The first key is to assess candidates before hiring. We encounter many companies that hire based on their gut feeling about a candidate. I met with a customer last week who has a VP who makes up his mind in a matter of the first 10 minutes of an inperson interview. Some people have strong empathetic abilities and can get a good read on an unknown candidate.
But they make mistakes.
The President of the company explained to me that although this VP was quite intuitive, he still missed on candidates which ended up costing the company.
This meeting brought to my attention the need to explain when to assess a candidate. We use a different approach based on the position. Our bread and butter is sales hiring and assessing. Salespeople need to be assessed early in the process – certainly before the first face-to-face interview.
The reason – salespeople tend to have well developed interpersonal skills. Even bad salespeople can have good rapport-building ability. This ability is dangerous because it is so disarming to an interviewer. Once the interviewer’s guard is down, logic is shelved and emotional decisions ensue. The very rapport-building ability you are searching for can be used against you.
Recently, we have seen ads where companies have taken the assessment piece to the extreme and asked all applicants to complete an expensive assessment before even responding to the ad with a phone call or email. That approach is good for the assessment company, but ludicrous for the hiring company.
Despite the monetary investment, this approach will have a detrimental effect on the number of responses. The best salespeople are motivated by a return on investment. This Utilitarian motivation applies to their time also. A vaguely written sales ad asking for 45 minutes of their time to complete an online assessment is 180 degrees out of phase. Far better to receive a phone call from a respondent who wants to qualify the position for fit before pursing the opportunity. Generally, that is the sign of a strong salesperson.
The best approach is to run a phone screen on the respondents that meet the stated criteria in the ad. If you have read our blog for any amount of time, you have seen our anecdotes from sourcing. It is amazing to see how much you can learn from a simple 10-15 minute phone screen. As we like to say, some times you don’t need an assessment to tell you all you need to know.