Here’s something for our fellow recruiters!
We understand, that day after day, you encounter a lot of difficulties, and then you end up criticizing the hiring managers with whom you work. The same criticisms, again and again, from your hiring manager must be an indication that you need to change your hiring process, immediately!
Perhaps, our article today will help you become a bit more conscientious and understand why certain phrases from your managers come back to haunt you every time.
The lack of a structured method to evaluate the candidates you recruit is one of the biggest reasons why the hiring process becomes tedious. So, how do you apply the method in your evaluation?
We have the Questy demo that will help you understand the discrepancies in your procedure, but knowing things for yourself before you try something is always better.
Read on as we discuss in detail how you can make the hiring process more efficient as well as effective.
6 Phrases That Show You Why You Need to Become A Structured Interview Specialist
He should have done diploma/degree
This sentence alone can kill all your efforts to diversify your recruitments. How can you find new profiles that will give your business a different perspective if you always have to look for them in the same place?
Hiring from Questy can help you attract diverse candidates, but there’s a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed first.
The fundamental problem with this view is that a diploma or a degree is not a valid recruitment criterion. Apart from professions for which a specific diploma is compulsory to practice the profession, such as lawyers or doctors, you are not looking to recruit a diploma, you are looking for someone who demonstrates the skills, knowledge, and abilities required to perform the role.
The hiring manager is rarely able to explain to you concretely how the diploma/degree, he is asking for, makes candidates better.
The solution provided by structured interviews:
The structured interview method will help you to identify the criteria that will be necessary for the position. To achieve this, you will seek to identify critical incidents in the position: success or failure situations that will help you discover the skills and behaviors necessary for success in this role.
And that is what is most important. Focus first on the skills and behaviors you are looking for rather than choosing a certificate as a criterion.
Why? Because you know that they will be directly related to the position since you have deduced them from real situations.
Once you have helped your manager to identify the criteria he is going to look for in an employee, he will stop conceiving the diploma as a mandatory criterion for recruitment. What matters is that he has in front of him a candidate who has the criteria he has set with you.
I need to see the candidate face to face
Your manager wants to be in the same room as your candidate. This is not always possible. For him, it is mainly because he is convinced that he will not be able to evaluate it correctly if he cannot see the candidate in person. According to him, a video conference might not be enough to get an idea of the person.
The problem here is that his assessment is essentially based on how he feels about the person during the interview. Your manager relies more on his intuition than his reason to make his decision. This is what prevents him from considering doing the interview remotely.
The solution provided by structured interviews:
The structured interview method aims to assess interview candidates as objectively as possible. This means that you will avoid, as much as possible, being influenced by your intuition or your mental impression of the person. Take a live demo to get a better idea of how we can help you turn your interviews structured!
You will rely, as much as possible, on the answers that the candidate gives you to the questions you ask him. As your recruitment criteria are well defined, you can ask your candidates very relevant questions that will allow you to correctly assess your candidate.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the candidate is in front of you or thousands of miles away, what matters is your ability to hear the answers to your questions. A structured interview is based on the questions that are asked and not on the environment of the interview. Your manager can therefore conduct his interviews where he wants and when he wants.
What are your 3 strengths and your 3 weaknesses?
These are two questions that have caused the wastage of so much ink on job applications over the years. There are probably thousands of articles available on the Internet advising applicants on how to answer these questions.
However, these questions do absolutely nothing useful for the recruiter to evaluate the candidate. But your manager doesn’t necessarily know that. He imagines that since everyone is asking the question, it must be a good one.
The problem with these questions is that it is impossible to know which recruitment criteria you are trying to assess in the response. And that’s what makes it a bad interview question.
The solution provided by structured interviews:
One of the great strengths of questions in structured interviews is that each question seeks to assess only one of the job criteria. This is essential so that the candidate’s response allows us to assess it. If your question seeks to assess several criteria, you will not be able to get a clear answer for each of them. It is therefore better to focus on only one criterion per question.
Let’s understand this in detail.
The questions used in structured interviews mainly take two forms: Behavioral questions and Situational questions. In both cases, the question will seek to know how a person behaves in a given situation. There can be a situation in which they can potentially demonstrate the competence you are looking for during the interview. For behavioral questions, you will ask your candidates about a situation they have already experienced.
For the situational question, you are going to ask them how they would behave in a hypothetical situation. These are the questions that will allow you to best know how the person will behave in their future role. And it is for this reason that they allow you to correctly assess the candidate as per the criteria you have set.
Once you have explained to your manager the power of these question formats, they will be quick to adopt a more scientific method of assessing a candidates’ behavioral traits.
It’s no, I didn’t feel good about them
This is probably one of the phrases you dread the most. Why?
No one likes being treated unfairly – be it school grades or employee interviews. Sometimes you just don’t want to face the facts, but other times you might be right: The “halo or horn effect” can hurt your assessment. And the hiring manager doesn’t even have to mean it badly, his brain is simply playing a trick on him.
Because, often, the justification for refusal is missing. You cannot get more from your manager on why he’s rejecting your candidate. Often because your manager is incapable of knowing it himself. He cannot give you any objective reason to reject the candidate. Sometimes, this even hides outright discrimination against your candidate.
And the responsibility to inform the candidate falls on you. As a professional recruiter, you can’t say that your manager just didn’t feel good about your candidate. This is not valid feedback.
The solution provided by structured interviews:
The objective of structured interviews is to provide an objective answer to the question: does this candidate meet our needs?
As you have already determined the criteria earlier, you therefore clearly know, at the end of the interview, the criteria on which the candidate did not provide you with answers satisfactory. It, therefore, becomes much easier to give the candidates complete and detailed feedback on their performances during the interview. Feeling, no longer, takes precedence in the evaluation when an interview is well structured. The manager will therefore be able to point out the criteria on which he was not convinced by the answers of your candidate.
Let’s conduct another round “Just to be sure”!
This has happened to all of the recruiters! After a long interview process, if there is still a doubt in your manager’s mind when it comes to deciding to recruit your candidate. And he then asks you to schedule an additional interview with another person (a manager, a team colleague, an HR person) to have additional advice before making the final decision.
The problem with this additional interview round is that it is often an exact copy of an interview that the candidate has already taken during the process, simply with a new interlocutor. The candidate plays the parrot by repeating his background and his experiences, and tries his best to convince one more person that he is the right person for the job.
With the lack of a specific objective, the interviews follow one another, with different interlocutors, but without knowing exactly what they are evaluating. And since the questions are not determined in advance, they often repeat themselves from one interview to another. And with all of that, the hiring manager never gets close to making the final decision.
The solution provided by structured interviews:
In the structured interview method, you set your recruitment criteria initially. And, since you know that the questions you are going to ask in the interview will seek to assess these criteria, you can choose which criteria each interview will assess.
The structured interview allows you to plan the objectives from the start of the process. You can therefore organize each step of the process according to your criteria.
For example, with Questy, you can make clear recruitment and selection strategy along with access to an online recruitment tool that is cloud-based and can integrate well with your existing systems and software. Take a demo now!
Your manager, therefore, knows, even before starting the interview, what he will seek to assess, and what will be assessed in other interviews.
I would like to see other candidates to compare
We know you have already experienced this situation. You have presented a candidate who perfectly matches the needs of your manager but he/she has only one flaw for the candidate: to be the only candidate who corresponds to the needs, for the moment. And he/she, therefore, asks you to present him other profiles before making a choice.
Psychologists say this is normal!
Our brains are designed to make choices. Your manager is much better at making choices when he/she has several options. Here, your manager does not see that he has a choice between a good candidate and no candidate at all. He thinks he has a choice between 1 candidate who matches and, potentially, all those who match but aren’t present.
But, beyond this cognitive problem, the problem is that the rules for deciding to recruit a candidate are rarely clearly defined in the process.
The solution provided by structured interviews:
You already know, the structured interview will help you define your recruitment criteria upstream. But it also allows you, for each of these criteria, to set an evaluation grid for the level of skill sought. You can therefore choose, with your manager, from what level of evaluation he/she accepts that the person is recruited.
Like that, if you present your manager with a candidate who precisely meets the conditions that you have set together,
He/she cannot decide not to recruit a candidate.
Or,
He/she has set an ideal standard for deciding to recruit.
It’s now up to you to find the candidates who suit the needs. This allows your manager to make the recruitment decision calmly, without even having to consult you.
All in all,
The beauty of a structured interview method is that anyone can use it, even those who are not recruiters. In the extreme, your hiring manager will no longer need you to assess the candidates.
If you master this method well and teach it to your managers, it will allow you to confidently delegate part of the process to them. Questy allows you to create a structured Recruitment Workflow Path that makes jour job a cake-walk. Talk to us to know more!
