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3 Principles for Hiring in The Great Resignation Era

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These past 20 months have seen a monumental shift within the hiring market. The balance of power is now tipped away from employers and  now leans toward candidates. In The Great Resignation era, employees are willfully resigning their jobs by the millions. Given the greater risk of turnover, it is now more imperative than ever that employers understand how to hire the right candidates for the right roles — a goal they can better achieve by focusing on three key principles for hiring in The Great Resignation era: pre-interview preparation, interviewer question technique, and the interviewer’s listening skills.  

Hiring Mistakes Aren’t Cheap

Even before The Great Resignation began, research indicated that a single hiring mistake at the management level could cost a company $1.5 million or more, annually — an average of 1.5-2 times the employee’s salary. Poor hiring decisions also decrease organizational productivity and workforce morale.

In their New York Times Bestselling book, Who: The A Method for Hiring, authors Geoff Smart and Randy Street share a number of best practices for avoiding common hiring mistakes during the interview process. As a Certified Forensic Interviewer, I see the three principles within this book as especially applicable for hiring during The Great Resignation — starting with pre-interview preparation.  

1. Pre-Interview Preparation: The Ideal Candidate Profile

Companies must ensure their interview process is designed to bring the best candidates to the fore. That process begins with what the “Who” authors call, “the scorecard”: a document which describes the organization’s hiring goals. Put another way, your company needs to ask the question, “What does our ideal candidate profile look like?” 

Answering this question can help the interviewer establish consistent guidelines for evaluating each candidate. The company should not build its candidate profile around the tasks that they want the candidate to execute. Instead, they should build it around the outcomes that the organization wants them to achieve. Once the outcomes are established, the interviewer can then identify the skills and attributes the candidate must possess to achieve those outcomes. 

Without a clearly established profile, interviewers may over-prioritize factors such as years of industry-specific experience and education or end up comparing candidates to one another instead of measuring how well each candidate’s skills and attributes match with the ideal candidate profile. 

2. Interview Questions & Technique

The kinds of questions an interviewer asks during hiring play an outsized role in the responses they receive–and, therefore, hiring outcomes. Several commonly used techniques can muddy the interviewer’s understanding of the candidate’s skills:

Behavioral Questions 

This type of question often starts with the phrase, “tell me about a time.” However, this opener gives the candidate leeway to take poetic license with their answer or to provide a canned response. 

To avoid this issue, an interviewer should rephrase questions to ask about specific times, events, or people.  Key phrases like, “when was the first time,” “when was the last time,” or “what was the most difficult time?” help prompt less generalized responses. The interviewer will also gain a clearer behavioral read as the candidate answers the question. 

Compound Questions

One of the other big mistakes interviewers make is asking the candidate long, compound questions — a series of questions instead of one. A compound question looks something like this: “Please tell me about a time you experienced conflict with one of your supervisors and what the conflict was about and how it started and how it made you feel?”  

An interviewer should ask one question at a time. This helps ensure the candidate answers the question and that the interviewer remains fully attentive throughout their answer. Once the candidate finishes their reply, the interviewer can ask any necessary follow up questions.

Questions With Implied Answers

Questions with a clearly implied “correct” answer are among the least useful. Examples include asking a candidate if they are able to perform a particular job function — asking an accounting candidate, for instance, if they know how to use Quickbooks. The candidate knows the answer the interviewer wants to hear, and will, in all likelihood, give that response.

Rather than asking about abilities, an interviewer should consider adding experiential elements to the interview process. For example,  if a job requires experience with a certain software, an interviewer might ask candidates to perform a task using that software. They can ask the candidate for a demonstration during the interview, or as a follow up.

3. Interviewer Listening Skills: Creating a Focused Environment

Interviewers often make up their minds about candidates’ strengths or weaknesses based solely on reviewing their resumes. These expectations create biases during the interview process. An interviewer might forgive poor answers if they believe they are speaking with a strong candidate. Vice versa, they may over-index on poor answers if they think they’re speaking with a weaker candidate. 

As an interviewer listens to each candidate they should pay close attention to specific word choices and apparent comfort-levels. They should take note of the way candidates describe their ideas and experiences. Does the candidate sound confident? Do they use appropriate, industry-specific terminology? Do they appear more comfortable answering some questions than others?

Ideally, an interviewer will not just listen attentively, but take a disciplined listening approach. Disciplined listening requires the interviewer to remain focused on their prime objective: finding the candidate most likely to help the company achieve its long-term objectives. It calls for interviewers to limit their internal monologues and to unearth the true value each candidate has to offer.

The Importance of Strategic Interviewing

As companies navigate the dynamics of the The Great Resignation, it’s important for interviewers to implement a solid pre-interview strategy for hiring the ideal candidate. Interviewers must refine their questioning technique and create an environment in which to focus and listen to each candidate. With these three considerations in mind, organizations can hire the right candidate for the right role, even in these difficult times.

Why You're Always the Interviewee and Never Hired

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I just finished interviewing potential hires for two open positions at my company, and I was reminded why I founded Come Recommended in the first place.

Back in 2009 when Come Recommended launched, it was a professional networking site for internship and entry-level job candidates and employers. But in order to gain access to the community, all members (including employers) had to “come recommended.”

Our technology allowed potential members to send recommendation invites, which brought recommenders to a page that first asked for their relationship to the candidate or employer and then provided a specific set of questions depending on that relationship. Unlike LinkedIn, Come Recommended members couldn’t choose whether or not to show these recommendations…they immediately appeared on the member’s profile after the recommender hit Submit. Once a member had three recommendations (good or bad), they were granted full access to Come Recommended’s online community.

Why all the trouble just to get into a networking site? Because I was fed up with the exact reason I’m writing this post today: Candidates often look great on paper, only to disappoint majorly at some point during the hiring process. Even though Come Recommended is now a content marketing and digital PR consultancy (I know, complete change of direction), I still find myself butting heads with this issue.

I am convinced — as I have been for a long time — that many more people would be employed if they just took a closer look at what they might be doing “wrong” during their job search.

Instead, they get angry and blame employers and hiring managers for their troubles. Don’t get me wrong, there are way too many companies out there looking for the “perfect” candidate they will never find. But you need to take control of your job search — your career — if you ever hope to be happily employed. And that might even mean paying someone (oh, the horror!) to help you perfect your application materials and hone your job searching skills. Believe it or not, career coaches and resume writers exist to help you — and have valuable skills worth paying for.

I wish I was wrong, I really do. I wish candidates that truly weren’t a good fit for my position looked just as bad on paper as they do during the interview process. Trust me, it would save me a lot of valuable time. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. And that’s not to say these folks aren’t a great fit for some other position out there — they very likely are — but not mine, which is my primary concern.

For one of the two positions I had open, I interviewed approximately 25 people — and had zero problem narrowing the list down to three after interviewing everyone. By their experience on paper (or in this case, their LinkedIn profiles), all 25 should have made excellent hires for this particular position. Why didn’t they? Here are just a few examples:

  • Nervous laughing: I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and call it nervous laughing, although one candidate was laughing so hard during the entire interview that I thought I was being punked on a radio show.
  • Going for a world “you know” record: How many times can someone say “you know” in the same sentence? Six, apparently. In. The. Same. Sentence!
  • Disliking a virtual working environment: One of the questions I ask candidates is what they liked most and what they liked least about their previous positions. One candidate told me she disliked working in a virtual (sometimes called remote or telecommute) environment…which Come Recommended happens to be. (This is made clear in all our job ads.)
  • Calling from a rave: Not one, but two candidates I interviewed had loud music and conversations going on in the background of their interviews. While I can’t confirm they were clubbing, it sure sounded like it.
  • Putting me on hold: Yes, that’s right, one candidate put me on hold for a while to confer with someone else in the room before answering a question.
  • Telling me your life story: The first question I ask candidates is the ol’ “tell me about yourself.” Your answer to this question should be anywhere from 30-90 seconds. Two candidates took 30 minutes (yes, minutes) to respond.
  • Never leaving your script: I have a feeling one candidate got a hold of my full list of interview questions from another candidate…because she stopped me at one point and told me I “missed one” that she really wanted to answer. She proceeded to tell me what the question was and clearly read her answer to it from a piece of paper.
  • Not truly wanting to work for my company: Nothing gets my attention more than a candidate who tells me she’d rather be in grad school or working at a law firm than my company. (Sarcasm.)

Unfortunately, this list could go on…and on. Some of you reading this might not even believe these stories because they seem too (trying not to write “stupid”)…unbelievable. I would never do something like that, you’re thinking. Really, are you sure? What I find unbelievable is that people would purposely tank job interviews. Perhaps it’s time you evaluate what you could be doing wrong in the eyes of hiring managers and recruiters…and do something about it.

Perils of Brand Abandonment: Strive for Shiny, Fresh and Authentic

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Brand is something that cuts both ways in the recruiting business. Candidates have personal brands – we talk about that a lot on the TalentCulture blog – and companies have brands. A company’s brand directly relates to it’s workplace culture. An excellent (and disturbing) article by David Lee on ERE.net has me thinking about the perils of brand abandonment – those moments when people, or companies, stop paying attention to the messages they’re sending out when they are hiring and retaining talent.

Brand, the way I talk about it with candidates, is a shorthand way of presenting yourself to others. It’s more than an elevator pitch, but it relies on the same idea: a condensed and polished presentation of a few key facts about you and why you’d be a good employee. As I’ve written here, a personal brand should present your skills, interests, personality attributes and values in a coherent manner that will be compelling and authentic to recruiters and hiring managers.

For companies the process isn’t that different. An organization/workplace may start with a mission statement, then move on to values and objectives, but the point of the exercise is the same: to create a compelling, credible, and authentic collective persona – a culture brand – that is compelling to customers, investors and valuable employees. Of course, we know workplace culture is so much more than a mere mission statement. Healthy organizations strive to make their brand consistent on all angles.

But sometimes, when you’ve worked to establish your brand, you start to believe the shorthand version. You drink the Kool-Aid. You stop listening, stop monitoring how people react, and stop thinking about the value of your brand.

Lee’s article describes a survey in which candidates describe horrific, dispiriting experiences they had with prospective employers. Read the article for particulars, but the net is this: treating candidates poorly at any point in the recruiting process leaves them with a bad impression of your company. It’s brand abandonment, and it’s completely avoidable.

Brand abandonment is a real risk for career seeking candidates as well.

Here are a few points of risk:

Social Media and TMI

Social media can be the enemy of brand for a job seeker. We’ve all heard the stories of candidates being screened out for Facebook and Twitter posts. Don’t put anything on social media you wouldn’t tell your grandmother. The not-cool grandmother. I’m not saying do not be authentic and interesting. If your not-cool grandmother does not accept your unique personality well then – perhaps we can ignore her. I want you to be you! Just be thoughtful. Protect yourself here.

Poor Interview Technique

Talk about what you can do for the employer. In an interview situation you need to reinforce the links between your brand value and the company’s brand, without being narcissistic. Don’t reveal details that aren’t relevant. You may have been an Eagle Scout, but that was then and this is now. Listen, don’t just talk.

Improper (or no) Follow up

It is absolutely imperative to follow up with a thank you note. Unless part of your personal brand is being rude, there’s no excuse for not saying thank you. No scented pink paper, check your spelling, sum up the key takeaway of the interview – What you learned about the company, why you’d be the right candidate, why it’s the right company/fit.

Check Your References Before the Interviewer Does

Don’t count on the boss you had three jobs ago for a great reference – make sure you’ll get one by making a call and running through what you need in a reference and what he or she is comfortable saying. Don’t trust your brand to someone else: make sure you’re on the same page before you hand out names and phone numbers.

Brand is a responsibility. It takes care, constant monitoring and periodic refreshes. You are your personal brand. And companies need to stay present and take full responsibility for their brand behaviors by being consistent and sensitive to the messages they are sending career seekers about their workplace culture. Bottom line: Use what you’ve got to keep it shiny and fresh.

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