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Are You Masking Your Hiring Process Problems with the Wrong Solutions?

By Lou Adler, August 23, 2007

Just about every corporate recruiter has too many requisitions to handle as effectively as possible. The problem is magnified when good candidates get excluded for dumb and preventable reasons, generally weak interviewing skills on the part of the hiring manager or a candidate who wasn't at his or her best. Sometimes good candidates are excluded before they're even seen because they don't have exactly the right background. Sometimes good candidates pull themselves out to of the process because the job doesn't seem interesting or the candidate didn't like the hiring manager. Few companies address these problems directly--instead they avoid them, focusing most of their energy and resources on hiring more recruiters or developing new sourcing ideas. This is comparable to buying more raw materials than necessary for a factory that has an excessive scrap rate rather than fixing the scrap problem.

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

Interview Training, Interviewing, Newsletter, Recruiter Training, Recruiting, Sourcing

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With this in mind, here are few ways to eliminate good candidates from being thrown in the scrap heap:

Get Everyone to Agree to Real Job Needs: When you take your next search assignment ask the hiring manager to create an employee value proposition (EVP). An EVP describes why a top person would take the job despite the potential of a big counter-offer or competing offers for more money. A good EVP summarizes the challenges, projects, growth opportunities, learning experiences, and the type of work that needs to be done. The written form of this should be so interesting that just reading it compels the candidate to apply. It must also clearly describe real needs and clarify job expectations. Getting everyone on the interviewing team to agree to this job summary establishes a common framework to assess competency, motivation, and fit. This alone will eliminate hiring mistakes attributed to interviewers who aren't aware of real job needs. Here are some other articles on preparing performance profiles which will help get you started.

Shift the Criteria for Seeing a Candidate from Experience to Comparable Results: Use the EVP and performance profile instead of the job description as the basis for presenting candidates to your hiring manager clients. Since the performance profile lists the expected results, just ask your clients if they'd see candidates who have achieved comparable results even if they were a bit short on the qualifications. Most will quickly agree. Not only will your hiring manager clients see more of your candidates using this technique, they'll also be seeing stronger candidates who better fit their real needs. To determine job fit based on results ask candidates to describe their most significant accomplishments and the results achieved during the screening interview. To ensure that 100% of your candidates are seen you'll need to document these with facts and details to offset any lack in experience.

Don't Take "No" for an Answer: Don't let good candidates get away without a fight. Most good candidates pull out of the process too soon without all of the appropriate information. Recruiters can reduce this problem by clearly understanding the EVP and the performance profile. Then when a candidate says they're not interested in pursuing your opportunity, quickly suggest that they might be making a long-term decision using short-term information. This will get them to at least listen to your offer. Here are additional articles on applicant control you might want to read to make sure you never again lose a good candidate simply because the person didn't have time to talk.

Neutralize Personal Biases to Force Objectivity During the Interview. Most managers make quick emotional or intuitive decisions based on first impressions and gut feelings. Delaying the yes/no decision as long as possible will eliminate many of these types of hiring mistakes. One way to do this is to objectively and formally measure first impressions at the end of the interview, and then compare this to the initial first impression. Telling your managers ahead of time about a candidate's marginal first impression also helps neutralize the problem. Using a structured interview with pre-written questions is another way to increase objectivity. More hiring errors are made in the first 30 minutes of the interview than at any other time all due to over-valuing the impact of first impressions, so intervening here is one way to ensure good candidates don't get excluded for faulty reasons. As part of this intervention you'll also reduce the number of under-performers who get hired because they're good at over-presenting.

Conduct More Panel Interviews: A well-organized panel interview is a great technique to increase assessment accuracy and naturally minimize emotional biases. Weaker interviewers can also effectively participate in panel interviews as long as they're led by a strong facilitator. Since all members of the panel hear the same information there is less variance in the final assessment. The key to an effective panel interview is to have one leader who asks the primary questions with everyone else asking only clarifying and follow-up questions. Panel interviews are useless if everyone is allowed to ask their favorite questions. Here are a few more articles on panel interviews to help get you started on using this very powerful process.

Eliminate the Yes/No Vote: Unless someone has a 90% or better hiring batting average, you shouldn't give the person a full yes/no vote. Instead, assign each interviewer a few performance factors or competencies to assess during their portion of the interview. These are things like technical competency, motivation to do the real work, influencing comparable teams, problem-solving, and cultural fit. You might find the 10-factor candidate assessment scorecard and a 1-5 rating scale we use to collect all of the interviewers' inputs useful here. By narrowing the roll of each interviewer to something other than a full yes/no vote, they tend to be more accurate since there's less information to collect and less of a need to rely on gut feel and intuition. The team then has the responsibility to reach consensus on all important factors and collectively make the final yes/no vote. This is very comparable to how all major business or investment decisions are made, so it's not all that unusual.

Recruiters and managers alike all complain they have too much work to do. So rather than eliminate the scrap problem they just buy more raw materials in the hope that something will work. Unfortunately it won't. The real solution is for recruiting managers and HR leaders to fight back and take control. Start this by figuring out the real long-term problem before you implement more band-aid sourcing solutions that just mask the problem.