So you’ve got an open positon at your company. You put up notices online and in print media to inform potential applicants that they can start sending their resumes.
What happens now?
That was the topic of The Harvest Group’s webinar on Jan. 25, led by Bill Arman and Ed Laflamme. Titled “How to pre-screen and interview potential employees,” the webinar looked at the best ways to make sure your hiring process is streamlined to prevent becoming overwhelmed and hiring the wrong person.
To make it easier to understand, Arman and Laflamme broke the “people program” into eight steps: retention, growing them, performance management, onboarding, recruiting, organizational structure, HR administration and Foundation: Culture-compliance.
For this webinar, they focused on the recruiting step.
“Recruiting is almost identical to marketing and selling your services,” Arman said. “It’s marketing and selling career opportunities.” He added that in order to succeed at recruiting, it’s important to get everything in line before you run out and start interviewing people.
The first thing to consider is where to find good candidates. If you have good sources for candidates, that will lead to good people to screen and interview. Arman suggested looking at people who proactively submit to your company (either through walk ins, website inquiries and submitted applications and resumes, as well as referrals from current employees). You should also be reaching out to candidates. Job fairs, conferences, NALP’s Collegiate Landscape Competition print ads and networking are a few things they suggested.
After you get your potential candidates, Arman said it’s important to remember that the hiring situation is rapidly transferring from an employer’s market to an employee’s market.
“You’ve got to keep them warm and moving forward through the process,” he said. “I know we all get busy, and sometimes a viable candidate gets cold and they’re gone. So keep in mind: It’s an employee market now.”
Keep them informed on the next steps in the hiring process, as well as a timeframe of when they should expect the next step to occur. Always let them know by end-of-day the following Friday, and make sure to follow up and make the final decision on whether they’re interviewed or not. Never leave a candidate’s status hanging.
Screening.
The next step in the hiring process, following recruiting, is screening. If you do a good screening, it will save you a lot of time by preventing interview duds. It narrows down the pool of people you want to actually invite for an in-person interview. Screening is done by looking over their applications, as well as doing a phone call. However, be wary of screening someone only via phone.
“A lot of people sound pretty good on the phone and have a good energy,” Arman said, but if they don’t fit some of your basic criteria, they could still be a bad candidate.
Arman said the outcome of the screening process is straightforward: Do you want move on to the interview process or label the candidate a no-go? If it leads to an interview, you have four options: get them on board, conduct additional interviews (typically at higher level jobs), “tag and release” (where you see them as a potential hire but you currently don’t have an open position) and no-go/pass.
If you’ve never screened a candidate on the phone before, here are a few sample questions he suggested. As always, ask the same questions of every candidate.
- How did you learn about this position?
- Are you currently employed? How long have you been employed or looking?
- What is your motivation for leaving your current position?
- Where else have you interviewed? What’s the status?
- Where do you live? How long have you been there?
- Have you worked here before? Have you interviewed here before?
- Do you have a driver’s license? Have you had any moving violations in last five years?
Interviewing.
While a good screening will take from five to 30 minutes max, an interview should take 45 to 60 minutes.
Here are a few considerations he suggested for interviewing, which he said is a more relational process.
- Try to discover their skills, knowledge, behaviors and motivations.
- Use EAR Questions where interviewees are expected to give an example of a situation, tell what action they took in the situation and what the end result was.
- Ask questions that are specific to the job they’ve applied for
- Give them several situations and ask how they would handle them.
- Try to discover mutual acquaintances.
- Option: get their pay expectations to see if their expectations are too high or too low.
In both screening and interviewing, candidates should always do 60 to 70 percent of the talking, and questions regarding age, race, sexual orientation, etc., should never be asked.
When you’re finished with screening or interviewing, do a summary of each candidate and rate them as A, B or C. This is especially valid when you’re screening at a job fair and dealing with hundreds of candidates in quick bursts.
Use an assessment tool, such as Myers Briggs or DISC, to look at candidates. Judge their basic skills (plant identification, sales presentations, punch lists, etc.).
While it may be hard to pick candidates based on how qualified they each are, Arman suggested also looking at disqualifications. A few red flags he included are:
- Work pattern – if they’ve had more than five jobs in the last three years, or gaps in employment, those are no-gos.
- Where do they live? Is it relatively close to work?
- Do they have little potential?
- Do they have a bad attitude, or make everything all about them, instead of what they can do for the company?
- Were they late to the interview?
Arman said some of the things he looks for is a person who’s humble, hungry and smart, with a positive attitude. “I don’t want any whiners, wieners or wimps,” he said.
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