Interview Tips That Will Improve Your Recruitment Drive
Recruitment is perhaps one of the trickiest aspects of managing a business.
If you’re a startup or have scaled up from being self-employed, then your skills lay within the core elements of your business. You know how to do the service or product you sell, but when it comes to recruiting, a critical time for any business, you’re perhaps not as comfortable as you’d like to be.
Bringing in the right people will help you grow and expand; it will allow you to fill skill gaps and add additional elements to your organization. However, if you get it wrong, it could spell disaster. Adding the wrong people is a recipe for disaster, and you could be lumbered with a cost and a destructive influence, which derails all your positive hard work.
Whilst there is no sure-fire way to get recruitment right, you can make it a little easier and effective by taking on board these small bits of advice.
Know What You Want
The problem with recruitment might not necessarily be who you bring in, but what you set out to do in the first place. An article on Medium explains how you should understand the difference between a ‘need’ and a ‘want’. You may want someone to help you on the practical side of the business, but your needs are in an administrative role.
Know what you want and be clear on the job spec before going out to find your newest recruit.
Be Transparent
In our post on ‘Transparency in Leadership’, we discussed how this is something worth considering when you make your move to recruit new staff. Depending on the size of your business, bringing in new faces might cause awkward situations within the existing ranks. Have you considered being open with your staff and involving them to a degree?
Be transparent with your potential recruits too. Make sure they understand everything about the role, it’s potential and its limitations. You’re selling them your business too, so make sure you give them the right impression.
Do Due Diligence
CNBC reported a surge in new jobs just before Christmas, with 266,000 new positions created in the United States. That demonstrates the huge demand for good quality staff going into the New Year. It also suggests that you’re going to be presented with lots of people desperately clutching CVs, eager to tell you how good they are.
Make sure you check the facts, follow up references and make enquiries around any impressive claims. The interview is incredibly important and warrants far more than a paragraph here, but take time to ensure the good stories you hear are based on fact, not a desire to get into work.
Post-Interview Etiquette
This may not seem obvious, after all you’ve already made your choice so surely the way you handle the unsuccessful candidates is irrelevant. Not so. Recruitment specialists Comeet explain how sending a thank you email after an interview is standard practice for a candidate, but you should do the same as an interviewer.
What if your final choice doesn’t make the grade? You might need to fall back on someone you previously discarded and that’s where the post-interview etiquette comes into play. If the labor market really is all about demand and not supply, keeping good relations with strong candidates might give you an advantage if you need to think again after the fact.
