Recruiting The Perfect Person
Anyone who has recruited will know just how hard this is. You can describe the
perfect candidate, even picture them, you know their background and ambitions -
but finding them seems almost impossible and every "near miss" just seems to
add to the disappointment.
Why is this? Most of us start off with the absolute ideal as far as skills and
personality are concerned. As mentioned earlier, this approach will almost
always make the process less than successful as the perfect person with skills
in all the relevant areas, may have a personality that doesn’t fit. In
addition, if the person is already at the level of the job it is quite possible
that they won’t be happy for long in that position before they ask for
promotion or "something different.
One of the most difficult and yet the most important aspects of recruiting is
the interview. Not many of us have much experience in this area and yet we rely
heavily on this one hour to give us all the answers about a potential
candidate.
A couple of ideas:
- be as prepared as possible before hand
- try drafting some competency based or targeted selection questions. This is
really only useful if you can identify the important skills beforehand, and
apply the same questions to every interviewee.
- don’t rely on written references (I have never seen a bad one) and if you are
not sure about somebody, ask them to come and spend half a day in the job, if
possible. Not only will you find out how committed they are to your job, but
everyone else in the can give their opinion - if you want it!
Alternatively, ask potential candidates to write a one page submission on why
they want the job. Never fails to sort the don’t cares from the serious ones!
