Recruiting today is harder than it’s ever been before. While job seekers are prevalent and well-qualified, the actual act of recruiting has become more challenging thanks to complex, cross-disciplinary job positions and the rapid formation of new company sectors.
Luckily, this shifting hiring dynamic doesn’t have to render it impossible to find good employees. Read on to learn more.
5 Recruiting Practices to Adopt Today
To ensure that your interviews produce qualified, passionate, capable employees, put the following five recruiting practices into action:
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Abandon the old interview scripts
Many managers go wrong in interviews by simply asking overly simplified questions that fail to offer real insight into the candidate’s abilities or personality.
Questions like “what are your greatest weaknesses?” or “What makes you different from other candidates?” are so stale that they’ve become downright cliché. Because of this, companies who want to continue pulling in extraordinary talent in today’s world can do well to abandon those tired old queries for questions that aren’t so easy to answer robotically.
If your company has been relying on a standard interview sheet to recruit all candidates, now is the time to change it up. While it may be time-consuming, creating customized interview sheets for each job position is one of the best ways to ensure you’re finding the perfect fit for the job, every time.
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Look forward instead of back
Some of the most popular interview questions of all time revolve around historical behavior. Recruiters love to ask about challenges employees have faced and what they’ve done to address them.
While this insight is valuable for getting to know a candidate, the “looking back” approach is not ultimately effective at understanding how the employee would handle a future situation within your company.
Instead, consider asking a candidate how they would handle a problem your business faces often.
In addition to making the candidate take a more active role in the interview, this approach also aligns more closely with today’s career environment, within which everything moves quickly and changes rapidly, and past performance is not an indicator of future success.
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Ask for a test run
One of the best ways to assess a candidate’s ability to perform a given job is to have them perform it.
For example, if you were hiring a senior copyeditor, you may ask them to edit a piece of test copy for your review. Alternately, you may present him or her with a current problem that your company is facing and ask for solutions on how to address it.
Both of these approaches are active ones that allow recruiters to understand immediately which candidates are qualified, and which may not be the best fit for the position.
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Gauge the applicant’s knowledge of the industry
Today, the candidates most likely to succeed in dynamic and fast-paced positions are those who have a broad and multi-faceted feel for how the industry works as a whole.
To determine whether or not the candidate you’re interviewing possesses this, ask them to project several significant ways in which the industry will evolve in the coming years.
Not only will this offer insight into their understanding of the field, but it will also help you assess their ability to think big and lean into the future.
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Discover how the employee learns
Because so many of today’s positions require employees to learn at an incredibly rapid rate, it’s wise for recruiters to take the time to find out how their employees learn on the job.
To assess this with your candidate, ask him or her about the steps he or she would take to learn new skills on the job.
Would they attend classes, learn on their own, read books, reach out to colleagues, or attend conferences? Keep in mind that the approach the employee would take isn’t the critical part – an evident willingness to learn on his or her own is.
Better Recruiting – Made Easy
The climate of recruiting has changed markedly over the last several years.
Fortunately, recruiters who renovate their interview process using these five simple practices are better-prepared to locate and recruit qualified, unique, and adaptive candidates that will perform well in a wide variety of positions and industries.
To learn more about the best recruiting practices or to overhaul your company’s recruiting plan today, contact Crawford Thomas today!