Interview strategies for attracting and landing top performers
“Include a sales segment. Before you begin the interview, allocate enough time to "sell" the candidate on the job. When you're planning your interviews, divide them into time frames or segments for each assessment area and be sure and allocate at least one quarter of the time (in some cases, at least half for "hard-to-sell" candidates) toward convincing the candidate that, if offered the job, they would accept it. If you happen to know their "job acceptance criteria" in advance, it's relatively easy to put together a sales pitch. Remember to ask them at the end of the interview specifically, "Do you have any concerns?" and "Do you need any additional information in order to make your decision?" “
Dr. John Sullivan, in an article for ERE.net, (an outstanding resource for recruiters and non-recruiters who need to improve their recruiting skills,) wrote the above.
I find recently that more and more Hiring Managers are getting tired of being trained in how to interview candidates and it occurred to me while reading the above article that much time is being wasted in this training when it does not include the addition of a sales segment. I recently heard that a Hiring Manager resented the fact that he had to sell his company’s benefits to a passive candidate they were meeting. This is troublesome on many levels and until hiring and retaining are added as a KPIs for managers in China this is not going to change. I don’t try to fix everything at once (not since that Ford Pinto incident in High School, at least) so I usually suggest that my clients use a three-man approach to the interview process.
The order is not as important as the execution of this technique which entails using one interviewer to judge the candidate’s technical competency, another to judge the candidate’s soft skills and corporate ‘fit’, and a third to act as the company’s number one fan. Most HR recruiters are very good at the third role but are often asked to play too many of these parts and end up overwhelmed. The candidate ends up under whelmed. This model works with active candidates as well as passive candidates and is pretty quickly adopted by most organizations. It takes a lot of weight off of interviewers, as well, asking them to focus on just one aspect of the candidate and letting them use what they have learned in those interviewing classes.
When dealing with passive candidates, those candidates introduced by a head hunter who, while interested in what may be a better opportunity at your company, are genuinely happy at their positions, I highly recommend a sales segment for your interviews. A passive job seeker is one who is currently employed and not actively seeking a new job. He may not be happy in his current job but he is not job hunting and has been introduced to you by your headhunter.
For more ideas like these or to engage AdMark in a search please find me at brian @admarkasia.com
