Applicant Screening

I’ve been travelling over the last couple of weeks to see clients with BJ McKay, our most recently minted consultant. The calls have had multiple purposes. In all cases they were an effort to connect BJ with clients he was going to service. In some cases, it was an effort to reacquaint myself with old friends and contacts. And again in all cases, we were there to simply provide customer service – to see how and if we could help our client businesses perform better. 

The sessions have been really valuable – for our clients and me.

I’ve gotten to watch clients respond to BJ’s natural enthusiasm paired with his solid knowledge of how to apply our products and services. He brought value talking to clients about our Selling Skills Assessment Tool™ and its’ value in measuring Sales Skills. Every one of our meetings had some discussion around Predictive Index® and how the Predictive Index Management Workshop™ applies to applicant screening, employee productivity and work satisfaction. It was fun sitting back watching BJ field a range of tough PI® questions comfortably and correctly. He even was given opportunities to discuss applying the principles of organizational alignment, successful strategic planning and executive coaching to various client problems.

The visits were all successful because clients saw us as actively engaged in helping to solve their problems. That was natural - because that is what we were there to do.

I am working with a client in helping them to fill a key management position within their organization.  One element of this particular search is that there are members of the team who have been with the company for a period of time who are interested in this opportunity.  This is a not-so-unique challenge that hiring managers face when key positions become available - do we promote someone from within because they have earned it by putting in their time?  The way this particular client chose to handle the situation is unique.  Rather than just "giving" the position to an internal person they opted to have these individuals go through the same assessment and selection process that other candidates are going through.  This means that the resumes of those internal candidates came into my inbox just like everyone else's and even I did not have a heads up that the internal candidates were interested!  I found this to be a particularly interesting piece of the client's recruiting strategy.  It allowed all candidates to be placed on the same playing field and all of them were put through the same applicant screening process.  It may not seem unique but even though a best hiring practice is to hire the best person for the job sometimes hiring managers settle for the "best I've got" right now.  They take this approach in order to take the hiring project off of their plate and move on to new and usually more exciting things.  Hats off to those hiring managers and companies who take hiring seriously enough to make sure that the person they bring in to a key position fits well with the bigger picture of their organizational alignment.   

• Aliah Wright wrote an article called "Millennials: Bathed to Bits" in the July 2010 edition of SHRM's HR Magazine in which he states, "Old style interviews are out.  Two way dialogues are the way to hire."  If you've not seen this article, be sure to check it out.  Great perspective on a new hire's first three months and a new paradigm for the employee lifecycle.
• Diane Spiegel's posting, "7 Questions You Wouldn't Expect During a Millennial Interview" aligns perfectly with Wright's article. The questions she presents are great examples of a candidate engaging the interviewer in a real dialogue.  Are you ready to answer these questions? 

At this point, we've all read or even experienced ourselves the open position that had 500 applicants.  With such enormous candidate pools and so many people looking for work (and even desperate for work), this means that employers have maximum control of the process, right.  Well, not really.




Even with lots of candidates out there..., 

• Candidates will have other opportunities (part 1) - If you drag out your candidate screening process over weeks and weeks, you are increasing the chances that candidates (even finalists) will move on to another opportunity.  The "hotter" the candidate, the more opportunity they'll have, even in this market. The company who can put them through their process quicker and offer an equal opportunity may beat you out.
• Candidates will have other opportunities (part 2) - The great candidate may also be one who is in pretty dire circumstances.  He/she may have to take the first offer they get of any work. 
• Candidates will get uncomfortable and withdraw - If your process drags on, candidates can start to think, "Jeez, even if they offer me a job, it doesn't seem like they're really that interested in me.  I'm not sure if I want to work somewhere where I'm not valued."  Even if a candidate doesn't officially withdraw, they'll just go silent.

Indeed, even with unemployment high, best hiring practices still hold true when it comes to working with candidates.  It's still critical to move through your hiring process expeditiously.  here are some thoughts to help with that. 

1. Set an 8 week deadline.  Commit to no more than 8 weeks between posting a position and making your final decision on a candidate (or to restrategize the search and start over). 
2. Make sure that internal stakeholders agree on the position and search parameters before you launch.  When there is internal dissention about the scope of a job, qualifications, compensation, etc., it drags out the hiring process because these matters are being worked through while candidates are being considered.  Figure out the position first, get everyone in agreement, then launch.
3.  Have the infrastructure in place to move through the process.  If you don't have the capacity to quickly process resumes and move candidates through quickly, consider engaging additional help.  (Note that our RPO service is perfect in these situations!)
4. Communicate to your candidates.  Be clear about your timeline for hiring and where they are in the process, especially if they're real contenders.
5. Keep the top candidates engaged. If the hiring manager just interviewed someone fabulous but is going on vacation before the final decision can be made, make sure that the candidate is contacted by the company in a meaningful way during that week.  It's not enough just to tell them that you'll be away - keep them connected.

Strong hiring is critical for company success. But I’ve found that great hiring is less about applicant screening and recruiting strategy and more about simply knowing what you need.
 

For example: You need someone to answer the phones, so you need a receptionist. But will he/she work with a 60-line phone system with 300 calls/day, or manage about 25 calls a day, but be expected to “triage” customers? These are two very different positions, and being clear about the needs of your position will guide the rest of the process. 

Here is a framework I find helpful for defining a job and capturing that in the format of a job description:

1.       Position Summary  (2-3 sentences) – Why does this position exist?  How is it critical to the company’s success?

2.       Responsibilities (3-5 broad areas with 3-12 detailed bullets in each) – What does a person in this role do? What are the 3-5 areas into which their responsibilities naturally fall? What will they be evaluated on?

3.       Core competencies (6-12) – How should this person perform their job so that they align with the company overall? What behaviors must one exhibit in order to fit into your company culture and meet your definition of professionalism? 

4.       Position specific competencies (3-6) –What traits must someone have in order to be successful in this specific role? HINT: Personality assessments like Predictive Index® can be very helpful for defining these. 

5.       Critical skills & knowledge (3-6) – What are the teachable skills or formal knowledge that one must have for this position? 

6.       Working conditions – How will this person work on a daily basis? How much travel and what kind of travel is involved? 

When you can clearly answer these questions, you’ve done half the work necessary for strong hiring. You can use the information from these question to guide where you post the position, how you screen resumes and how you interview candidates. 

I can't pass up an opportunity to reinforce the kudos my colleague Todd Gross offered to our ADVISA Hiring team today in his posting Best In Class Recruiters.   Our Hiring Partners Gina, Sally and Beth are truly exceptional at applying best hiring practices, smart recruiting strategy and savvy applicant screening to the searches we do on behalf of our clients.  Thanks, Todd, for recognizing our team and thanks to all of our team members for your great work every day. 

Learn more about our unique Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) work by clicking here or contacting me directly.  I'd love to explore how we can enhance your employee recruiting efforts.

Before the time comes to fill a position - any position - within your organization it is important to get your ducks in a row before you just jump right in.  The ducks to which I am referring have to do with the important pieces you need to have in place before launching a search to fill a vacancy.  The first "duck" to have in place is a job description that effectively captures the job you need someone to do today.  Many times Hiring Managers continue to work from a job description that was created years ago and as with most positions the duties of the position have evolved to a point where the original job description does not look much like the job that you need to have done today to effectively achieve organizational alignment.  The second "duck" is to have an effective applicant screening process in place to  identify benchmarks necessary for candidates to meet in order to successfully do the job you need them to do.  Whether you partner with the Advisa Hiring team to help with this piece or you do this on your own it is important to make sure candidates not only have the type of experience that is necessary for the job but they also need to fit in with the culture of your company and the job itself needs to motivate employees to be the best they can be.  In the end, having your ducks in a row will not only help you to hire the right candidate, it will also make the process more simple for hiring managers and prove to be helpful for engaging employees because you will have taken steps to make sure they are the right person for the job. This is one of the best hiring practices you can follow to ensure the search process runs smoothly.   

• Recruiters don't seem to truly understand the role they are recruiting for or that much detail about the clients needs.
• I am not sure if the post-interview feedback is honest or I don't get feedback at all.
• Most headhunters don't return my calls or acknowledge that I applied for a job.
• As a hiring manager, I hate when recruiters sling resumes at me and don't take the time to understand my needs."
• Dishonesty about a position, company, or the requirements for a role
• Recruiters seem unethical and will do anything to make a placement; their tactics to recruit or develop accounts are dishonest.
• I feel like job postings are not real jobs some time, the Bait and Switch.
• Recruiters are only working for the company and aren't looking out for my best interest through the offer stage.

            

• Each of these individuals specializes in executing searches.  They are highly adept at understanding your company and what you need – your Partner will take great care of you utilizing best hr practices and hiring assessments.
• They instill confidence that a thorough assessment of the candidate pool occurs, and that the process is as efficient as possible.
• If you are a PI® client, your consultant receives communications about the progress of your search. 
• Gina, Sally and Beth are committed to representing you accurately and we will always have your needs and desires at the forefront as we review candidates. 
• Keeping you informed is important to us, so each week you will receive a summary of the search, including the number of applications received, the strength of the candidate pool, and how many candidates are in each process of the screening. 
• T  he ADVISA Hiring Partners are not compensated by commissions.  They work for their clients as if they are on the clients' payroll.  Like all of us, they put pressure on themselves to please our clients, but they don't feel any pressure to submit unqualified candidates.
• The candidates, both successful and unsuccessful are treated professionally, with respect and sensitivity to their personal situations. 

My ADVISA colleague, Gina Bindley, wrote a blog posting earlier this week that really resonated with me.  It's called "The Puzzle Known as Hiring."  In it, she succinctly discusses the reality many people face: feeling overwhelmed with making a hire and doing effective applicant screening.  Her advice to take the hiring puzzle one piece at a time is quite prescient and - if I may add - a great reminder for other moments of the day as well.  Thanks, Gina!

This is one of my mom's favorite phrases.  "Don't get the cart before the horse," she'd say.  I think of this often because, admittedly, I'm inclined to do so.  Why?  I get busy, impatient, jumbled in my head, etc. and it just happens.

Recently, I saw this happening with a client who uses Predictive Index® as part of her company's applicant screening process.  Here is her process:

1. Review resumes
2. Conduct interviews
3. Review the pre-employment assessment that's done by Predictive Index.
4. Make the hire or put the candidate in the "thanks, but no thanks" pile.

Today I was reading an article about Zappos, an online shoe retailer that is recognized as one the top 100 companies to work for.  The Jan. 9, 2010 New York Times article, "On a Scale of 1 to 10, How Weird Are You?" features an interview with CEO Tony Hsieh in which he talks about the importance of company culture. 

To define Zappos' culture, he led a year-long process to articulate their 10 core values.  In the article, he explains, "We wanted to come up with committable core values, meaning that we would actually be willing to hire and fire people based on these values, regardless of their individual job performance."  He engaged employees in helping to identify their 10 values:

1. Deliver WOW through service.
2. Embrace and drive change.
3. Create fun and a little weirdness.
4. Be adventurous, creative and open-minded.
5. Pursue growth and learning.
6. Build open and honest relationships with communication.
7. Build a positive team and family spirit.
8. Do more with less.
9. Be passionate and determined
10. Be humble.

Admittedly, there is a lot that could be quibbled over here.  Are these values or competencies or both?  Is is really fair to hold everyone accountable for being fun?  Is is realistic that everyone have a personality that reflects embracing and driving change?  

Technicalities aside, what Mr. Hsieh did was define success.  He drew a line in the sand and said, "This is what I - we - expect.  Period."  He's ready to hire and fire based on these expectations.  And study after study, Zappos is one of the best places to work.

This is such an outstanding example of backing up activities like hiring, interviewing, changing culture, etc. all the way back to defining expectations.  It sounds so simple, but it's hard work (took Zappos a year) and it can seem overwhelming and nebulous at the start.  But the payoff is huge.  

Once you know your expectations (on the company scale and at the individual level), so much of the other work falls into place.  Applicant screening becomes a simple exercise in probing to see if a candidate can meet the expectations.  Employee recruiting is simply sharing the expectations.  Organizational alignment is quite straightforward, because the expectations at the top are clear.

Contact us if you'd like to start the conversation about your values - your expectations - I promise it will pay off. 



  
 

I'm a sports freak...I love every sport and I'm an excellent, knowledgeable spectator. Football, basketball, tennis, baseball (well, just the playoffs because the regular season is simply too long at 162 games) - the list goes on and on. The only sport I actually play is tennis and I can tend to be just a tad too competitive on the court but I love being out there. Plain and simple, I like winning but more than that, I hate losing.

My job at Advisa is a Hiring Partner. I'm here to assist clients in hiring selection, utilizing applicant screening, the PI® behavioral assessment tool and best hiring practices to help them fill positions. These could be any positions, such as a Synergy Group Leader position in China or a Network Engineer  in Dayton.

I take great pride in filling any position, but especially the "needle in the haystack" ones where our clients have come to us because of our expertise and ability. I'm always aiming for a 1.000 batting average and when I'm not able to find the perfect candidate and my average slips a little, as occasionally happens, it bothers me...a lot.

Nobody throws a touchdown pass or hits a home run or serves an ace every single time but that doesn't mean they're not trying to. And it's the same with not only me but the entire Advisa Hiring staff as all of us are committed to providing you with the highest, most professional assistance with employee recruiting...every time out.
 

I've been working with a client this week who started using Preditive Index® in their applicant screening process after ADVISA took them through a custom training program.  Recently, there had been a hiccup and some less than ideal communications around one recent hire, so they were coming back for guidance.  We sorted through the bumps they'd had and here's a truth that emerged:  there are some very delicate aspects of hiring, regardless of if you use personality assessments and which one you might use.

1. When you're doing candidate screening, you have to know what you need and you have to know your deal-breakers, but you also have to know where you have wiggle room.  In other words, you have to apply wisdom. For example, you say you need 10 years experience, but this is actually one you can fudge on when you get somone with 8 years experience with really tremendous work during that time, right?  But you know that someone with only 2 years experience just won't work - deal-breaker.  Same thing if you're using personality assessment: you have to know the critical personality traits you need, and then you have to consider where you have wiggle room.
2. Reprioritizing is a reality.  You can start a search knowing that you want a certain kind of experience, a certain personality, and you're willing to pay a certain amount, but you may have to move around on some or all of those as you look at your candidate pool.  This happens in the hiring process with or without the incorporation of a personality assessment.
3. Hiring decisions and search status should be communicated by Human Resources (or one designated person who's coached on how to do this, if there's no HR).  This helps protect the company against risk and helps provide the best experience for candidates.
4. When you reject a candidate, resist the temptation to explain why.  This really gets hard when a candidate comes asking why they weren't offer a job.  The best answer is always, "Another candidate fit our needs better."  Or, if no one was selected, "We just didn't find the right candidate."  In both cases it's good to add, "You're welcome to apply again in the future."  That's it.

There are multiple products in the marketplace for scripted interviews in which every candidate is asked the exact same questions - the interviewer literally reads the script.

Understandably, HR departments and hiring managers find this to be appealing for candidate screening because it's simple: the script tells everyone involved exactly what to do.  Interview scripts I've seen can also be very comprehensive, or exhaustive, depending on your standpoint. 
 

1. interviewers disengage from thinking and do not ask candidate-specific questions or important follow-up questions;
2. candidates feel “depersonalized” and lose interest in the opportunity.

Is this how you want hiring managers and top candidates feeling?  Would you describe this as best hiring practices? 
 

Consider an alternative: structured interviews. 

Like scripted interviews, structured interviews have a pre-determined format that eliminates haphazard questioning and helps interviewers cover the critical areas and avoid unimportant (or non-compliant) questions. However, structured interviews support customized interview questions for a particular candidate. This customization engages the interviewers more, elicits more meaningful information about the candidate, and provides a better experience for the candidates. 

Here are important elements for a successful structured interview as part of your applicant screening process. 

• Facilitation - Designate someone as the facilitator for the interview.  This is the "ringmaster" who helps to keep the discussion focused and flowing.
• Team - Interview as a team, so that people can take turns listening and thinking, rather than just trying to think of the next question. 
• Deal-breaker list - List the critical qualifications for what someone needs to know and how they need to do their job.
• Interview segments - Rather than a list of questions, take a deal-breaker and consider it to be a segment of the interview where multiple questions are asked around the same factor. For example: With a sales person, explore how strategic they are with selling.  Start with, "I see you exceded goal each of the past 4 years.  Tell us how you did that." Then keep peeling away the onion to get to how they accomplished this (and consider if how they did it fits with your needs). 

If you'd like to learn more about structured inteviews, contact me at ADVISA - we can explore how structured interviews may work for you. 

PART 3 - Cover your deal-breakers early and efficiently

Previous posts in this series about best hiring practices:
Set yourself up for the right candidates
Really know what you need
A different perspective on interviewing

PART 2 – Set yourself up for the right candidates

Previous posts in this series:
Really know what you need
A different perspective on interviewing

In this post, I’m going to cover how you market the position. But how does this relate to screening candidates? How you market the position is critical for attracting the right candidates and setting up realistic expectations. The right posting will actually take out some of the work with applicant screening. 

Let’s review the work from the last posting about this Sales Rep position we're using as our example:

• Goal:  Expand our product into the student market
• Need: Three sales reps who will aggressively push our product into the student market through in-person sales at events that attract college-age students. Each rep will be responsible for $50,000 in sales quarterly.
• Requirements: In order to be successful, a new sales rep must be highly social (able to engage the students), persuasive and results-driven.  He/she must be able to work independently (will travel to events alone).  He/she should have demonstrable success accomplishing goals through working with people. 
• Logistical requirements: Away from home 2-3 nights/week. Drive up to 8 hours per day. $25,000K base and $30,000-$45,000 commission. 

Here would be a job posting that would support your recruiting strategy and help you target the right person.

Do you get fired up in groups when you can connect with lots of people? Do you thrive on challenge? Would you rather be out and about rather than tied to a cubicle?

XYZ Products is looking for three dynamic Sales Reps as we expand into the college student market. You will attend the most exciting concerts, athletic and other events that attract college students. There, you’ll engage students with our product and make sales to customers you have won. We’ll provide you with training on the product and our specific sales strategy – your ongoing input will help us continue to develop our message and build sales.

As a Sales Rep, you’ll work independently traveling across Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois to events – we cover the costs when you’re gone overnight, which will be 2-3 nights per week. We’ll reimburse you for mileage or provide you with a car. After your month long training, you’ll have a $25,000 base and commission of $30,000 just for meeting your sales goal ($50,000 quarterly), but you can earn another $15,000 beyond that, as well as special incentive bonuses.   Check out www.xyzcompany.com to learn more about what it means to be part of our team.

If you’re social, independent and ready to deliver results, we’re ready to support your success and reward you. Send your cover letter and resume to hiring@xyzcompany.com. 

Everything in this posting ties directly back to the identified needs. It is clear about what it takes to be successful and the logistical parameters. Your candidate screening will be helped by this posting, because there will be a self-selection aspect to candidates. Even someone who is interested in sales, but inside sales-types will likely not apply – this just isn’t the right position for them. And that’s okay – you want to spend your valuable time only on the candidates who are a great fit. 

Now that the proactive parts of screening (setting the right vision and smartly marketing the position) out of the way, in my next post I’ll discuss actual strategies for applicant screening. But if you can’t wait, contact me – I’d love to hear your challenges and see how we can help.