Are You Underselling Candidates?

June 24, 2014 at 6:00 AM by Kathleen de Lara

positive candidate experienceIt’s an unfortunate, common mistake: Offering a candidate a lateral job switch, or worse, a step down from their upper management position.

If you wanted to drive candidates away from your funnel, this is definitely the way to do it.

But it’s also insulting and makes it clear you don’t have an understanding about the role you’re recruiting for, and for most candidates, that’s a slap in the face. Many recruiters already get a bad rap, and underselling a candidate just adds fuel to the flame.

Are you underselling candidates? Here are some reasons your recruiting and hiring strategies may be turning off top talent.

You haven’t delved past the resume or LinkedIn profile.

Candidates tend to mention or highlight whatever comes to recent memory. Whether that be a website design they created two months ago or the blog post they wrote last week that drove a million views, taking a look at a candidate’s resume isn’t a comprehensive representation of their work.

Your interview questions should be more than just a few ways to tug at the surface — they should help get your recruiters into the nitty gritty details to learn more about the breadth of candidates' work, their thinking and working process, and the trials, errors, and steps they took to reach their current success. Many candidates tend to highlight their best or most recent work, which tends to be a summarized version that only includes material that's industry-relevant.

Don’t forget to brush up some info on their past work, which may not be a solid representation of how they’ll fit into your company now, but it can give you a good sense of their drive, progress, and other skills that can be revived and transferred.

recruiter burnoutThe candidate’s previous job title is your main (perhaps only) starting point.

The Adler Group CEO Lou Adler is a strong supporter of getting rid of job descriptions altogether. He says it’s a false representation of a candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and excludes high-level candidates. In other words, let a candidate's work and track record speak for itself. Each company files employees under different categories and names as a means to organize individuals within each department or to indicate an employee's specific tasks, roles, and expectations. However, companies that are smaller and more strapped for resources are familiar with employees who wear a lot of hats, and job titles come secondary and descriptions get blurred.

A customer success manager one day could be the team’s finance operations assistant the next. Talk through with a candidate to learn more about their day-to-day responsibilities in their previous positions to get a better understanding of what they’ll be able to contribute to your team.

You aren’t confident about the position you’re recruiting for.

keyword stuffing In other words, the position title and its role are so vague that the elevator pitch you’ve come up with is a mishmash mess of keyword stuffing. When recruiters don’t understand the open req, the tendency is to rely heavily on job titles and descriptions set out by hiring managers, which can be vague, nondescript, and run-of-the-mill, limiting your understanding of who’s fit for a role and who isn’t.

Before sourcing, get a feel for the position you’re recruiting for by sitting down with an employee currently in the role and learning about their current duties, challenges, and ask for an overview of their work week.

Try shadowing them for a few hours to find out their daily tasks. Sit in on the team’s meetings and find out which projects they have lined up. Drop by their office space and listen in to any conversations (if you’ve gotten to OK to eavesdrop) happening on the fly. Spend some time following team members who were once the types of candidates you were recruiting for, and you’ll get a refresher on what you’re looking for and why you hired these team members in the first place.

You’ve allowed one bad reference to throw off your judgment.

It’s a drop in the bucket. Before being quick to judge the quality of a candidate based on a single, one-star review, go back to the drawing board and weigh out the factors of the bigger picture.

Let’s say a candidate’s reference brings up a time his inexperience with marketing automation poked a few holes in a team assignment, causing them to delay a product launch by a few hours. But you're a huge fan of the candidate, regardless, and this bad reference triggers your response to move the candidate back a step in the interviewing process or to offer a more junior position that’s probably in line with the candidate’s supposed experience.

Before pulling the breaks on the job you had in mind for a candidate, listen to both sides of the story. Learn what happened and break down the candidate’s process of thinking and doing.

  • What were the obstacles?
  • What were the presumed solutions to those obstacles?
  • What could have been done differently?

A candidate who’s able to present clear reasoning for why something went wrong along with a viable, second-chance plan obviously recognizes the error, analyzed the other approaches that should’ve been taken, and understands how to not make the same mistake twice.

recruiting tipsYour loyalty to the hiring manager’s job description is unfailing.

Don’t just hire for what the company needs now – hire for what it will need in the future. Many recruiters prefer to follow the script that’s well-rehearsed, timed, and, at one point, proven.

The familiar cycle goes something like this: You’re trying out different strategies, find something that works, and massage the hell out of it to get the same results you did the first time. But this applying this tactic to your recruiting plan can set your team up to flop. Repetition doesn’t incorporate a strategy adapted for the way your industry changes, what the company needs, or how candidates, over time, respond differently to recruiters’ outreach.

Perhaps you have an open position for a designer at the company and you find a candidate who has UI/UX experience and had a short stint as a product manager. The problem is your pitch and interview with this candidate revolves solely around the designer position. On the whole, he falls short of a few requirements on items like the number of years of experience he’s had in the designer field and the different types of mediums he’s worked with, and you don’t end up hiring him.

Before ixnaying a candidate based on what he doesn’t have, weigh out the possibilities of the candidate learning skills on the job and growing into a role, and in the meantime, offering other specialty skills to the company that don’t necessarily fall under his specified job description, but can nevertheless benefit other teams.

interview questionsYou’re not asking the right questions.

Overemphasizing a candidate’s previous achievements doesn’t tell you much about how talent can benefit the company in the future. Find out what really matters to an employee. What are their career projections? Where do they want to be in five years? How do they expect management to steer their route to success? What challenges have they encountered with in their past work experience?

Get into the brain of a candidate to learn their next moves. That way you’ll be able to assess their goals and structure a management plan that benefits the company and can be practically implemented into the candidate’s employment timeline.

Expanding your expectations with a candidate and getting familiar with their background can help your team source talent whose abilities exceed the expectations of a job description. Don't miss out on candidates who may not be a perfect fit for a role. Resourceful recruiting? It's making do with the qualified candidate already in your doorstep. 

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