Hiring the Best in 2020

The Covid 19 pandemic has made 2020 the most volatile recruitment market ever in my 25 years in the profession. It has impacted every aspect of hiring from talent pools to selection processes to internal recruitment resources. 

For businesses that adapt there is great opportunity to gain competitive advantage. For those that don’t there are pitfalls aplenty.

To get you in the first category I have compiled an ‘easy to digest’ 5 article series which I will publish every week over the next five weeks.

The first part is right here...

Assessment of Potential Employees

In a volatile labour market it’s even more important you fully assess candidates and ensure they are not just desperate for any job or one of the poorer performers your competitors happily cast off under the guise of redundancy. A misstep here will provide a very short stay for your new employee doing neither you or them any favours.

Given the speed of the global pandemic, recruiting companies have had to learn quickly to avoid expensive mistakes.  We’ve learnt a lot from observing firms get it right and occasionally wrong in recent months and are now using this knowledge to help our clients improve success rates.

Since the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic almost all initial interviews for professional grade positions have taken place via video platforms.

One of the key challenges is that it is harder to assess and interview candidates remotely. Many organisations are now recruiting online but some have made the mistake of simply repeating their old process, not appreciating that video interviewing has subtle but important differences from face to face.

With so many tech options from Teams to Zoom is your company using a video interviewing tool that is fit for purpose and aids the process? 

When arranging interviews you need to be careful that your candidate is familiar with your video conferencing platform. If not, this may cause problems, both technical and how they perform in an unfamiliar environment. In short, do you get to see the best version of your candidate? If not you may miss out on hiring the best person for your position. The more widely used your choice of platform the less likely your candidates will encounter issues as they will have used it in other settings.

Whichever software you use you should record the interview for you to go back to if you need clarification on a candidate response to aid objective selection. This is particularly helpful where two candidates perform very well and you need to differentiate them. Don’t forget to tell the candidate you are recording the interview when you start.

Talking of technical issues, video interviewing raises a dilemma around how do you judge a candidate whose internet connection was disrupted mid interview. Do you rearrange or discount them? How much of it was unavoidable and how much could have been mitigated by better preparation on the candidates’ side? These are nuanced questions but having an internal agreement on your response before the interview process will avoid erratic and subjective decision making from your hiring managers which may lead to qualifying out a great candidate or equally wasting time on the uninitiated!

It can be tricky to fully assess someone when you aren’t meeting them face to face. It’s very easy to miss those subtle non-verbal cues which make up such a big part of communication and assessment.

It has been proven that video meetings are more tiring for all participants as our brains are working at a higher rate trying to fill the blanks which body language and very minor verbal clues normally provide answers to. These subtleties are lost on video platforms and increase the risk of an inaccurate perception of the candidate's responses. This is arguably the single biggest reason to still have some form of face to face meeting at the latter stages of a hiring process.

I hope this provides food for thought regarding your assessment of candidates. If you want to discuss any aspect of this feel free to contact me.

Next week’s piece will be on candidate attraction!