Hiring: Gut feeling VS Technique

070713_EX_gutsTN Noises coming from the stomach can play us a bad move when the time to choose the correct candidate comes. It’s for sure that a role has to play, but we have to be careful and not let ourselves be lead only by the “belly”.

It’s also truth that 2 and 2 doesn’t make 4, and that nobody has the secret recipe to mix the correct members that will be part of our company. Not a small detail if you’re asking yourself what do you have to pay attention to while pointing at the people that will help you growing… the ingredients.

But it’s for sure, that interviewing and recruiting it not a 21st century’s concern. People have already thought about the two previous paragraphs already and several ideas, correctly combined with something I consider is a skill, help managers choosing the “most” correct people at the correct time.

Leaving aside the creativity and capability to take possibilities out of the blue that psychologist have, and to bomb 100 questions per second to the seating victim to come up with an endless papyrus that will tell you a ratio, percentage and quantification of each skill like you were measuring the amount of salt in water with a chemical reactor, there’s still normal people : ) that wants to find the equilibrium between “how to listen noises coming from my stomach” and “how to interpret the answers to which questions”.

It’s a matter of fact that there’s no secret to decode the path to success on an screening and interviewing process that will lead us to the “perfect” candidate, but we can rely on many techniques and guide lines that, at least, will help us reducing the risk of choosing those who are not for the position and, going deeper, “the most accurate one”.  Of course, non of these trends and schools won’t require a “pinch of personal taste”.

We need to know what do we want, to start thinking about “how do we fill that need”. Aiming to a target and start walking towards use to help: defining what we call the Person (or Job) Specifications and having a very clear picture of the job we are seeking candidates for, through a Job Description, we just have to design the interview based on those questions whose answers are going to shed the information we are looking for.

A Job Specification could be like this:

 

Essential

Desirable

Education    
Experience    
General and Technical Skills    
Other Attributes    

The document coming out of this table, should be considered as an organization asset and may have as many forms as ideas the interviewers have. The key point that cannot be missing, is the possibility of knowing from it, what’s the complete profile and required skills set of the person we are looking for.

Always avoiding poor questions, we should be able to ask those which are going to let us know what’s the matching level between whom we have seating in front of us and the ideal model we had already defined. Which questions and how to interpret them is a whole different story (post).

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