Archive for the 'Interviewing candidates' Category

Why is reference checking more important than interviewing?

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

Thorough reference checks will almost always prevent your organization from acquiring a problem employee or an employee unqualified to do the job for which they were hired.

There are two ways in which a bad hire can harm the organization: acts of commission and acts of omission. In the former, the employee commits an act that directly threatens the organization, such as theft or inappropriate behavior. In the second, the employee fails to properly perform his or her job. In one case I’m aware of, a company’s controller embezzled a large amount of money; however, it was the controller’s incompetence at managing the firm’s cash flow–not the embezzlement–that caused the business to fail.

When assessing a candidate’s qualifications for employment, one must guard against the temptation to make hiring decisions based on interview performance. Individuals who change jobs frequently may be very skilled at interviewing–they’ve had a lot of practice. Excellent employees, however, have little experience interviewing and may not promote themselves well. Therefore, hiring managers should not judge candidates on interview performance, since the best interviewers may be the worst employees!

More importantly, a candidate’s testimony about work history is self-serving: the better they make themselves look, the more likely they are to receive a job offer. Unprincipled candidates will utilize fabrications, exaggerations, and omissions to manipulate the hiring decision in their favor–particularly with a trusting interviewer. If you accept a candidate’s self-description at face value, you may end up hiring the best fibber rather than the most truly qualified candidate.

The best way to learn about a candidate’s previous responsibilities and how well the candidate performed on the job is to interview those individuals for which the candidate worked (”references”). The comments of these individuals, taken together, provide a realistic picture of the candidate’s experience, abilities, and strengths, as well as weaknesses.

References need not be limited to those provided by the candidate. Prior managers or supervisors can be located by placing a call to employers listed on the candidate’s resume, through Google, LinkedIn and other sources.

Occasionally, a sneaky candidate will provide fake references (don’t believe it? search online for “fake references”). Verify the position and employer of the candidate’s references to make certain the individual who answers the phone is not the candidate’s confederate.

If you check references through people you know “in the business,” be careful that your networking doesn’t tip off the candidate’s current employer, causing embarrassment, or worse.

The longer a candidate has been in the workforce, the more extensive their reference trail. That’s one advantage to hiring experienced workers, you can be more certain they are problem free and well-qualified.

Michael G Smith

Posted in Interviewing candidates, Recruiting, Reference checking | 1 Comment »

What do you look for when reviewing resumes? How do you avoid overlooking a “golden nugget”?

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

I don’t think there are reliable shortcuts for reviewing resumes. The more time you take with each one, the less likely you are to set aside a viable candidate.

I don’t reject candidates for reasons not relevant to the job; that is, I don’t reject a candidate because the resume has spelling or grammar errors. I have found blunders in the resumes of successful journalists and authors, so unless I’m hiring someone to write resumes, I don’t use resume mistakes as reason to reject candidates.

I feel the same way about interviews; I don’t particularly care how well a candidate interviews, I’m only interested in how qualified the candidate is.

Screening resumes effectively depends on having a very specific list of qualifications required of a candidate in order to perform the job being filled. As a recruiter I have often found that the qualifications provided by the employer are too vague, irrelevant or simply too numerous. It’s best to boil down the qualifications to the two or three truly essential for the job and then reject all candidates lacking them without concern for rejecting a “golden nugget.”

I don’t think it makes sense, for example, to reject a candidate with, say, 10 years of appropriate experience because they don’t have a college degree. Of course I’d prefer the candidate to have a degree, but I’m trying to find the best candidate in a pile of resumes, and since this candidate’s experience demonstrates he or she is qualified, potentially even the best qualified, I’m not going to reject based on a preference for a college degree.

By looking at the last two or three jobs on the resume, I can quickly evaluate the candidate for two key considerations: 1. evidence of job stability; 2. appropriate work experience at the proper level of responsibility. Job stability is the most important consideration as far as I’m concerned; the candidate’s resume should be dominated by positions with at least three, and preferably five, years of tenure. A habit of job-hopping assures the resume will not be read.

Appropriate work experience is clearly a decision factor. If I need candidates with experience in nonprofit fundraising, then either nonprofit fundraising is on the resume or it’s not. I then evaluate the level of responsibility and the years the experience. Typically, I’m filling management positions, so the resume must list managerial experience of the scope, and for the length of time, that I previously determined are required.

If the requirements for the position are not entirely clear, or qualified candidates are likely to be hard to find, then I may decide to sort resumes during my initial review. I label resumes as: “unqualified,” “possibly qualified,” and “qualified.” After I’ve gone through the batch, if I have enough “qualified” resumes, I probably won’t revisit the “possibly qualified” batch. If not, then a more extensive reading of the resumes in the “possibly” batch is warranted, combined with some online research on those candidates.

Aside from job hopping as a reason to reject, any misrepresentation, intentional obfuscation, or lie will cause me to reject a resume without hesitation. If a candidate has no reservations about fibbing on the resume, they will fib on the job.

Michael G Smith

Posted in Interviewing candidates, Job hunting, Managing employees, Resume writing, Screening candidates | No Comments »

What should I say in my resume cover letter?

Monday, May 12th, 2008

Many job seekers believe that elaborating on their experience and skills in a cover letter enhances their chances of getting an interview. Although this belief underlies much of the available “advice” on writing cover letters, it is completely mistaken. The simple truth is that hiring managers have limited time and nearly unlimited resumes to screen; they just don’t have time to read cover letters.

(I should point out that “cover letter” in this context means a letter, or more typically, a cover message, as in an email message that accompanies your attached resume or application. Almost all resumes are sent by email these days, so “cover letter” refers to the email message you send to an employer or recruiter, or the text message inserted into the appropriate spot on an online application.)

The most efficient way to screen resumes is, well, to screen the resume and not bother with the cover letter. A quick review of a resume is all that’s required to place it in one of three categories: not qualified (the vast majority of all resumes); possibly qualified; and, almost certainly qualified. If the resume screener has enough candidate resumes in the “almost certainly qualified” category, the resumes in the other two categories are set aside (with the cover letter never having seen the light of day).

If the number of potentially qualified candidates must be reduced, the resume screener will take a more detailed look at the resume and possibly read the cover letter. It’s at this point the tactic of packing lots of info into the cover letter may backfire: information in the cover letter might be used to reject the candidate. Remember, the resume has survived the first cut and is now sitting in the “to be interviewed” pile, so the ideal letter for this situation says simply, “Please consider me for the position you recently advertised”, as it avoids providing the screener with any information that may be used to reject the candidate.

Rest assured that if the cover letter is long-winded, contains stupid comments (”out-of-the-box thinker”; “I’m a people person”), contains some otherwise benign detail that is viewed negatively, or any one of a thousand other problems that the job seeker may not anticipate, the resume will move out of the “interview” pile and into the “not now, maybe later” pile.

Since one cannot know with certainty how the person reading the cover letter will react to any particular bit of information, it is best to let your resume carry the full load of securing an interview. Don’t risk providing a reason in your cover letter to undo what your resume may have already accomplished.

Michael G Smith

Posted in Interviewing candidates, Interviewing tips for job seekers, Job hunting, Resume writing | 1 Comment »

Negotiating salary: overstating your current income or desired salary can cost you

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Job candidates sometimes outsmart themselves when discussing compensation with a prospective employer. Forget what you may have learned about negotiating tactics, as you may sabotage the job offer.

Here’s what can happen: if you stretch the truth about how much you currently earn, or provide an inflated “minimum” amount of compensation you are willing to accept, the prospective employer may offer the job to another candidate who has asked for less.

Say, for example, you tell a prospective employer that you wish to earn $100,000, figuring you can then “negotiate” down to $90,000, an amount with which you would be pleased. The other candidate, however, may ask for $90,000, which is the number he or she really wants. Naturally, the employer takes both candidates at their word and proceeds to offer the job to the employee who will cost less (assuming, of course, both candidates have roughly equal skills).

Suppose you give the employer an honest, minimum compensation number and they then make an offer that is lower? This is not a problem; it doesn’t make a bit of difference what amount you ask for, or what amount they offer, since you alone control whether you accept the offer or not. If the offer is too low, turn it down and reiterate that the number you provided earlier–your minimum compensation amount–is truly the minimum offer you will accept.

If the employer is unwilling to come back with an offer at, or above your minimum, then either the employer has another candidate that is not quite as desirable as you, but somewhat less expensive, or the amount the employer offered is simply the most they are able to spend.

In my experience, employers do not typically reduce the amount of compensation they plan to offer when they learn the candidate is willing to accept less. Surprised? Think about it; if the employer decides that, for a variety of reasons, salary “X” is the right amount to pay for a certain quality of employee doing a particular job, then why pay a different amount? If money had been the most important consideration, then the employer could easily have sought out a less expensive employee.

I have also found that it is much better for the employer to find out before the offer is made that the compensation amount is not acceptable to the candidate. It is usually easier for the hiring manager to secure approval for higher compensation during the process of preparing the offer, especially if the request is based on specific information provided by the candidate. Once the offer is made and rejected, though, the manager’s harried effort to secure more money will likely be seen as an attempt to salvage a bungled hire.

Michael G Smith

Posted in Interviewing candidates, Interviewing tips for job seekers, Negotiating compensation | No Comments »

Storing & organizing resumes without a dedicated program

Monday, May 5th, 2008

What candidate resume management tools or process do you find effective?

“We are a consulting firm and receive and retain hundreds of resumes annually. Currently these are retained physically in folders in a file cabinet in alphabetical order with notes detailing the hire/do not hire decision. Several people may take notes during the interview and they are all placed in the folder. We retain every candidate resume in order to be able to recall what it was that we liked or disliked about them and to have their contact info available on a moment’s notice; we frequently land an opportunity that prompts a quick hire or encounter the same folks during subsequent searches.

“You may have deduced that the volume assembled over more than fifteen years has become difficult to reference. Can you offer an application or process that you find effective?”

Philip J. Leonard III
Vice President of Operations
Diversified Project Management
Drawingfromnature.com

Answer:
Philip, I am surprised that, in this day and age, you work with paper resumes. By printing out a resume (or any document for that matter) you forgo the ability to search and retrieve it using powerful computer-based tools. Moreover, if you loose the paper resume, you also loose the notes and comments.

As a recruiter, I am deeply reliant on retrieving bits and pieces of information I’ve collected over time–including resumes and notes of conversations. Although I sometimes print out resumes in order to take notes, I always copy the notes back in to my PC. It doesn’t matter where or in what format notes are kept since I use Google Desktop to retrieve all the information I need.

Say, for example, that I am aware of a potential candidate for a position I wish to fill and I want to pull together any notes or resumes I might have. I type the candidate’s name (”pete moss”) into my Google Deskbar search (on my computer’s taskbar) and Google will retrieve every reference to that name anywhere in my PC–every resume, note, outlook file, spreadsheet, email, even any website I’ve visited that had the words “pete moss” on it.

This ability to search through my whole computer (like Google searches the entire web) without regard to the location of data frees me from the requirement of keeping my information neatly stored in some particular “resume management system.” My computer IS the system.

Furthermore, Google allows you to coordinate searches between computers, so you can search through resumes, notes, and other data that the HR Director has on the HR department system and they can search through your information as well.

Ideally, you should not be storing hand written notes of interviews anyway. Each interviewer should debrief in a consistent manner–a short memo is fine–and then email that to the person coordinating the hire. Better still, upload the note to Google documents for storage and sharing, or use one of Microsoft’s many group collaboration tools. This solves the problem of record keeping, searching and group access all at once.

I realize it’s comforting to know exactly where your data is stored, but you no longer need to do so. Tools exist that can instantly retrieve information from the nooks and crannies of your hard drives–Google remembers where your data is, so you don’t have to.

Michael G Smith

Posted in Interviewing candidates, Managing employees | No Comments »