Healing Employment - Interviewing Reality Check

Third in a Series on the "Seven Stages of Engagement"

As talk of our nation's unemployment rate continues to surface in the media, employers must re-focus on how to better recruit and hire new employees for their companies. With renewed attention to the seven stages of engagement in the process of finding new recruits, employers need to understand and potentially repair each stage by applying creative and important methods for success.

In the employment process, the third key stage of engagement is INTERVIEWING. Once you've successfully attracted a quality applicant pool, then suited and sifted your way through to select your top candidates, how do you effectively spend your time with the most promising talent?

Interviewing Illusions

Today's interviewing illusions include:

-- It is a candidate-rich environment, so hiring managers are in the driver's seat

-- Unemployed candidates are not top talent

-- Comparative shopping is a good practice

Let's burst these illusions right here and now. Yes, it is a candidate-rich environment. However, starting in late 2009, many organizations cut 20 percent of their workforce. Much of the talent with the highest salaries was cut, so lots of top talent was added to the applicant pool. This point also pokes a hole in the illusion that unemployed candidates are not top talent. Finally, the notion that hiring authorities are in the driver's seat and have the luxury of comparative shopping with top talent is a bust. If you're interviewing a talented professional, they will likely have at least two other opportunities in the mix.

Stand Out From the Crowd

You don't want to be a "typical" hiring manager, so get creative:

Research - Prior to interviews, pull up the candidates on Linked In to find out more about them, and work what you know about them into the interview. It's personal, and the candidates will feel you are genuinely interested in them. They will likely leave wanting to work for you.

Be ahead of the pack - Interview all of the top candidates on the same day and send a text message that very afternoon to your top candidate(s) asking them back and to be prepared to interview YOU. You have positioned yourself as the employer of choice.

Communication - As a rule, the hierarchy of candidate communication is: snail mail is trumped by a phone call, a phone call is trumped by email, and email is trumped by a text message.

Finally, when interviewing job applicants, remember to be humble. An interview really is a two-way street.

Stay tuned for the next installment in Decision Toolbox's series when we will explore the fourth and fifth stages of engagement: HIRING and ONBOARDING.

by: Kim Shepherd

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