Identifying the right talent for your team, part 1

You’ve got a critical role to fill in your team and, thankfully a set of interviews lined up, but how can you make sure you are choosing the right person from that candidate pool?

Talent is scarce so quick recruitment processes can help you secure the candidates you need rather than losing them to competitors but that can make it even harder to assess your applicants and make sure you are getting the skills you need.

As recruiters, it’s our job to guide clients through this process and help ensure they have the best chance of securing the best talent. Now we’re here to share that advice with you. Let us know if it helps!

Tip 1: Think of questions for each of the key job responsibilities, as well as general questions.

Think about what this person will be doing on a daily basis and what their key responsibilities and deliverables would be. If this isn’t a role you have direct hands-on experience with, reach out to colleagues who do and get their input on these questions.

For example, if the role involves an element of project management, ask about how projects have been managed in their previous roles, what their involvement was, and what challenges and successes they had.

If the role involves an element of stakeholder management, ask how that worked in a previous role, including any communication challenges they might have had and how they overcame them.

Don’t just ask the question and let them answer either. Be sure to ask follow-up questions to draw out more specific details, which also shows your interest in the candidate as it proves you’ve been listening to them. See our next tip about situational-based questions to help you delve deeper.

By asking such specific questions, you should be able to build up a picture of how well your candidates understand these responsibilities and how they’ve covered them in the past, giving you a good idea of how they would fit into your company and succeed in the role.

Complement these role-based questions with more general questions to build up a broader picture of this candidate. This could include:

·???????What is it that interests them about this role

·???????What is it that interests them about your company

·???????Where do they see their career heading

·???????What’s important to them in a job (flexible working, development opportunities, career growth etc)

But consider the nature of the role you are interviewing this candidate for too. These questions are good for understanding the motivations of a candidate you plan to hire on a permanent basis, but can be off-putting for candidates interviewing for a temporary, freelance, interim, or contract role. In this case, you are looking to bring their expertise into your company for a limited period of time and your interview should be more like screening a supplier than finding someone totally invested in working for your company, for example.

A final thought on this subject: when asking questions in an interview, we advise making it as natural as possible, rather than seeming like a tick-box exercise. Free-flowing conversations can put the candidate at ease and get them to open up more but making sure you have those questions in mind provides some structure to the interview and can help make your post-interview decision more objective which is especially important if you are deciding between several candidates.?

If you found this helpful, be sure to look out for the next instalment. Or, if you can't wait, check out the full range of advice over on our website .