By now, you’ve probably learned by heart what techniques do and don’t work for your interview process. You probably know how to skip the wait times for background checks and even filter applicants by soft skill to see only those you know will thrive in your available positions. But when was the last time you updated the way you interview your candidates?
It’s more crucial now than ever before to ensure your interview process is up to date. This includes making sure it’s effective in finding a well-suited long-term employee candidate. It further includes offering fair and unbiased decision-making processes for such. To save you time and money on mis-hires and researching tricks for doing so yourself, here are our favorite tips to improve your candidate filtration and acquisition process!
Update your Interview Process
1. Offer equal opportunity
For some candidates, the greatest fear in being asked to interview for a job is not getting the job; for others, it’s getting the job but for the wrong reasons. And as a professional in the industry, you will have heard of hirers getting paid for employing a person of color or a person with a disability—also known as tokenism in the workplace—but how can you guarantee that you aren’t also guilty of doing so yourself, even if it’s coming from good intentions?
Start off on a good foot with your top contenders by showing them from the very get-go that you’re all for equity in the workplace and that you’re not just hiring them for—or that you’re not going to hire them because of—their race, gender, disability, religion, or sexual orientation. This means filtering candidates for soft skills that evident or missing from their psychometric assessments or interview responses.
This can be done through soft skill assessments, like Packfinder, which through psychometric profiling offers employers and recruiters varying levels of close readings on a job applicant’s personality, work abilities, natural predispositions, and best-suited career paths for their greatest potential. Psychometric profiling measures both the applicant’s soft skills and their internal responses to these questions, as well, so you know their answers are accurate and reliable every time.
2. Ask personalized, not personal questions
You might feel inclined to ask your future employees about their personal life to get more familiar with them. Let’s say you ask them about their marital status, their home life, or even their cultural background. These all seem and are in every other circumstance very harmless small-talk kinds of questions to ask, but in the context of a job interview, each of these questions can actually be perceived inappropriately and are even illegal to ask due to their connotations in discriminatory practices.
In fact, there is an entire list of questions you may be falling guilty of asking—just out of habit, and not intentionally at all! And sometimes your standard questions run dry or lead you to a dead end in an interview, and there are still some aspects of the candidate that seem unclear about which you’re not sure how to go about finding out. This can all be mediated simply by having a set of questions that are personalized based off of those handy summaries your candidate’s Packfinder results provide.
Within the Workwolf business platform, you can have access to view your candidates’ Packfinder results and discover more about them before you even interview them, so you know which questions to ask and get a better sense of who they are as a candidate. With your top candidates’ Packfinder results, you’ll be able to see how closely they suit one position over another, and even their strengths, habits, and natural tendencies as a worker, and use these pieces of information to get to know their preferences and potential as an employee to judge how well they suit what you’re seeking.
3. Make them glad they came, even if you didn’t offer them the job!
It seems that after a while, rejections get easier to write and say in phone calls or video chats. With that said, it’s never something we employers or recruiters enjoy doing.
The best way to let them down easily is to show how appreciative you are of them. And what better way to say how much you value an applicant?
Your Interview Process Made Easy!
Packfinder is my number one resource to offer candidates. It’s Workwolf’s exclusive soft-skills assessment with a value of over $100 each, but one you and your candidates can receive for free. This assessment—while first-hand meant for your consideration to match with your pre-established benchmark based on soft skills in your previous or current top performing employees—can also provide the applicant with the information about themselves to showcase their future employer that they truly are meant for a position.
As well, they can use the information gained in their Packfinder results to start looking in new career paths. To offer your job applicants Workwolf’s complimentary Packfinder assessment, sign up for a free business account here.
