Hiring – Page 2 – Vinehouse Hiring

Should you hire overqualified candidates?

This question is a tricky one.

Years ago, I was a Production Manager in an electronic factory and needed an assistant. As I sifted through the applications, I spotted one I recognised. It was from the father of an old school friend. He was massively over-qualified. His last salary was well over twice what we were offering.

Because I knew him, I thought I’d get him in for an interview anyway. He was amazing. He had 30 years of really valuable experience and was clearly very knowledgeable. He was also very nice. But, unfortunately, after 25 years of service to his previous employer, he and all his colleagues received a letter telling them not to come in on Monday.

He said he didn’t really need a vast salary; he just needed an income to keep him going till his pension kicked in. Because of this, he didn’t mind taking a massive pay cut.

My boss and my colleagues thought I was mad to take him on. They were all convinced he would leave in a few weeks and be too old to do a good job.

As it happened, he was still there five years after I’d left. Not only that, but he did a phenomenal job, and I learned a great deal from him.

The trick here is to find out why the over-qualified candidate wants the job. So often, there is a perfectly good reason that makes complete sense. Of course, this isn’t always the case, and that’s why you need to check this area carefully, but you need to stay open-minded. This is the key, don’t just make assumptions about the person and the reasons.

Being too well qualified is never a good reason on its own to reject a candidate. You could be turning away an absolute bargain.

Hiring

A Strange December for Hiring and Recruitment

Usually, the flow of candidates slows down considerably in December, as you will know if you’ve ever tried to hire anyone around this time of year.

Not this year. We have seen such large numbers of candidates for some of the roles we are working on at the moment that we had to pause the ads to have enough time to respond to all the candidates.

I thought it might just be these particular jobs, but I was talking with our Indeed account manager just yesterday, and he says it’s been happening across the board. He thinks it may be because of all the uncertainty and tough financial situations, and this is encouraging more candidates to apply at this time than usual.

There is no sign of the rush slowing down.

So, if you are thinking of hiring anyone, now is a much better time to start than you would have thought. But you must make sure you get back to candidates quickly. We know you may well be very busy at the moment, but a delayed response is a great way to lose good candidates.

We have even had some really excellent candidates for remote Machine Learning Engineer positions (these are pretty hard to find). Our client then needed to change the requirements at the last minute and locate people on-site. This meant our candidates no longer met the key location requirement. So let me know if you are looking for any Machine Learning candidates or know someone who is.

Just get in touch if you have any questions or would like a quick chat.

Hiring

Why hiring is more difficult at the moment and 3 things you can do

If you’ve tried hiring anyone recently, you may have noticed that it’s more difficult than usual.

There are all kinds of reasons for this. First, there are fewer people looking for jobs (quite a lot of people decided they really didn’t want to carry on working after being in lockdown). Second, there are more jobs in some sectors. In addition, there aren’t enough people with some of the key qualifications required. The list goes on.

This means that it’s very much a candidates’ market at the moment and probably will be for some time.

We have seen fewer applicants overall for most roles, and also, fewer applicants are a good match applying for roles.

So, what can you do about it?

Here are some key things you can do:

Make sure you are offering the right package – not just pay but also added benefits. If you are a small company, you can often be much more flexible than a large corporation. Offering a few extra days off or some flexibility has huge value for many candidates and can be a very low cost to your company. We have seen clients lose very good candidates because they were not prepared to offer a little flexibility. One client was not happy to offer any time off in the first year. The top candidate’s mother had a heart attack, and the candidate wanted to have a couple of days to visit her as she was some distance away. The client would not include this. To me, this seemed a very short-sighted (and heartless) response. The candidate turned the offer down.
Respond very quickly to candidates. Many companies take weeks to respond – seriously! In that time, a lot of candidates, particularly the good ones, get other jobs. When I say quickly, I mean within a day. This means you need to have a good system in place for getting back to them, even if it’s just a short call or email to thank them for sending in their resume. (My own daughter applied for a lot of waitressing jobs when she left university. One company got in touch three months after she had applied and asked if she was still available; they seemed surprised when she wasn’t!)
Make sure you are ready and prepared with your offer, don’t start working it out after you have finally decided to hire the candidate.

I know these things sound really basic, but you’d be amazed at how many people get these things wrong. These key tips can give you an advantage over other employers.

Just get in touch if you need some help; we’ll be happy to talk.

Hiring, Webinars

Hire Once Hire Right

With Nancy Slessenger and Marketer Perry Marshall

In this webinar hiring expert Nancy Slessenger discusses how to avoid the biggest hiring mistakes: –

– Not being clear on what you really need
– Writing an ad that shuts down your campaign
– Using resumes
– Not using application forms
– Asking really bad questions

This webinar was hosted by Perry Marshall and presented by Author and Hiring Expert Nancy Slessenger of Vinehouse Hiring.

If you’re thinking of hiring, or need help, come join our Hiring Advice Forum either on Facebook or LinkedIn

Hiring

Five key steps to a successful hiring and recruitment campaign

A vital recruitment tool that you need to be using is a task-based assessment that is not only a barrier to poor candidates, but is a great way of highlighting a really good candidate. But it’s not that simple. Before you even get to that stage there are a number of steps that you must follow to design a successful recruitment strategy.

Here are the five key elements:

1. DEFINING WHAT YOU NEED – Clear objectives, a job description, a person specification that defines the person you need in the role, including their profile, to get everything achieved in the way you need it to be done.

2. RESEARCH– Information specific to each post that tells you if the kind of people you need are available, where to find them, what package they need and any specific issues you might have filling this post in your location.

3. ADVERTISEMENT – An advertisement that only attracts the kind of people you are looking for, not hundreds of unsuitable candidates. Even adverts can be designed to attract candidates that have the right characteristics and deter those that don’t. Pretty neat,huh?

4. LOW OR NO EFFORT FILTERS –Ways of filtering your candidates that require little effort so not searching through mountains of resumes and CVs, making it as easy as possible to identify good candidates quickly and early in the process and reject the poor ones.

5. CANDIDATE ASSESSMENT– A method for assessing candidates objectively against all your criteria (which could be 50 or more). This needs to be easy and quick to do so you can tell at a glance which candidates meet your criteria and which don’t.

The core purpose of a hiring or recruitment process is to find new employees who will achieve the objectives and goals you have, in the way that you need them to be achieved. In other words, to do exactly the job you require.

Remember, when you use all of these five steps all of this is done before you even see the candidate.

Using an effective process it’s quite possible to filter out most of the poor candidates very early on, so you can focus on a small number of promising applications and be very thorough in your assessment of them.

I would put money on the fact that anyone who made a bad hire wasn’t using a thorough process including all the steps I’ve listed.

“How is this better than picking people out from their CVs like I’ve been doing for years?”

To give you something more concrete, here are a few examples of how modern hiring and recruiting is being used to find the right candidates with less time and effort than it often takes to get the wrong ones (notice how these examples are not limited to particular roles or steps in the process, they cover a wide range of tools and jobs):

A poor candidate applies and is directed to your web-based assessment. He or she does not even bother to fill it in because he or she can’t answer the questions, so is immediately eliminated with no effort from you. In fact you are not even aware it’s taken place because it’s completely automated. (NO EFFORT FILTERS)

The results of a web-based assessment from a good candidate with the skills you are looking for arrives. You quickly scan the table of the results that includes 20 other candidates and can instantly see the candidate with the best answers. Notice you have not had to trawl through any CVs or resumes trying to work out which is the best.

Three candidates move forward to an audio interview. You get a table of the results which have already been assessed for you. You merely have to confirm which candidate you would like to take to final interview, the rest is automated.

You have a candidate for a receptionist post. As part of her final interview, you put her on the desk for half an hour. During that time she sells £400 worth of products (absolutely true story). You now have some really useful and reliable evidence about her sales skills.

Instead of a pile of resumes and CVs from people who only vaguely seem to meet any of your requirements, you get the details of a small number of candidates with clear evidence on how they match up to your agreed criteria.

If I haven’t convinced you that this is a better way then I wish you the best of luck. If I have convinced you and you would like to know more about how to do this then I’ll see you soon!

To your success,

Nancy Slessenger

Hiring, Interviewing

Should you ask all candidates the same questions?

My very first job as a school governor (equivalent to a school board member) was to recruit a new deputy head.

It was quite clear who the best candidate was and I can say, without doubt, that we recruited the wrong candidate. I arrived at the meeting and was given a piece of paper with my question on it. I had to ask all the candidates this one question. My other eight colleagues had their own questions, which they also put to each candidate.

The candidate was sat on a chair in front of the long table where we all sat.

I could not believe that people were still using this process.

When I asked the other governors about their method they told me that this was ‘fair’ and we had to treat all candidates the same. This is to completely misunderstand the whole recruitment process.

The purpose of the interview

In this case (because the process was so poor and the interview was the only screening we were using) the purpose of the interview was to identify if the candidate could do the job.

Instead of asking about actual experiences and finding out what the candidate had achieved, we were asking “What would you do if…?” questions whose answers were completely unreliable (this was clear from the performance of the individual we recruited).

How can it be fair to ask different questions?

Your objective in this kind of interview is to identify if the candidate has specific skills and behaviours. To do this you need to employ your investigative skills. Many candidates have excellent experience, but are poor at letting you know. So you have to dig.

Now it may be that you start off with the same question. Here’s a recent example:

Have you made any unpopular decisions?

Depending on the answer of the candidate, you really need to follow this up with very different questions:

Candidate: Yes

Interviewer: What was the most difficult?

Candidate: I don’t think so

Interviewer: What about decisions that your team or boss did not immediately like?

Candidate: Unpopular with whom?

Interviewer: With your team.

Now it may be in this case the interviewer thinks the job is going to involve lots of unpopular decisions because that’s what it would be like if he did the job.

But usually you are asking about unpopular decisions because it is likely to lead to examples of the specific skills you are looking for. These could possibly be negotiation skills, resilience or communication skills.

But let me take you back to some recruitment I did where we were looking for managers with just such skills. My client defined “resilience” and being able to keep calm and to your course of action in the face of hostility. I had designed a very robust process for these candidates.

They had to take part in various activities and role-plays while we observed them. Every now and then we would see candidates where we could find no examples of resilient behaviour through the entire day. Not because they weren’t resilient, but because they were such good negotiators that they never encountered the hostile behaviour that other (often more argumentative) candidates seemed to attract.

So a really skilled candidate would have found ways to make “unpopular decisions” palatable and may not even see them as “unpopular”, which would mean you would not get very useful evidence from this question.

Different questions

You need to have a selection of questions so that if you do not get examples of the behaviours and skills you are looking for from the first question, you have plenty more areas to search in. This is not cheating and it is not treating people unfairly.

When I prepare lists of questions for clients to ask their candidates in the final interview, I make sure there are alternatives if first one doesn’t give you the information you need. This is much fairer to the candidate who just hasn’t had the experience you are asking about. It’s also fairer to you, because it means you are more able to find the candidate you need.

What happened to the candidate who should have got the job?

In case you are wondering about my original example here, the candidate who should have got the job, Liz, was already head of science at the school. She didn’t get the job because she was “too good in her current role, we can’t afford to lose her from that”.

Of course we did lose her – she went to another school as their deputy head and I’d be very surprised if she didn’t go on to be an excellent head teacher. She did well but we lost a very good member of the team.