Did You Know This About Recruitment?

“Everyone knows how to recruit staff.”

That’s what you hear people say all the time.

However, if they read the research from the Journal Of Applied Psychology they might discover that, actually, they don’t.

For example how many of us have taken part in panel interviews where candidates are asked questions by different people on the panel?

Research has shown that employing staff after a panel interview is much less successful than employing them on the basis of a one on one interview.

What About Recruiting Key Staff Members?

Key staff include sales people, project managers, accountants, directors and the like.

For these sorts of jobs it’s vital to ask candidates to take a personality test.  After all you really don’t want an accountant who’d rather not be doing figures. Similarly you want to avoid sales people that either hate meeting people or are so full of themselves that they alienate staff and customers.

Don’t Ignore Qualifications But…

Don’t recruit anyone purely on their qualifications or achievements. You need to check whether they’d fit in and work in your organisation. And I don’t know whether you’ve noticed but a lot of successful entrepreneurs have not done too well at school!

Back To The Interview

When you do an interview create a deep rapport with the “victim” by talking about their life before school, what things interested them and then they’re more likely to tell you the truth about the project that went belly up,  the sale that went down the tubes or the stupid decision that cost the company money!.

Attitude And Aptitude Are Key

Finally, once you’ve checked their aptitude recruit for attitude. Yes you can recruit super effective techy people, but if they don’t document “because why should they” and you need stuff to be documented don’t assume they’ll change – they wont. If you need staff to be pleasant to your users – don’t assume that can be trained in – it can’t.

Attitude can be checked during interview. For example if you’re looking for a customer services rep. do they smile at you, do they hold your eye and yet do they have the backbone to politely say ‘No?’