Are you kissing too many Frogs?
How often have you waded through reams of unsuitable CV’s or interviewed people that were simply wrong for your organisation, or wrong for the job?
Interviewing unsuitable people is a waste of your valuable time. It adds confusion to the process, distracts your focus away from the right candidates and leaves unsuitable candidates with a negative view of your organisation. Good people are vital to the success of your business. Recruiting them should be managed with the same focus, efficiency and effectiveness as any other critical project.
You’ve got to interview, the question is: how many frogs does it take to find your prince (or princess)? Well, there are some simple steps you can take to cut down on the slimy lip action.
Clearly define what you want
Invest the time to write a detailed role description. The very act of writing down your requirements will force you to think through the capabilities, skills, experience and behaviours of your ideal candidate. We can’t over emphasise the importance of this step.
Make your recruitment consultant do their job properly
It’s all too easy to accept a simple trawl of a recruiters’ database as a ‘short-list’. This is the lazy recruiters way of making you do their job. You should expect more, and they should have the expertise to filter unsuitable candidates. Make sure they understand your brief and know how much flexibility there is. Discuss the process with them and insist they speak to every single candidate before they send you any CVs.
For example, we interview every candidate either face-to-face, or by telephone. It’s a step that benefits candidates as well as recruiters - after all, we need to know what their expectations are too.
Use skills and assessment tools to your advantage
Specialist skill and competency assessment tools will help you filter candidates so you’re only meeting those with a skill-set and behaviours that match your needs. We like to create a thorough picture using a combination of Thomas International personality and behaviour tests and our own procurement skills profiling tool, DNA.
As well as profiling their procurement skill-set, DNA gives us everything we need to conduct a competency-based interview. This combination is enough for clients to let us conduct first-round interviews and deliver their short-list. Saving a whole round of frog kissing.
Spend the time you’ve saved talking to the right candidates
The above steps will save you time which you can use more profitably to interview a quality shortlist, of say three or four well-matched candidates. You’ve freed up the time to really get to know these candidates. We find assessment days, days spent gauging a candidates suitability, work very well. We’ve successfully run these for clients, combining interviews, presentations, case studies, negotiation role-play and team interaction, to find the perfect candidates.
Now that’s what we call a happy ending.
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