How do I Hire the Right Candidate for my Organisation?

We are recruitment specialists.  Our aim is to ensure that the companies we work with hire the best candidate on the market each time they have a position available.

The Key Part of the Recruitment Process is the Interview Itself.

As external recruitment specialists, we have little control over what happens in the interview itself.  We prepare candidates in advance of the interview to calm their nerves.  It is important that the candidate is calm enough to provide accurate and relevant information to the questions.

Every Interviewer has their Preferred Interview Style

However, we have little or no control over the questions that are asked during the actual interview. Hiring managers generally have a preferred style of interviewing when hiring people for their departments. For those managers that hire occasionally, interviewing can appear daunting. Sometimes, it is difficult for them to know what questions to ask.

For Interviewers that Hire Occasionally, Interviewing can appear Daunting

Traditionally, the types of questions would involve perhaps “how would you deal with a short deadline?” for example. The candidate will give their answer to this hypothetical question and it will be immaculate! We want to put forward our best selves in interview and this is the reasoning for doing this. This type of questioning doesn’t guarantee that the candidate would deal with the actual situation if it had arose though…

Competency Based Interviewing is Very Effective

Let’s take an example. Say you were working towards a deadline as part of a team of four and the deadline was realistic to achieve with four people. One person falls ill, a second person gets a call from home regarding an emergency and so two people remain on the team. Of the two people remaining, you have a social event this evening and the other person is a new staff member who hasn’t been fully trained. Now think back to your perfect answer to this hypothetical question and think about the actual situation being presented. From a team of four people to really just you, the short deadline becomes nigh on impossible without working significantly late tonight and missing your planned social event…

Do you think you would still react in an exemplary fashion…?

Describe an Actual Example in Your Answer to the Interview Question

We would like to think we all would, but that might not necessarily be the case. How can we show how we would deal with a short deadline? We describe an actual example of a particular time this occurred and we describe the factors around it along with how we actually handled the situation.

In order for an interviewer to learn more accurate information, the question needs to be asked differently. They need to ask something like “tell me of a time when you had a particularly short deadline and how you dealt with the situation”. This allows the candidate the opportunity to give an actual example and will give you the interviewer a more accurate picture of how strong the candidate actually is. These questions are called competency based questions and are very effective when used correctly.