Before I move into this week’s article on recruitment, with furlough coming to an end in a couple of months I will be doing various Q and A articles in the coming weeks. If you have any questions about managing redundancies or any other HR subjects relevant to the end of furlough please reply to this article with your question, or message me, and I will gladly answer them.
If you or any of your contacts anticipate needing to make redundancies towards the end of furlough you should start planning for this now. Please see our free guide to the 8 Steps to Making Redundancies
Recruitment in SMEs
It’s a big moment in an SME’s life when they become large enough to justify employing a dedicated recruiter. These days most professional recruiters, including agencies, use LinkedIn Recruiter to help them ‘mine’ and then ‘farm’ candidates, which produces high quality CVs for current vacancies and also enables them to find good future prospects and keep them warm for upcoming vacancies. This approach increases quality, reduces costs and significantly increases recruitment efficiency.
This option is not really open to smaller companies due to the costs of both the LinkedIn tool and employing the recruiter so they tend to use agencies, adverts and personal recommendations when recruiting.
Our business model at 186hr is to eventually support a number of SMEs with a set amount of HR provision each month or year. As part of this HR proposition, if the demand is there we will employ a recruiter to help clients with JDs and finding good quality CVs via LinkedIn Recruiter, amongst other tools, to achieve the above benefits but at a fraction of the cost for each client.
Unfortunately we’re not there yet so we’ll continue to advise and work on a normal HR consultancy basis.
Looking at the next stage of the recruitment process once the organisation has found candidates they wish to interview, I hope I do not cause offence with this comment but we find that – in the same way as I would be hopeless at your job – the standard of recruitment interviewing in most organisations is generally awful. So today I’d like to give a few tips to significantly improve this.
It has been shown time and again that Structured questions, sometimes referred to as Behavioural questions, are the most accurate form of recruitment question at identifying whether a candidate can actually do the job or not. I won’t explain the different definitions and differences as I am not sure anyone cares – they just want to be able to interview well and this article will help with that.
These type of Structured questions, similar in a lot of ways to ‘Competency Based’ questions that larger organisations use if they have introduced a competency framework, work off the premise that how an individual has approached issues in the past is a good indicator of both how they will approach them in the future and also whether they can actually do the job.
The simple act of turning a question from ‘how would you’ to ‘how have you’ makes a huge difference.
For example, if you asked me ‘how would you approach qualifying for the UK Olympic triathlon team?’ I would be able to give you a pretty good answer about the training and diet regime I would employ and the interviewer may think I know enough to achieve the goal and give me a chance. That would be a big mistake as I would be to Olympic triathlon what Eddie the Eagle was to ski jumping!
However, the simple act of changing the question to ‘how have you approached qualifying for the UK Olympic triathlon team or something similar in the past?’ makes the question much harder to answer if I have never done this. Although I know the theory, and have seen documentaries on the Brownlee brothers I would not be able to bluff my way through the answer.
Therefore questions such as ‘how would you’ should generally be avoided, unless they are followed up by questions asking for specific examples such as ‘can you give an example of when you have done that or something similar at your last employer?’
With regards to what questions to ask in a recruitment interview and the structure of the meeting, for SMEs we recommend the following:
Introduction
I start by explaining what the candidate can expect from today i.e. that it will take around 45 minutes; that I’ll start by explaining a little about the company and the role; then we’ll talk a little about their CV but not in great depth as the next section is specific questions about the role where we’ll discuss their experience in greater detail; and then they will be able to ask questions and we’ll finish by me explaining what happens next.
This approach sets expectations and calms the candidate as they know exactly what to expect, and that they will have chance to ask any questions at the end.
Explain about the company and the role
This should be brief and succinct, explain what the company do and where this role fits into that. I then normally ask ‘how does that sound?’ to gauge their understanding and that there are no misconceptions about the role. Any specific requirements e.g. if you need someone to roll their sleeves up and get involved rather than manage from a distance, should be explained here.
Questions from the CV
This is more an opportunity to calm the candidate down than to gain meaningful insights as candidates are generally nervous to start with so you need to help them overcome that before you ask them key questions.
Although it is impossible not to form a view about the candidate even at this early stage try and resist it as you haven’t seen the ‘real’ person yet, you have seen either a veneer of the person they wish to portray, or a nervous wreck who needs to calm down before they will perform well in the interview.
So just be careful of the ‘halo and horns’ trap at this stage where, if you instantly like the candidate you will tend to view everything they say positively and try and persuade yourself it’s a good answer even if it isn’t. And vice versa for a candidate you give metaphorical ‘horns’.
I normally explain to the candidate that whereas there is some really good experience on the CV we will go through those more in the next section. I then ask a couple of questions they will be comfortable answering to calm them down such as asking about an achievement on the CV. They may have won salesperson of the year, or had an interesting promotion, or lived abroad for a couple of years ….. They should be comfortable talking about these and will therefore start on a high and lose their nervousness.
If nothing jumps out from the CV I normally ask ‘there are some good achievements in your CV. What are you most proud of?’. Again, I’m often not too bothered about the answer, I just want to calm the candidate down.
After answering such a question confidently the candidate should now be more relaxed and able to give their best in the rest of the interview rather than being nervous or caught off guard.
Main Interview Questions
As covered above, these should be structured and mostly about giving examples of how they have approached issues similar to the job requirements in the past. To ensure you make a fair comparison, ideally you would ask each candidate the same ‘headline’ questions although clearly any follow up questions will depend on their answers.
When devising what questions to ask in this section, I follow a simple process where I put the questions together from the job description. Under the ‘Job Requirements’ section there should be a series of bullet points explaining exactly what the role entails. I normally just turn these into questions. For example:
- ‘Achieve monthly sales targets as agreed with line manager’ becomes ‘tell me about a time when you beat your sales target and how you did it?’
- ‘Ensure all customer queries are handled in line with the company SLA’ becomes ‘what service standards did you follow in your previous role, and how did you ensure you achieved these?’
- ‘Manage team to a high standard ensuring poor performers are managed accordingly’ leads to a question ‘tell me about a time one of your team was not performing to the required standards and how you tackled that?’
The next point to discuss, equally important, are the follow up questions to the headline questions you have pre-prepared as some people will try and bluff their way through an answer. It is often only when you get to the third or fourth follow up question that you’ll be able to judge whether the answer is genuine and you can judge whether the individual can actually do the job.
For example, in the above poor performer question you may wish to ask:
- What were the circumstances of the poor performance?
- How did you approach the initial meeting?
- What was the reason for the poor performance?
- What did you agree with the individual as a plan?
- How often did you review this?
- What was the outcome?
- Where is that person now?
This is often called ‘drilling down’ and whereas the initial answer may have been good you soon find out if the individual is as good as their initial answer. If they have not been honest in their initial response or their approach wasn’t particularly good in reality, you will soon find them out. Only a psychopath can keep up a lie for this long and hopefully you won’t interview many of them!
Closing the Interview
Asking the candidate whether they have any questions about the role or company will often give a good indicator as to how keen they are and whether they have done their homework about the role. I prefer to do this at the end not the start as if you do it at the start it can seem like a test, at a time when they are still nervous.
Remember, the purpose of the interview is to find out about them, not whether they are robust enough to get though a tough interview – that approach went out of date in the eighties as it is simply not effective at judging whether the individual can do the job.
Explaining what happens next and when / how the candidate will find out the result is clearly important to them.
None of the above process is rocket science. You probably read it thinking it is simply common sense and you’d be right. But for some reason it really is rare for managers to be good at this, so hopefully this common sense guide has been some help.
I can’t stress enough though, it all stems from a well written Job Description. If you haven’t defined exactly what you want the role-holder to do how can you interview for it or judge whether the candidate will be good at it?
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