Candidate Preparation

Discrimination and Human Rights Legislation

Whether you are operating in Canada, United States or elsewhere you must be aware of the applicable laws against discrimination when hiring.  In this section, the information and examples are based on the laws in Canada.  This is not intended to be legal counsel, as the training programs that help employers prevent discrimination and ensure compliance can be extensive and beyond the scope of this document.  However, in this section I will focus on the common issues that come up in a job interview.  It will be assumed that you are familiar with the applicable discrimination laws that govern your company.  As such, I will look at common questions that typically should be avoided and provide best practice alternatives.

Not only does anti-discrimination practices apply to you but it is a wise idea to see if your client has been provided the necessary  training to hire within the human  rights.  Since if your client asks your candidate an inappropriate question, it will not only create a bad impression for your company but it may also open you up to legal action.

If you are in doubt or have any question, seek advice from your local labour lawyer or contact the appropriate government department for advice.  It is important that you find out which legislation your company falls under (federal, provincial, state) to ensure you meet compliance.  In Canada, most employers fall under provincial legislation but some are under federal jurisdiction and can depend on a variety of factors like industry, whether or not your company provides a interprovincial/international services, and so on.  For example, Canadian Banks, Telecom, and Railway fall under federal legislation. The key is to seek advice and get the right information to ensure compliance and prevent complaints.

In Canada for more information, contact your government human rights officer or visit the Human Rights website.

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Creating and Customizing Behavioral Questions

So how do you create great behavioral interview questions to help you assess and select the right candidate? To help you get started, we have attached a handbook of behavioral interview questions for your convenience. This handbook contains behavioral questions to assess the most common job required competencies like problem solving, communication, conflict resolution and so forth. However, if you want to get the most out of your questions, you must customize the questions for your specific job order and client. So how you customize and target your behavioral questions? Well start with your job description and posting.

“The answer you get depends on the question you ask”

Simply refer to the job description that you’ve already created. Based on the prioritized job and hiring requirements, create your customized behavioral question. I will illustrate with an example below of just how easy it is to create your own customized behavioral interview questions. The assumption here is that you have already created an up-to-date and prioritized job description and posting.

Example:

Suppose your a client asked you to hire an accountant. Based on your discussions with the hiring manager and your analysis of the job, you have identified that the main responsibility is to “perform accounts reconciliation” and the main soft skill are “detail orientation, analytical and problem solving”.

Step 1: Identify a prioritized responsibility from the job posting:

“Perform accounts reconciliation to the general ledger… reconciling various balance sheet accounts to subsystems”

Step 2: Identify a prioritized soft skill identified on job posting:

“Detailed oriented, analytical and proven problem solver”

Step 3:

Find an appropriate behavioral question to assess the competency of problem solving and detailed orientation. You may use one of your own or one outlined in our behavioral questions manual.

“Tell me about a time when you identified a problem before anyone else or your superiors?”

Step 4:

Drawing on your job documents, blend or “contextualize” your behavioral question with your prioritized job function and requirements.

“When reconciling various balance sheet accounts to subsystems: Tell me about a time when you noticed a source of potential loss for a company or identified an undetected financial error before anyone else. What did you do about it?”

You can see that the question created above, assesses the most important competency as identified by the hiring manager (detail orientation, problem solving) through the most important job responsibility again as identified by the hiring manager (accounts reconciliation). By following these steps when creating your job interview questions, you ensure you ask the right question to get the right answer to find the right candidate. And best of all, you use your time wisely by asking the most important questions.

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Behavioral Interview Questions

Behavioral questions are based upon the theory of past behavior. That is past behavior is a good predictor of future job performance. How a candidate handled a situation the past will give a good indication of how they will handle a similar situation in the future. Not only is the world of job interviewing relying on this theory of past behavior, but well-known and established systems like the criminal justice system also relies on this theory.

Behavioral questions are very prevalent in the human resources industry. Studies of shown that this style of interview question is a better predictor of job performance than the traditional job interview question. Behavioral questions ask the candidate to recall a work situation in the past. They are used to assess competencies anywhere from problem solving, tolerance for stress, to risk taking and so forth. Behavioral questions start with phrases like:

• Tell me about a time when…

• Describe a situation where you…

• Given example, when…

Here are some examples of behavioral questions:

• Tell me about a time when your work was criticized?

• Give me an example of when you had to make a decision without all the information and details that you would have preferred.

• Describe a situation where you identified a problem before anyone else?

What’s the difference between a traditional interview question and a behavioral interview question? For example, suppose you were trying to assess competency of conflict resolution. A traditional job interview question would be something like:

“Tell me how you feel about conflict resolution” or “What are the steps in conflict resolution”.

A behavioral question would be phrased as follows:

“Tell me about a time when you had to deal with an angry or abusive customer. How did you handle it?”

Now that we have explained the theory of behavioral interviewing, in our next post, let’s look at how to create your own behavioral interview questions for your specific client and job order.

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How to Get a Sense of Company Culture

In a previous post we talked about how important it is for your candidates to fit into your client’s company culture and to have the right soft skills  So now that we have established the need to understand your client’s culture to make a great placement. Where do you begin to understand your client’s culture? Well, a good way to get a sense of the company culture is to simply ask the hiring manager. Ask the hiring manager to describe the culture at work, and within the team. Ask them how working there differs from other employers they have worked with? What kind of atmosphere do they create at work? Ask them to describe their own management philosophy and style and so forth.

Conduct Site Visits

Another good way to get a sense of the culture is to conduct a site visit. Not only will the site visit help you build stronger relationships with your client, but also it will help you experience the work atmosphere for yourself. The other reason why you need to conduct a site visit is because sometimes the culture and atmosphere the hiring managers perceive is very different than the ones the employee sees. A site visit will allow you a chance to see for yourself the work atmosphere your candidate will be a part of.

Taking a walk through the work area will give you a sense of what it is like to work there. Stop by the employee/union bulletin board and to see what the issues are, and what is being communicated. Is it filled with retirement party and company celebration posters, or is it filled with union and employee grievances? Walk through the employee lunch area. Do employees take their lunch or are they at their desk, working through their lunchtime? All of this will help you understand the company culture and in turn, help you find the right person for this client. At the very least, you will know how to describe the work environment to your candidate when asked. So enough can’t be said about investing time up front to ensure you understand the job, the culture, and qualifications which set the foundation for great hire.

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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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