Last week a Grapevine reader sent me a CV (curriculum vitae) he had received from a candidate, asking me if I thought it was a good candidate. It was a very poor CV, but that doesn’t mean the candidate is no good.

Here’s what one of our clients has to say about CVs:

“I get this warm fuzzy feeling when I think that our competitors will be taking on the candidates we didn’t … just because they have good CVs!

It’s what we would have done before.”

Paolo Lencioni, Partner APL Accountants

A little test

Here’s a little piece of homework for you. Identify the best and worst employees in your organisation or team. You know who they are. Now, check their CVs or résumés. Is there any correlation? Do your best performers have the best résumés? What about the worst performers?

When I did this years ago, I was shocked by the results. We had been relying on completely the wrong information and had misinterpreted the information we did have. That’s when I first started to develop the recruitment service we now provide for our clients.

We screen by getting people to do what they would be in the job. This makes choosing the right candidate so much easier.

Do you judge candidates by their CV or résumé?

What can you get from these CVs?

So many people I have met judge candidates on their CVs. This is a big mistake. Why? Well, because so may excellent candidates have really poor CVs or résumés and so many poor candidates have managed to get someone to write them a very good résumé.

The trouble with CVs

I often help people to write their CV or résumé and what strikes me every time is how poorly people sell themselves. Let’s take a current client. He is an amazing salesman. However, when it comes to selling himself, ‘underselling’ hardly begins to describe what he does.

He works in the field of magazine publishing. As you may know, many magazines are struggling with getting advertising revenue at the moment. If you publish an industry magazine you often send it to people for free and rely on advertising revenue. But advertisers prefer it if much of your circulation is to people who have requested the magazine. This guy turned a 0% requested circulation (i.e. no one who got it had asked to receive the magazine) to 100% requested. In other words he managed to get people to read the magazine and want it, so the advertisers were keen to pay for advertising in it.

He also came up with a new web-based platform for generating income for his magazine that, within 3 months of going live, was generating £5k ($7.5k) per month and is still increasing. He has taken so-called “dead” clients (clients who for years have not bought any advertising), resurrected them and turned them into profitable clients. And that’s just the start.

Needless to say, none of this was mentioned in his CV. If there were an Oscar for hiding your light under a bushel he would certainly be nominated in most categories. And remember, this is a top-notch sales guy. So just think what it’s like for normal people.

(If you would like to interview him, just let me know by replying to this email and I’ll put you in touch.)

You could be missing out on great candidates (and probably are)

In our recruitment process we don’t look at the CVs till we have screened in other ways. When we do look at CVs we are judging them using a few specific criteria. Unless the candidate needs to have good written communication skills, spelling and grammar are not included.

Did I hear you gasp at this point? I can understand that. But I can also tell you that we have recruited some excellent candidates who had very poor résumés or CVs, including bad grammar and spelling.

Get your criteria right

Your goal is to get the perfect candidate for the job. If you are hiring someone to write CVs then of course you expect a perfect résumé. If not, an excellent CV is not a requirement.

However, you can usually tell how much detail a candidate likes (a long CV indicates someone who likes detail). And you can often tell how frequently people like to change jobs.

Our recruitment service

Our recruitment service includes helping you all the way through the process, including screening candidates right from the first so that you don’t end up interviewing people who aren’t going to be good in the role. If the candidate doesn’t work out we help you to deal with that situation and hire a candidate who does work out at no extra cost. We charge a flat rate of £4500 + VAT – less than agencies charge you just to get you a CV or résumé.  To find out more contact us.

If you can’t wait that long, get our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

For the last 10 years I have owned a bright red Beetle car, Legolas. For the first time, this

My new Beetle in 2003

week he broke down.

I managed to get him into the garage and went off to do some shopping, hoping he could be repaired in time for my trip the next day. Finally they called me to say that it was bad news. There was really no hope. The turbocharger had broken and bits of it had been sucked into the engine. So the only way to repair him was a heart transplant.

I phoned Charlie with the bad news. As always, she came to the rescue and worked out a plan. Very shortly I had a hire car arranged.

So now I had a plan for a temporary solution. But my mind was racing with thoughts on how to repair my dear Beetle and get him back in working order again.  The idea of changing my lovely car didn’t even enter my head.

The hire car

My very kind neighbour, Mary, gave me a lift over to the car hire place and, with a heavy heart, I drove away in an almost new, anonymous blue plasticy vehicle, still carrying that fragrance so beloved of men; “Eau de New Car”.

It took me a while to work out how to open the boot. I was seriously concerned that I would not be able to plug my iPod into the stereo. But I was cheered to discover that there were heated seats. I decided to be grateful for small mercies.

The instruction manual

That evening, between sips of wine to help me get over the shock of my poor car, I leafed through the manual and was relieved to see that I would be able to plug my iPod into the sound system. Not only that, but it looked like I could plug it in in a rather more sophisticated way than before, so I would be able to switch the tracks using a button on the (heated) steering wheel.

I raced to the car and, sure enough, it worked.

Things were looking up.

The next hurdle was the sat nav. I had to work out how to use it in tim

e to pick up my daughter from an address I hadn’t been to before. This was a bit more of a challenge; till I got the car outside into the light and realised I’d been pressing the wrong button for the last 10 minutes.

The headlights

Much of my time was spent trying to work out how to turn the headlights off and how I had accidentally turned them on. At length I discovered that these arduous tasks are now carried out automatically depending on the level of light.

Trying something new – it doesn’t always hurt

As my experience with this car went on I started to realise that it might be time to get a new car, rather than repair the old one. At first I admit, I felt as though I was betraying my lovely old car. But after my 350 mile round trip, my mind was made up. (And to salve my conscience a dedicated Beetle restorer wants to buy the car and repair him.)

Many old ways are perfectly acceptable. But sometimes things have moved on and life can be a lot better than you imagined.

Why I developed our recruitment process

I was forced to develop this process because we work with so many clients in Australia. This means we must be much more efficient and use our resources, like the windows when we can speak, effectively.

I find it’s often the case that when you are constrained you make improvements that you just wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise.

So I have developed a process that, once set up, requires the minimum work from you (no more sorting through piles of CVs and resumes from people who are completely unsuitable) and also finds you better candidates.

Our recruitment process is different in some ways to what you have done before.

The frightening bit

The really frightening bit is only interviewing one or two candidates. So most of our clients end up interviewing more than that for their first recruitment with us, because it makes them feel safer.

However, once they realise that it’s a waste of time interviewing people who just aren’t right for the job and they learn to trust the process, it’s a different story.  

The key is that our process weeds out those who would not be suitable at an early stage, so you don’t waste your time or theirs on taking things further.

I would never have changed

The Beetle enjoys a weekend with friends in Cothelstone

I will confess that had it not been for my old car breaking down, I would never have

decided to get a new car. And I think that’s what you often do in many situations. You put up with how things are because you simply have no idea that they can be any better. You feel comfortable and safe so you don’t look for new ways.

Sometimes you need to say “goodbye” to the old ways in style. Here is a lovely video of the band Baltic Crossing saying “goodbye” to their car (who had an irretrievable breakdown just the day before my dear Legolas).

https://www.facebook.com/balticcrossing

Our recruitment service

Our recruitment service includes helping you all the way through the process; setting it up and helping you screen the candidates. If the candidate doesn’t work out we help you to deal with that situation and hire a candidate who does work out at no extra cost. We charge a flat rate of £4500 + VAT – less than many agencies charge you just to get you a CV.  To find out more contact us.

You’ll find it all in our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.

Should you ask all candidates the same questions?

My very first job as a school governor (equivalent to a school board member) was to

Should you ask all candidates the same questions?

recruit a new deputy head.

It was quite clear who the best candidate was and I can say, without doubt, that we recruited the wrong candidate. I arrived at the meeting and was given a piece of paper with my question on it. I had to ask all the candidates this one question. My other eight colleagues had their own questions, which they also put to each candidate.

The candidate was sat on a chair in front of the long table where we all sat.

I could not believe that people were still using this process.

When I asked the other governors about their method they told me that this was ‘fair’ and we had to treat all candidates the same. This is to completely misunderstand the whole recruitment process.

The purpose of the interview

In this case (because the process was so poor and the interview was the only screening we were using) the purpose of the interview was to identify if the candidate could do the job.

Instead of asking about actual experiences and finding out what the candidate had achieved, we were asking “What would you do if…?” questions whose answers were completely unreliable (this was clear from the performance of the individual we recruited).

How can it be fair to ask different questions?

Your objective in this kind of interview is to identify if the candidate has specific skills and behaviours. To do this you need to employ your investigative skills. Many candidates have excellent experience, but are poor at letting you know. So you have to dig.

Now it may be that you start off with the same question. Here’s a recent example:

Have you made any unpopular decisions?

Depending on the answer of the candidate, you really need to follow this up with very different questions:

Candidate: Yes

Interviewer: What was the most difficult?

Candidate: I don’t think so

Interviewer: What about decisions that your team or boss did not immediately like?

Candidate: Unpopular with whom?

Interviewer: With your team.

Now it may be in this case the interviewer thinks the job is going to involve lots of unpopular decisions because that’s what it would be like if he did the job.

But usually you are asking about unpopular decisions because it is likely to lead to examples of the specific skills you are looking for. These could possibly be negotiation skills, resilience or communication skills.

But let me take you back to some recruitment I did where we were looking for managers with just such skills. My client defined “resilience” and being able to keep calm and to your course of action in the face of hostility. I had designed a very robust process for these candidates.

They had to take part in various activities and role-plays while we observed them. Every now and then we would see candidates where we could find no examples of resilient behaviour through the entire day. Not because they weren’t resilient, but because they were such good negotiators that they never encountered the hostile behaviour that other (often more argumentative) candidates seemed to attract.

So a really skilled candidate would have found ways to make “unpopular decisions” palatable and may not even see them as “unpopular”, which would mean you would not get very useful evidence from this question.

Different questions

You need to have a selection of questions so that if you do not get examples of the behaviours and skills you are looking for from the first question, you have plenty more areas to search in. This is not cheating and it is not treating people unfairly.

When I prepare lists of questions for clients to ask their candidates in the final interview, I make sure there are alternatives if first one doesn’t give you the information you need. This is much fairer to the candidate who just hasn’t had the experience you are asking about. It’s also fairer to you, because it means you are more able to find the candidate you need.

What happened to the candidate who should have got the job?

In case you are wondering about my original example here, the candidate who should have got the job, Liz, was already head of science at the school. She didn’t get the job because she was “too good in her current role, we can’t afford to lose her from that”.

Of course we did lose her – she went to another school as their deputy head and I’d be very surprised if she didn’t go on to be an excellent head teacher. She did well but we lost a very good member of the team.

Our recruitment service

Our recruitment service includes helping you all the way through the process, including helping you with interview questions and screening the candidates. If the candidate doesn’t work out we help you to deal with that situation and hire a candidate who does work out at no extra cost. We charge a flat rate of £4500 + VAT – less than agencies charge you just to get you a CV. To find out more contact us.

If you can’t wait that long, get our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.

Induction – the final but crucial step in the recruitment process

I once worked with a company that made transformers. My project there reduced their turnover rate to 25%. This meant that, as a result of my work, only 25 people out of every 100 employees left every year.

You may think a 25% turnover rate is nothing to shout about. But it is when you know that before the project, it was 100%.

How on earth could it have been so high? It was this high because, once the company had got a new starter in through the door, they thought their job was over.

The terrifying induction

They would bring the new starter into the huge factory full of loud bangs and clangs and sit him or her down in front of a terrifying, greasy, noisy winding machine. Then they would run through the process of adding the coil windings to a bobbin just once before abandoning that individual to the mindboggling din of the factory. They didn’t even tell them where to go for the tea break.

Some didn’t stay long enough to find out.

I introduced a training program for new starters that helped them through the process along with an induction program that introduced them to the company. We got this improvement in just six weeks.

It’s not over till the new hire is performing in the role

There is no perfect recruitment process where the perfect candidate arrives on your doorstep with a perfect set of skills and behaviours for the job from day one. Every new recruit needs to be inducted into your organisation in some way. Even if that is just familiarising themselves with your process or finding out how to use your software.

Make sure they get off to a flying start

So it’s a good idea to have a plan ready to make sure that your new recruit will be up to speed as soon as possible and feel welcomed into your organization.

Clear objectives and measures

Clear objectives and measures

This includes having a clear set of objectives and performance measures right from day the start. The new hire needs to know what’s expected of them and get regular feedback on how they are doing. That way he or she can get up to the standard required quickly.

Sometimes things just don’t work out

Even with the very best process, there is always a chance that the candidate is not quite the right fit for you. If this is the case, you need to find out as soon as you can and deal with the situation. Often a little help or training can resolve the situation, but sometimes that will never be enough and you (both) need to admit to having made a mistake.

If you are monitoring your new hire’s progress carefully, you will spot this quickly and be able to deal with. You will be able to avoid a situation where someone is with you for three years and has cost you a fortune in poor performance.

Our recruitment service

Our recruitment service includes helping you all the way through the process, and does not finish till your new hire is performing successfully in the role. If the candidate doesn’t work out we help you to deal with that situation and hire a candidate who does work out at no extra cost. We charge a flat rate of £4500 + VAT – less than agencies charge you just to get you a CV. To find out more contact us.

If you can’t wait that long, get our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.

This week I had an email from a Grapevine reader after a particularly nasty experience at

Have you been bullied in an interview?

an interview. I was appalled by his examples. It was as though the interviewer had arranged the interview purely for his own amusement. He behaved as though he should never have invited the candidate for an interview and was now blaming him for that mistake.

So I decided to take a break from talking about recruitment to give a few tips on how you deal with really bad interviewers, and how to answer the questions our friend sent me. I hope you find this useful. (If you are interviewing, please do not treat your candidates like this.)

The questions

Here are just a few sample questions from the interview suffered by our reader (modified to protect the guilty). Remember these were all asked in a very aggressive manor.

“You point out in your application that you have worked in a wide range of projects.  Can’t settle, can you?”

“Have you worked in a manufacturing environment at all? Do you have any manufacturing experience?” (It was clear this was not the case from the CV.)

“Did you actually write your application? Are you sure? Would you like to change it?”

And of course, our old favourite:

“Why should I give you this job ahead of all the other candidates?”

You do not want to work for someone who bullies you in the interview

Let me make this clear. If a person behaves like this in the interview, before you have even started in the job, you would be well-advised to go elsewhere.

This behaviour (it was certainly bullying) is unlikely to be an isolated example. Apparently those who work for this person say he is nice. I wonder what they mean by ‘nice’.

What if you don’t have a choice?

What if you experience this not at another company but when you have to re-apply for your own job?

In this case it may be your organization has a bullying policy. It’s probably worth finding out what that is.

Also remember that bullying can have a detrimental effect on your self-esteem and you can end up thinking, completely wrongly, that you couldn’t get a job anywhere else. I have come across people in that situation.

Dealing with bullying behaviour

Remember, bullying is childish behaviour. The trouble is that it can catch you off balance. When this happens you can find your own behaviour being dragged down to the same level. That’s when you get problems.

Your goal is to keep your level of skill and behaviour up, and help the other person, the one doing the bullying, to start behaving in a rather more mature manner.

That means that you need to stand up to the behaviour, firmly and kindly. Not always easy, I appreciate.

In this case I suspect the manager had been watching far too much of “The Apprentice” and had modelled himself on that style, in the mistaken belief that it is an effective use of everyone’s time.

If you are interviewing, please be aware that this kind of questioning does not get you any useful information and is quite offensive.

Some answers to the questions

Interviewer: “You point out in your application that you have worked in a wide range of projects.  Can’t settle, can you?”

Response: “I see you have noticed that I have worked on a wide range of four different projects and your concern is that I would not settle on yours. Is that correct?”

If the interviewer answers that it is correct, just explain what happened:

“I was asked to move to each of the projects because of my expertise in _____. Even though I was reluctant to move, I understood the business case and agreed.”

Interviewer: “Have you worked in a manufacturing environment at all? Do you have any manufacturing experience?” (It was clear this was not the case from the CV.)

Response: “So you are looking for manufacturing experience. In the advertisement it was clear that this was not a requirement for this role and that you were looking for other experience. Have the criteria changed? What do you need from this role?”

Interviewer: “Did you actually write your application? Are you sure? Would you like to change it?”

Response: “You want to know if I wrote my application and if I’d like to change it? Yes, I did. What suggestions do you have for changing it?”

Wait for the answers.

Response: “That’s very useful, thank you” (Even if it’s rubbish.)

And of course, our old favourite:

Interviewer: “Why should I give you this job ahead of all the other candidates?”
Response: “In the advertisement/job description/person specification, you identified that you were looking for someone who

(give details)

I have

(give relevant details)

and experience of (give details) which I believe meet the criteria here in this job description/person specification/advertisement.”

Structure your answer

When people are bullying, they want attention. One of the things that often helps with bullying is to let them know you are listening (giving them attention). You do this by summarising their question as you begin your answer.

Then smile and calmly respond, possibly checking the facts. Try to think of them as someone who has simply misunderstood, rather than someone who is being deliberately difficult. This will make things much easier.

Get help with bullying

Why you don’t need to recruit the ‘best’ person for the job

Why you don’t need the ‘best person for the job’

When recruiting, most people insist they are out to get the ‘best’ person for the job. And of course that is an admirable aim, but a useless objective. This means you can easily end up recruiting the wrong person.

The problem is the word ‘best’

What do you mean by ‘best’? Do you mean the highest level of qualifications? Do you mean they have the ‘best’ experience? And what does ‘best experience’ mean anyway?

In fact if you are looking for the best person you will never know if you have found him or her, because there could always be another applicant round the corner who is ‘better’ in some way.

Write a proper objective

If you’ve read any of my posts here before, you’ll know how I feel about objectives and it’s just the same in this situation.

You need to have a clear definition of what you are looking for. This means that, once you find it, you can make the decision easily, you don’t have to worry about someone ‘better’ coming along.

Get the person specification right

To do this you need to get your person specification right. Then you can screen out candidates who do not match your criteria quickly and easily at an early stage with complete confidence. You will also find it much easier to spot the ones who do match the criteria.

And it makes the arduous job of searching through the applications much easier to delegate.  (Though if you use our process, you’ll find that can be much quicker too.)

Recruiting a business manager

Just this week I have been helping a client in the US recruit a business manager.  We worked out a very clear person specification and designed three tasks for candidates to complete. These were designed to identify if they had the prioritisation, planning and written communication skills we were looking for amongst other things.

Identifying the candidates who matched those parts of the person specification was quick and easy because we had clear criteria. That meant we didn’t waste any of our time or theirs.

It also means that, when I come to interview the few candidates who have got through that part of the process (one of them in the next half hour), I can focus on identifying if they meet the other personality criteria.

And, if she meets our criteria, we don’t have to hang on for more candidates. As soon as we think we have one who meets the spec; we can progress that individual to the final stage immediately.

Our recruitment service

Our recruitment service includes helping you all the way through the process, from defining what you need, to writing your and screening the candidates. If the candidate doesn’t work out we help you to deal with that situation and hire a candidate who does work out at no extra cost. We charge a flat rate of £3000 + VAT – less than agencies charge you just to get you a CV.  To find out more contact us.

Next week I’ll be going through Recruitment mistake 5: Thinking it’s all over once you have hired the candidate

If you can’t wait that long, get our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.

Have you ever used a recruitment ad that’s the same one you have been using for years,

How to Hire Well

just slightly modified? Have you ever noticed that many recruitment advertisements look the same?

I bet you can answer “Yes.” to at least one of those questions.

An effective recruitment advertisement

A good recruitment advertisement attracts the attention of the candidate you want to recruit – the one who exactly meets your specification, not 100s of unsuitable candidates.

How do you write effective job advertisement?

They key ingredients are personality and honesty. Now this may not be possible where you have standard advertisements that you have to use to fit in with policy, but in many smaller companies it is possible and not that difficult.

I work with a lot of small companies on this and we have had some spectacular results from making advertisements more effective. If you would like some help with yours,

I’ll be helping people writing job ads for free during April.

Just contact us now and we’ll arrange it.

Here is a structure I find that gets you good results

1. Introduction that speaks to the candidate you are looking for

Let’s imagine you wanted to recruit a left-handed table tennis player who had won a tournament. In this case, my ad might start:

Left-handed table tennis champion?

If you are a left-handed table tennis player who has won at least one tournament, we need you to join our team.

You need to grab the attention of the person you want immediately.

2. Are you the kind of person…?

This next section details out a bit more about the person you are looking for. The idea here is that you want the ideal candidate to say to him or herself: “That’s me!”

3. Who we are and what the job involves

This is where you give a few details about yourselves and what the job involves. Don’t hide the ‘bad bits’. Be honest. If there are nasty bits of cleaning up that need to be done – say so.

If you are passionate about what you do and started your company for a specific reason, put it in. Talk about what’s really important to you. This will chime with the kind of people who will fit in, but less with those who won’t (which is good, because you don’t really want to employ them).

4. What it’s like working here

In this section again, be honest and talk about your company or organisation. Are you a bunch of oddballs? Do you go down the pub on a Friday? Do you all bake cakes in your spare time? Or perhaps you are all Star Trek fans (Trekkies). Put it into the advertisement.

Don’t be frightened

This approach may sound risky and frightening, but I can assure you we have had much better candidates using this approach than we have had from the very bland ordinary advertisements others tend to use.

If you’d like some help with your ad, contact us and I’ll personally give you some help with yours for free during April.

Our recruitment service

Our recruitment service includes helping you all the way through the process, from finding the right candidates to making sure the individual is performing in the role. If the candidate doesn’t work out we help you to deal with that situation and hire a candidate who does work out at no extra cost. We charge a flat rate of £3000 + VAT – less than agencies charge you just to get you a CV.  To find out more contact us.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.

How to do a really bad interview

Many managers seem to think that an interview is about asking clever questions to

Make sure the interview is done well

outsmart the candidate. Unfortunately this is the way to do a really bad interview that is a waste of everyone’s time. Find out why.

A while ago I was running a workshop for people whose jobs were “at risk” (a jargon term meaning there are redundancies and their jobs may be made redundant). The purpose of the workshop was to help them to prepare for finding a job elsewhere. We were working on preparing for interviews.

Part of my workshop on this topic involves identifying their nightmare interview questions and preparing an answer.

Sadly most of the nightmare questions that come up on sessions like this are questions that add little or no value to the interview. Often they are posed by interviewers who really aren’t sure what they are doing and if they have had some training, it was not very good. They think these questions are smart or clever. But they aren’t. At best they are a waste of your time (and that of the candidate). At worst the answers can be seriously misleading.

I’m going to share some of those questions with you along with why they are such a waste of everyone’s time. At every workshop I have ever run, many people will have been asked these questions (or variations of them).

1. What would your best friend say about you?

This is your licence (as the candidate) to give a clever prepared answer:

My friends have been telling me for years that I’d make a great (title of the job you have applied for). Just last week Mandy, one of my closest friends said she wished she had the (relevant skill) I have. I’m sure she’s exaggerating (modest smile) because she’s really pretty good herself.

This does not give you any useful information about the candidate’s ability to do the job, unless it is preparing speeches for dodgy politicians.

2. Why should I give you this job ahead of all the other candidates?

This is unbelievably stupid, because, unless this candidate has any knowledge of the other candidates, he or she is not in a position to give you any answer other than a clever quip. If you are recruiting someone who needs to be able to produce witty responses at the drop of a hat, (like someone who is going to be interviewed on TV a lot under difficult circumstances) then this question is not helpful.

3. If you were in a lift and witnessed an employee behaving in a way that was racist or sexist, what would you do?

This and other questions about hypothetical situations are very common. People ask them because they want to know what the candidate would do in that situation.

We would all love to say we would challenge the behaviour and deal effectively with it, possibly also reassure the victim etc. but let’s face it; which of us really has tackled something as difficult as this?

Past behaviour is a much better predictor of future behaviour than the answer to a hypothetical question like this one. In which case, why not just ask; “Have you ever witnessed any racist or sexist behaviour?” If they say: “Yes.” then you ask them: “What happened?” Then, depending on their answer, you ask: “What did you do?” I guarantee this will get you much more useful data.

4. What is your greatest fault?

Again, this is an opportunity for a well-prepared BS merchant to pull the wool over your eyes. Do not put yourself in that position.

I remember an awful colleague of mine boasting to me that his stock answer to that question was that he was “too ambitious”. (Another favoured answer is to say that you are “too much of a perfectionist”.)

In this case I should have listened more closely because he was indeed far too ambitious for his level of skill. He had no real moral standards and almost cost me my job when, in his efforts to achieve his unrealistically lofty ambitions, he lied about some data he had given me.

5. What is your greatest weakness?

During our workshop I always ask people for their suggestions on answering these questions, and one delegate gave a very good response to this one: “Chocolate.”

Like the other questions I’ve listed, this gives you no useful information about the ability of the candidate to do the job. That’s the purpose of the interview.

Don’t use “Clever” questions in your interviews, use good ones

Interviewing should not be a game of asking “clever” questions to outsmart the candidate. It is about using that opportunity to identify if the candidate meets your requirements, whether or not he or she is good at being interviewed.  

Unfortunately it’s all too easy to do a poor interview and think you have a great candidate. We’ve all done it. I know I have. Then you pay for it in the long term. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Contact us if you need some help on interviewing or any other aspect of recruitment.

If you can’t wait, get our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.

5 Recruitment Mistakes You Must Avoid – Mistake number 1: no preparation

Last week I identified five recruitment mistakes. This week you can find out how to avoid

The candidate’s CV unread

the first mistake – not preparing properly. I remember seeing a Video Arts training film on recruitment many years ago. John Cleese stars as Æthelred the Unready in a memorable scene where he has completely forgotten a candidate is due for an interview and is opening the envelope containing the candidate’s CV as the candidate walks in. But how should you prepare properly?

Our recruitment service

Our recruitment service includes helping you prepare effectively and identifying the kind of person you really need. This means you stand a much greater chance of finding your ideal candidate.  We go right through to the end, helping you to make sure your new hire is performing in the role. We charge a flat rate of £3000 + VAT – less than agencies charge you just to get you a CV.  For immediate help,  contact us now.

Recruitment mistake 1: No preparation

If you don’t prepare properly you reduce you drastically reduce your chances of a successful recruitment. Here’s what I recommend.

Where do you start your preparation?

As with most other things, start with the objectives. Ask yourself: What does this individual to achieve?

Don’t start with the old job description you have been using for years

If you do this, you will probably get what you have always got and may well be missing vital improvements you could have made.

Make sure the objectives are up to date

Once you have the objectives, review then and make sure they are completely up to date. I was working with a client recently who wanted to recruit a customer service manager. This is one of those jobs that, if you are not careful, can end up being completely reactive. But when taking on a new person you have the opportunity to make radical improvements.

We agreed that this role should be about improving the processes in the business so much that there were no complaints. It also needed to be about setting up the processes for new products and services so that the customers were happy right from the start.

We then further expanded the role to include up selling and identifying new product opportunities.

The job description

Once you have the objectives, you can start on the job description, which should outline the areas of responsibility. You can also include the immediate manager, and who the subordinates are. You need to be clear about the purpose of the job (this comes from the objectives).

I think it’s acceptable to include the objectives in this document if you want to.
Neither the objectives nor the job description need to be lengthy documents.

Person Specification

Lastly there is the person specification. This is the document you need in order to be able to recruit the right person. You need to specify the kind of person who would most easily be able to do a good job in this role and get you the results you need.

It needs to include the skills and experience required as well as a way of defining the ‘personality’. There are many different ways of defining personality traits. But what’s important is that you have one that works for the jobs you are recruiting for.

One of the easiest ways to make sure you have the right specification is to get the profile of someone you know who is already performing well in the same job or something similar.
It’s very easy to make an assumption about the kind of person without testing it and find out you’ve got it wrong. I remember one company I worked for where they decided to only recruit engineers with top-level degrees. However, neither of the people who had designed their best selling products had degrees. Many of the people they recruited were academically brilliant, but did not have the flair required for designing new products.

Next week discover some of the secrets to writing an ad that attracts the people you need.

If you can’t wait that long, get our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.

Have you made any of these costly recruitment mistakes?

1.    Not preparing properly
2.    Using a bad advertisement
3.    Relying on just one interview
4.    Eliminating the wrong people
5.    Not following through

The stupid thing is each one is very easy to avoid. Hiring the wrong candidate is bad for you and bad for the individual concerned. The more senior the person, the greater the cost to your organisation.

We have been taking on more and more recruitment clients in the last few months, because people want to avoid the mistakes they have made in the past and make sure they get the right person this time.

Our recruitment service

How to Hire Well

Our recruitment service includes helping you all the way through the process, from finding the right candidates to making sure the individual is performing in the role. If the candidate doesn’t work out we help you to deal with that situation and hire a candidate who does work out at no extra cost. We charge a flat rate of £3000 + VAT – less than agencies charge you just to get you a CV.  To find out more contact us.

5 recruitment mistakes you must avoid

Here are the top recruitment errors I come across time and time again.

Recruitment mistake 1: No preparation

I have a client who came bouncing up to me one day dying to show me the ad he had just written for a new member of his team. I asked him what the objectives for the role were. His face fell. He hadn’t worked that bit out yet. But it was a great ad…

Do you ever start recruitment by writing an ad, or just use the one you have always used? Or do you work out what you really need first?

Working out what you need means starting with the objectives, putting together a job description and then making sure you are really clear about the type of person who could fill the role. If you aren’t clear about what you need, you are very unlikely to get it.

Recruitment mistake 2: An advertisement that looks like everyone else’s

At least my client didn’t fall into the trap of writing a boring ad that looked like all the others. Have you seen adverts that start with “A vacancy has arisen…” or simply entitled “Project Manager”? Not only that, have you noticed how many ads have content that is almost identical to others on the same page? They give boring, dry lists of responsibilities and desirable candidate attributes: “The ideal candidate will…”

They are advertisements with little personality that give no idea of what it would be like working for the company. Nothing to really tempt your ideal candidates. This means you can get swamped with unsuitable candidates, but not get applications from the people you really want.

Recruitment mistake 3: Just carrying out one interview

Do you rely on just one interview? Many organisations do, and those interviews are full of poor questions that get you hardly any useful information. Questions like: “What would you bring to the team?” and “What would your best friend say about you?” are very common.

But these questions are such a waste of time. They don’t tell you if the candidate you are interviewing has the correct profile for the job.

This means that it’s nearly impossible to identify a candidate who meets your requirements. So you can end up picking someone who is just good at interviews.

Recruitment mistake 4: Eliminating the good candidates

Here’s a great quote from one of our clients – Paolo Lencioni, Partner at APL, an accountancy firm based in Australia that only deals with vets.

“I get this warm fuzzy feeling when I think that our competitors will be taking on the candidates we didn’t … just because they have good CVs! It’s what we would have done before.”

So many people rely on completely the wrong information when they are making their selection. You need to be sure you are not one of them.

You can get all kinds of useful information from your candidates if you know how to do it. If you don’t get this, you can end up eliminating good people just because you don’t like their CVs.

Recruitment mistake 5: Thinking it’s all over once you have hired the candidate

This last crucial error is probably the most common of all. Once the candidate is in the post, you may think it’s time to put your feet up and relax. Even with the best recruitment processes in the world, there is always a chance that you have made a mistake. And even if you the perfect candidate, you still need to make sure that your new hire is successful and earning their keep as soon as possible.

This means you have to put some effort into helping your recruit to learn the ropes and make sure they have everything they need in order to perform. Otherwise you may have wasted your time.

If you have made a mistake you need to make sure you pick it up quickly and deal with it before it costs you a fortune.

I’ll be going into these five mistakes in more depth and what to do instead over the next few weeks, including some real examples. If you can’t wait that long, get our booklet “How to Hire Well” now.

To find out more about our recruitment service, contact us and we’ll arrange a call to go through your requirements.