Basic Interview Skills

1. Be open, make you candidate feel welcome and be able to open up
2. Suspend judgement
3. Stick to a pre-determined structure
4. Ask open questions
5. Don’t offer options to questions
6. Keep your questions simple
7. Let the candidate know how soon you will let them know.

For more help with interviewing techniques visit my website www.emerald-starfish.com or call me on 07584 483570.

Emerald Starfish is a recruitment and training company that works with companies and organisations to ensure that they are recruiting the best candidates whilst reducing the time and costs of recruitment and increasing candidate retention.

Candidate Assessment and Job Performance

Correlation between two measures to see their relationship (2nd measure is job performance)

The relationship between assessment measures and a candidates ability to do a job are listed here.  This is based on work conducted by Schmidt and Hunter in 1998.  A perfect correlation is 1.0 and no correlation would be 0.  A validity of 0.30 or higher is considered useful. Where is the vailidation of your current recruitment methods? By using assessment centres and combining a number of these assessments:

• biographical interviews
• work samples
• competency based interviews

We can get as high as 0.68 validation.

What are your recruitment processes and how are you assessing your candidates?  For a complete review of your recruitment processes please visit www.emerald-starfish.com or call 07584 483570.

Telephone Interviewing – Top Tips

A great way to screen candidates at the first stage is by a telephone interview.  It reduces the time that this stage of the recruitment process takes for both you and the candidates.  If you are recruiting for someone who will spend time talking to customers over the telephone this type of assessment stage also lets you review how they will come across to your customers.

Top Tips

1. Book the call in advance and prepare the candidate in terms of why you are doing the screening and how much of their time it will take up.
2. Call on time.
3. spend a few minutes building rapport with the candidate to help them to relax and so you get the best answers from them.
4. Start with easy questions and work up.  Start off asking them questions around their CVs – their work history or qualifications for example.  This will also help them to relax further.
5. Listen to their voice tones carefully to see how comfortable they are.  If they are interviewing for a customer facing role how are they coming across as a customer?
6. Keep to time.
7. Any areas that you are unclear on probe further so that you can make a definite judgement on the candidate.
8. Give them the opportunity to ask you questions.
9. Explain to the candidates carefully the next steps and the time-frame.
10. Write up your notes so if required you can give clear feedback as to why (or why not) you are taking the candidate forward to the next stage.

Emerald Starfish is a recruitment and training consultancy which helps companies and organisations to get the most out of their recruitment processes. We will reduce time and the cost spent to recruit candidates whilst increasing candidate calibre and staff retention.  Please visit our website for further informaton.

Reducing Bias in the Candidate Selection Process

How do you choose?

Recruitment is taking a candidate from the pool of available candidates and through some method of selection produce an effective workforce.  During this process we are predicting that the chosen candidates will form an effective and productive employee.

How do you ensure that your natural bias isn’t part of your recruitment process?

Typical biases include:

• Appearance.  Are the candidates going to be making the right impression to your companies customers, both internally and externally?
• Similar-to-me syndrome.  Do you feel a warmth towards the person infront of you?  Do you have things in common, or do they appear to like the same things or have similar values to you?
• Selective attention.  Are you desperate to recruit?  Or  keen not to hire the person in front of you?  Are you hearing only the good or only the bad things that they have to say?
• Stereotyping.  Beware of categorising people who you consider are similar, this often happens with candidates with similar accents or voice tones.

A good recruiter should be aware of their own personal biases and their own cultural values and how they may affect the interview process.

A good recruiter or interviewer needs to keep an open mind, suspend judgement and focus on what the candidate is saying within an objective framework.

For help with your recruitment processes please call 07584 483570 or visit www.emerald-starfish.com

Candidate preparation – what help are your candidates getting?

When you invite a candidate to interview, or assessment centre what information do you give them in an advance and how are they preparing for the meeting?  What lengths would you expect them to go to, to ensure that they shine on the day?

I have always believed that candidates should have a good idea as to what they will be facing on the day – the competencies that they will be asked and the types of exercises that will being used on the day.  I have spent many years (literally!) briefing candidates, and ensuring that if I have had multiple candidates up for the same job that they have all received the same information.  I want candidates to have the best opportunity to shine during the assessment and be given the opportunity to demonstrate their key skills and abilities for the role.

I have recently been involved in a large recruitment campaign for a new team of people.  Over a six month period the organisation is taking on in excess of 600 people, within a whole new department.

Whilst this has been a really exciting project to be involved with handling these numbers of candidates through the process there has created new challenges in terms of the ways and type of information candidates are getting in preparation.  Websites and forums have been set up with already successful candidates briefing and coaching candidates with imminent assessment dates who in turn are briefing, discussing and encouraging candidates who have been invited to the first stage interview.  On-line there are available all the questions and competencies that are being asked at first stage and assessment centre with long discussions on key words to use and the best scenarios to use to demonstrate competencies.

How as recruiters are we meant to find our way through these perfectly prepared answers to find the candidates that are competent to do the roles?  What about the candidates who haven’t been part of these forums – where are they on the level playing field?

Should we, as recruiting managers be briefing candidates with not just the competencies that we are assessing, but with the questions we will be asking too?  This ensures fairness for all.  If we can get this out of the way what should we use the time when we meet candidates for? Should a greater space be made for previous experience, team fit and interpersonnel skills within the recruitment process?

To ensure that you are employing the right candidates please visit Emerald Starfish. Emerald Starfish is a Recruitment and Training consultancy specialising in working with companies to improve their recruitment processes, enabling them to make better recruitment decisions, increasing long term retention and reducing recruitment costs.

Ability and Aptitude Testing

Ability and Aptitude tests are useful additional tools to help with recruitment, to help with recruitment and can help you to see the wider picture of a candidates’ abilities and their attitude within the work place. They measure a candidates ability to be able to perform or carry out certain tasks.

In 1998 Schmidt & Hunter reviewed all the methods of selecting people using tests and Ability and Aptitude tests were not surprisingly found to be the most effective with graphology (handwriting being the least effective).

Ability and Aptitude Tests can be:

• A predictor of staff performance
• A way of identifying candidates with a higher reasoning ability who may benefit more from training programmes
• More predictive at professional/managerial levels than unskilled jobs
• Used to determine more accurately how suitable a candidate is for a role.

Tests can be completed on line and do not require any input from the client.  The testing company that you use to run the tests will also product the reports and should be able to make recommendations in terms of taking the candidate further through your process and the types of areas to probe further at interview.

Make sure you are using Ability and Aptitude tests that give information relevant to the positions that you are recruiting for.  Also decide where in your recruitment process you want these tests to be.  You can test all candidates that apply for your positions, and use these tools as an initial screening, or use them to produce more information at either first or second stage.

For further information on recruitment and Ability and Aptitude testing please call 07584 483570 or email caroline@emerald-starfish.com for more information.   Emerald Starfish are a Recruitment and Training consultancy specialising in working with companies to improve their recruitment processes, enabling them to make better recruitment decisions, increasing long term retention and reducing recruitment costs.

 

4 new Employment Law changes for 2012

• There will be an increase in the qualifying period for unfair dismissal cases from one to two years from the 6th April 2012
• Changes to Employment Tribunals are set to be announced on 6th April 2012.  Please see my previous article
• In 2012 statutory redundancy and unfair dismissal compensation is set to increase
• Maternity, paternity and adoption pay will increase from the start of April to £135.45 a week.

 

Changes to Unfair Dismissal Claims – are these really on the horizon?

The leaked government report today claiming that unproductive workers should lose their right to claim unfair dismissal has again opened up the debate about current employment laws covering this area of legislation.

Currently workers who feel that they have been unfairly dismissed from their role are unable to make a claim if this occurs within the first twelve months of their employment with a company.  This qualifying period is being extended to two years to help smaller businesses, the aim being to reduce the number of employment tribunal claims.  In addition to this from April 2013 employees will have to pay around £250 to apply for a tribunal and pay a further £1,000 if a hearing is granted – this being refunded if the claim is successful.

To ensure that you are employing the right candidates from the start please visit Emerald Starfish.  Emerald Starfish are a Recruitment and Training consultancy specialising in working with companies to improve their recruitment processes, enabling them to make better recruitment decisions, increasing long term retention and reducing recruitment costs.

Pre-interview Information

Do you have all the information you need on a candidate before inviting them to interview?

There is plenty of information that you can collect on your candidates prior to interview which will allow you longer with them discussing their suitability for your role.

Information such as salary expectations, copies of qualifications and driving licence can be sent across before you interview the candidate.  If their location is important, make sure that you have checked this pre-interview.  Don’t invite candidates who are not based in the right location to interview.  This is a waste of your time, the candidates time and costs both parties financially.  It will also affect your employer branding.

Be clear as to who you want to see and why you want to see them, before inviting them to interview.

For further information and advice on pre-interview preparation and the interviewing process please visit emerald starfish or call 07584 483570

Planning for Interviews

When you have candidates in for an interview do you make them feel relaxed and at ease, or do you prefer a higher pressured environment?

A more relaxed room setting for interviews, without barriers between you and the candidate will help to start to build your relationship with the candidate.  It can make them feel much more at ease in the interview.  This could be around a coffee table for example, or over the corner of a table.  This should help them to open up more with their answers.  Make sure that your body language is relaxed too, to encourage them to mirror you and relax further.  This type of scenario will help you to get the best information from your candidates.

A more formal room layout also has its place in recruitment.  This would be where you interview over a table, or perhaps there is more than one interviewer on the panel to meet the candidate.  The table can be a useful prop if the candidae has been asked to bring along information such as sales figures or business plans.  It can help them to present their information more effectively.  More interviewers present can offer different points of view to the responses that the candidate has given to your questions. By increasing the pressure that you put the candidate under at interview is also a good way of  seeing how they may react under pressure within the role.  It may be more useful to save the formal scenario for second stage, after having got the candidate to open up within an informal environment at first stage.

For more information and help on designing interviews and getting the best from candidates please contact Emerald Starfish on 07584 483570 or visit our website.

Emerald Starfish is a training and recruitment consultancy specialising in working with companies to improve their recruitment processes enabling them to make better recruitment decisions and reduce their recruitment costs.