Recruiting new employees often feels like navigating a maze. When deadlines loom and tasks pile up, the urge to quickly fill positions becomes tempting, leading some companies to adopt a 'bums on seats' approach. However, the repercussions of a misguided recruitment strategy can be costly. It incurs expenses from recruitment agency fees, consumes valuable time spent interviewing, onboarding, and training individuals. If the fit isn't right, it demands a repetition of the entire process –wasting both time and money. Moreover, the wrong hire can bring about costly errors or tarnish the company's reputation.
That's where investing time in structuring the interview process becomes invaluable. It's an investment worth every consideration. This blog is your guide to understanding why.
Clear Job Specifications: Setting Expectations Straight
Detailed job specifications are the GPS guiding both recruiters and candidates. They provide clarity about the role's responsibilities, the specific skills required and the expected behaviours. This transparency upfront aids in attracting candidates who truly comprehend and resonate with the essence of the job. This proactive approach significantly reduces the time wasted on attracting mismatched candidates or individuals leaving prematurely due to a misrepresentation of the role. While managers might find this task mundane, translating what’s in their head onto paper is immensely worthwhile.
Moreover, detailed job specifications aid in crafting interview questions that are tailored to the role.
Insightful Interview Questions: Unveiling Real Potential
Interviews should be more than a casual chat to see if you like the person. Crafting competency and values based questions that unearth relevant information from candidates is an art. Preparing these questions beforehand, aligning them with the job specification, and prompting candidates for examples of demonstrated skills ensures fairness and facilitates an equitable comparison among applicants, as well as identifying the shining stars among the applicants.
Understanding Behaviour: Psychometric Testing
An interview only reveals so much and what the candidate chooses to disclose, even within a structured format. To gain deeper insights into a candidate's character and motivations, tools like DISC offer invaluable insights into their preferred behavioural tendencies. This assessment assists in gauging how well their style aligns with the role's expectations and the team dynamics. Results are never taken in isolation, but it generates further questions to ask the candidate if their preferred behaviour style is different than what you envisaged for the role. However, it’s crucial that those administering tests and giving feedback have the appropriate training and certification to do so.
Agility in Learning: Assessing Fluid Intelligence
Beyond experience, the ability to learn quickly may be a pre-requisite. Employing a fluid intelligence test assesses a candidate's learning ability and how quickly they’ll get up to speed in a new company and role. In today's ever-evolving workplaces, this trait often makes the difference between merely keeping up and truly excelling. Candidates scoring lower in this area aren't necessarily rejected, but it requires assurance that their prior experience compensates and that they've developed coping mechanisms for their limitations. On the flip side, individuals with high scores often crave continuous stimulation and challenges. They may occasionally find it perplexing why those with lower scores don't catch on swiftly, leading to moments of frustration – a trait less conducive if they’re going to be managing people.
Putting Skills to the Test: Job-Related Tasks (Work Sample Tests)
Designing a job-related task (work sample test) assesses the candidate's ability to showcase their skills in action. For example, if they’re a Web Designer, consider giving them a brief to create a landing page; if they’re a Web Developer perhaps get them to check some code which has some deliberate errors in; ask a Sales person to do a presentation on how they’d pitch to a customer; role play an angry customer with customer service roles; for a role that requires data analysis, ask candidates to analyse a dataset and pull out key summary statistics and trends …….. You get the drift?
The Power of Research: Structured vs. Informal Interviews
Many companies get it wrong in recruitment because they don’t adopt the above approaches. But don’t just take our word for it - research stands as a testament. Studies have shown that a structured interview process coupled with psychometric testing and a job related task drastically increases the likelihood of finding the perfect fit. The image below shows the predictive validity of a successful hire whilst deploying various recruitment methods.
Not only does using a structured interview, psychometric tests and job-related tasks help you find the right candidates but it also mitigates biases that might seep into informal interviews, providing a clearer and fairer evaluation of candidates.
Embracing the Right Fit: Welcoming and Onboarding
But the journey doesn’t end with hiring the right person; it begins there. A seamless onboarding experience is crucial to cementing the relationship between the new employee and the company. This ensures they feel valued and integrated, reducing the chances of them seeking opportunities elsewhere. If the new recruit has a long notice period stay in touch periodically, let them know you’re looking forward to them joining you, drip feed them induction information, ask if they fancy meeting for a coffee, maybe invite them along to a team social. The onboarding process is so important, we might just write another blog about that…..!
In conclusion, a structured interview process coupled with psychometric testing and a job related task is a commitment to securing the best candidates for your organisation. By embracing a more strategic approach, companies can welcome new members who not only excel in skills but also seamlessly integrate into the cultural fabric, fostering a thriving work environment.
