Hiring is one of the most complicated tasks within an organization. Without a proper pre-employment screening process you are decreasing your productivity, wasting significant amounts of your recruitment budget, and wasting your time that you could be using to work on tasks delegated to you daily. The three following techniques to be used BEFORE scheduling a face to face interview will not only save you time and productivity, it will give you a better idea of whether or not this candidate who looks great on paper, is a good fit for your organizations environment and culture. The follow techniques will also help eliminate any last minute candidate rejections and prepare you for the obsticles that a candidate will have to face when accepting your position.
1. Do not just ask for a resume. Ask for a portfolio.
The first step to candidate prescreening is verification of required qualifications by reviewing resume, checking license, checking registrars, and verifying education and previous employment. One way to streamline this is to ask each candidate when applying to submit all required documentation with resume. i.e. “Please submit resume, copy license verification, copy of degree/diploma or transcripts, and copy of certification to be considered for this position. NO resume will be considered without the requested information*.” This simple statement will gather all required information to form complete portfolios of candidates interested in your position, and will save you a great deal of time in verifying qualifications. If a candidate is truly interested in a position then they will do everything necessary to be considered for an interview. If you have a candidate who does not send in the required information then you can almost certainly be sure that they do not qualify for this position, or they are not truly interested in the job. This statement will create a portfolio of each qualified candidate for your files to share with the department manager.
2. Schedule a 15 minute prescreen interview before scheduling a time for the candidate to speak to the department manager.
Once you have a candidate who has submitted their “portfolio” of qualifications, and you can be sure that they meet the minimum requirements you can move on to scheduling what we call our “Personal” phone screen interview. This phone screen can consist of questions like the following:
• What kind of personality/ person do you work best with?
• What did you like and dislike about your current and previous jobs?
• If you could change one thing about your last job what would it be?
• When faced with a problem how do you usually deal with the situation?
You can also probe the candidate even further in reference to any obstacles they may have to overcome when accepting a new position with your organization by asking questions like the following:
• Are their any obstacles that you will have to overcome to relocate to this area?
• Are their any obstacles that you will have to overcome when considering a career change?
• What are your salary expectations?
These questions among others are going to give you a good idea of how they fit within your company’s specific environment, team, and culture. They will also prepare you for any hurdles you might encounter with a particular candidate when getting closer to the time of offering that candidate employment.
3. Equip the department manager with the candidate’s portfolio and “Personal” phone screen prior to scheduling a phone interview between the department manager and the candidate.
Following the phone screen the next step for you is probably setting up a phone interview with the department manager(s). Because prior to this you have already verified minimum qualifications, have an idea of personality fit, and have an idea of any hurdles you may have to overcome when hiring this particular candidate, you are less likely to encounter any “surprises.” The only thing left for the department manager to do is speak to the candidate and formulate their own opinion about the candidate. At that point you and the department manager will have all the tools necessary to figure out if you are going to take the next big step of bringing this person in for a face to face interview.
These three techniques will greatly decrease the time and money spent by your organization for interviewing new candidates. The portfolio and “personal” phone screen will better prepare you and the department manager for making the decision to spend the money and time in bringing the candidate in for a face to face interview.
Allied Search Partners can become a full service extension to your HR department by offering the following services:
• Attraction of candidates
• Employment Prescreening: Phone Interview, Background Check, Reference Checks (1 and 2 rounds), Employment Verification, Education Verification, Registrar Verification, License Verification, Drug Screening/Tests
• Offering the candidate employment: Salary Negotiation, Counter Offer Issues
Please contact us today about our pre-employment screening and the opportunity to fill your next open position!
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