would be glad to answer them at the end of the interview, so I will make sure to leave enough time for that.  I will be taking notes during this interview because I am really interested in your background and it will help remind me later of your qualifications.”

Interview Not Interrogation

Last but not least, the most important element in creating an environment where your candidate can be comfortable and relaxed is you!  Over the years, I have interviewed with many hiring managers and others in the recruitment and staffing business

and have witnessed tremendously different interview styles.

Beverages, air conditioning, and comfortable chairs are meaningless if you do not create a warm and welcoming environment with your personality.  Be aware of your own body language.  Are you leaning away, distracted, and looking else where?  Are you making eye contact and smiling?  Interviewing is tiring and after a full day of interviewing, it’s hard to be high energy and friendly for that last candidate but it is so important.  Some hiring managers and recruiters I have worked with interview are more like interrogators.  Rather than looking for evidence of how the candidate is qualified and evaluating, these interviewers are more focused on looking for a reason to demonstrate how the candidate is not qualified.  These interviewers are mistrustful by nature  and are more focused on looking for inconsistencies rather than getting the information needed to evaluate.  I call these “hard interviewers”, while in some industries like policing this might be acceptable and even purposeful, I find you will get better results when your candidate is relaxed.  So remember the candidate is nervous enough as it is, it is your job to do what you can to help them feel at ease.

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Why spend our hours searching for the best candidate, only to send them to clients unprepared. Click on continue in demo below to find out how EmployPrep software can help you.

Before going forward with your candidate job interview, here are a few tips for recruiters to keep the following in mind:

Comfortable Setting

When setting up the interview be “candidate friendly”.  If possible, try to accommodate your candidate.  The days of candidates thankful to get an interview, begging for a job are over (especially with the star candidates).  Remember, your candidate has likely taken a day off work or has come in to see you on his or her free time.  So try to be flexible and accommodating with your interview times and locations.  Find out about your candidate’s commute, and offer to meet at a halfway point.  Find a coffee shop and conduct your interview over a couple coffee.  Not only is this a candidate friendly practice, but you may also find that you get better interviews from a relaxed candidate in neutral setting.

Another recruiter tip is to consider location.  Whether you are conducting the interview from your location or a coffee shop, it is important to pay attention to the environment.  Take note of the light, heat, seating, and so on and make the necessary adjustments to ensure a comfortable interview climate.  A comfortable candidate will interview better give you a better chance of finding the right talent.

Always make sure that you have water, coffee, tea, or some beverage to offer your candidate.  Many candidates already feel nervous in an interview, along with a lot of talking creates for a very thirsty candidate with a very dry mouth.  Again the goal is to make the candidate feel comfortable and at ease.  So that they can provide you with information that you are looking for.

Opening the Interview - Setting the Tone and Building Rapport

A key to a successful interview is starting it off right.  How you open the interview is very important as both the things you say and don’t say sets the ground rules for the rest of the interview.

Tips for Recruiters to Build Rapport

The best way to build rapport is smile, maintain eye contact, and listen actively.  You can build rapport by listening actively.  This shows the candidate that you are focused on them and what they say matters to you.  Empathy and active listening is very effective in getting a nervous and quite candidate to open up.  However, it can also cause the candidate to provide more information than is needed and take up valuable interviewing time.

“Why did you leave your previous job?”

Candidate:

I have been in the same position and level for 7 years and it was time for a change.   It was a dead end job.

Recruiter:

It sounds like you felt that you felt stuck and saw no career and developmental opportunities there.

Extrapolate career goals based on your candidate’s values:

I get the sense that you really value career growth in a job.  Describe the kind of change you are looking for in your new job.

By following these recruitment tips, you will not only facilitate more dialogue with your candidate but also get the information you need to assess candidate-job fit.

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Why spend our hours searching for the best candidate, only to send them to clients unprepared. Click on continue in demo below to find out how EmployPrep software can help you.

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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Why spend our hours searching for the best candidate, only to send them to clients unprepared. Click on continue in demo below to find out how EmployPrep software can help you.