Saturday, February 23, 2008

Does Your Interview Process Work or Interfere?

The headlines are all telling us that we are either in recession or on the brink of recession. Yet anyone connected with hiring is complaining about labor shortages.

Obviously, these shortages don't exist if you are in the mortgage business or recruiting for some areas of retail operations. Everywhere else, I am hearing complaints that is extremely difficult to find skilled AND unskilled labor (unskilled labor is a misnomer because most of it requires greater skills than it did 10 years ago).

So what can you do to streamline recruiting to insure that talent you want to hire does not disappear before you have a chance to extend an offer? Two of my clients have a lot of the process down well.

First of all, they are large firms that hire many people in a year. One has two core people doing recruiting; the other has many and follows the same procedure.

Both spend time interviewing and evaluating their recruiting sources. Once a recruiter becomes a vendor, they receive a lot of information about each job with which to do an assessment. Specs are not simply, "We need someone with 2-4 years of experience with x" or "We want someone with 15 years experience with a with emphasis on b". Specs provide useful information about the skill in the context of the job to be performed so that I can adequately describe the role and the function the person will be performing.

Once a resume has been submitted, HR and I discuss the person so I can learn how they evaluate and assess people for the job, saving time when I evaluate others.

HR does no interviewing with the first firm; they prefer to have candidates interview with 2-3 people from the department. If that goes well, a Managing Director may choose to schedule an appointment and interview the person; they may not. An offer is extended.

The second has HR do an in-depth initial interview and then will fly a group of people in for an interview day on a Friday. The flights will occur Thursday afternoon and evening prior to the interview so that if there are flight delays it generally will not impact the interview schedule. The candidate is met at the airport by a car and driver and they are put up overnight at a hotel near the interview site.

Candidates are interviewed by no fewer than three people and as many as five before a car returns them to the airport for the flight home.

The interviewers commit to communicate their decisions in writing no later than the following Wednesday (usually, they are received on Monday). If they want to hire the person, the candidate then completes an application and provides wage verification and an offer is extended.

Visa transfers are OK.

Notice how quickly this occurs?

Does your interview process come to a conclusion within 10 calendar days?

(By the way, if your process occurs too quickly you may scare some potential hires and cause them to turn down your offers).

There is competition for talent, that there is no doubt about. I hope you want to compete for the best and not chase the leftovers.


Jeff Altman

The Big Game Hunter
 Concepts in Staffing
thebiggamehunter@cisny.com

© 2008 all rights reserved.

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, is Managing Director with Concepts in Staffing, a New York search firm, He has successfully assisted many corporations identify management leaders and staff in many disciplines since 1971. He is a retired certified leader of the ManKind Project, a not for profit organization that assists men with life issues, and a practicing psychotherapist.

He is the author of “Get Yourself Hired NOW! The Big Game Hunter’s Guide to Head Hunting Your Next Job and Every Job After That” (in ebook and audio formats) and “Get Your Job Search Organized NOW!” (ebook) Both are available at www.getyourselfhiredNOW.com

To receive a daily digest of positions emailed to you, search for openings that The Big Game Hunter is working on, to use Jeff’s free job lead search engine, Job Search Universe, to subscribe to Jeff’s free job hunting ezine, “Head Hunt Your Next Job, or his staffing ezine, “Natural Selection”, or to learn about his VIP program, go to www.jeffaltman.com.

Explore some of The Big Game Hunter's products in "The Universe" series

Plus

Posted by at
Labels: , ,