How to Identify and Manage “Interview Chameleons”

There's no way around it. Interviews are a bizarre and unnatural means of communication. An interviewer and interviewee – two people who have likely never met before – attempt to impress each other by selling their skills, their culture, and their successes.

The interview alone won’t give you the full picture of a candidate. The fact that it's an inorganic conversation means you are naturally going to get a curated version of someone. What happens when someone takes this too far?

10 Traits to Look Out for in Every Candidate Before You Hire Them

It goes without saying that companies are only as good as their people. Recruiting and hiring is still more art than science, which means 100% certainty is hard to come by. What we do know is that new hires are high risk, high reward. The good hires happen when recruiters, hiring managers and team leaders are all in lockstep with each other, and that happens when you establish the criteria by which you’ll judge all new hires, no matter their reference or skillset.

Interview Load Balancing with Greenhouse's Caitlin Wilterdink

O Brave New World

That has such ATS in't.

The Applicant Tracking System has come a long way over the past few decades. Far beyond just a way to monitor candidates at every stage of the hiring funnel, they now offer advanced analytics and tracking information to provide your organization with crucial insights into your recruiting process.

Naturally, Recruiters at these ATS companies are taking full advantage of their own tools. When Greenhouse's Recruiting Manager Caitlin Wilterdink joined us on Hiring On All Cylinders, we were able to get an insider's view on the organization's recruiting process. This spanned from the kick off meetings they have for newly opened roles, through the obvious of how they themselves use their tool, to the projection of recruiting capacity based on historic funnel data. 

Stop Performing Back Channel References, Immediately

Previously, on the Entelo blog, we’ve trumpeted the value of performing back channel references on prospective hires, even going so far as to call it Advanced Candidate Sourcing. There’s a flip side to every coin, and as we recently learned at Entelo, when the back channel coin comes up tails there’s some overwhelming reasons to stay far away from this hiring technique.

Candidate Enablement: 3 Ways to Prep Applicants to Nail the Interview

Preparing for an interview is often left entirely to candidates, but we argue recruiters also play a crucial role in equipping people with the resources to understand a company and their role. 

If a high number of candidates are falling out of the hiring process early on, there could be something wrong with your interview process. Personalization doesn’t end in the outreach stage. Try out these three strategies to speed up hiring, prepare interviewees, and create a better candidate experience. 

How Curiosity Found Your Next Sales Hire

Past the impressive resume and sales numbers, breaking through the interview to tell the difference between a candidate good at selling themselves and a candidate who’ll bring repeated success can be a shot in the dark.

3 Candidate Mistakes That Should Make You End The Interview

You want to give your candidates the benefit of the doubt throughout the interview process, digging for context, following up with unlisted references, and otherwise trying to paint a full picture of who they are as a professional. There are however a few red flags that should do more than raise your eyebrows. Here’s a few deal breakers that should make you consider pulling the rip cord on the entire process. 

Getting Your Team to Give Meaningful Interview Feedback

Once you’ve done your job finding, contacting, psyching up, and scheduling your candidate, you may find yourself in the anxiety-laden position of sitting back and letting the team make the decision. Once you’ve passed off the candidate, you want to make sure they’re in the best position to succeed, and part of that is ensuring your own team is in the best position to complete an accurate assessment. Here are some ways your friends here at Entelo go about making sure we get a comprehensive view of candidates.

4 Underrated Traits of Top Hiring Teams

To build out the company’s A-team, you need to start with a strong foundation of skilled recruiters. Hiring your first employees is a big step for the company. Hiring your 100th employee is a big step for the company, too.

At either stage, the org’s hiring needs and strategies are completely different, and any setbacks in your recruiting (and recruiters, for that matter) triggers a stifling domino effect on your talent goals. All that planning and preparing won’t help the company find people if you’re not properly equipped with a robust, smart hiring team.

Keep a lookout for these traits in your next hiring hires.

6 Ways to Prep Your Team for the Post-Screening Interview

The in-person interview is a relatively nerve-racking, brief way for candidates and employers to get to know each other. Assessing good work and culture fit in the span of a few hours takes a keen, organized approach.

Round one, done. Now the rest of the team is tapping in to assist in round two. Use these six interviewing tactics for a more effective, speedy hiring process.

Here's Why Candidates Are Failing Your Interviews

Is your interview process broken?

The talent gap has been long cited as one of the biggest reasons companies are left with open roles. Getting a candidate in the door after much screening and vetting is no deed to go unrecognized, but neglecting your company’s interviewing process could mean serious hiring hitches.

Here are five common interviewing errors companies make when looking for the right candidate. It’s not them – it could very well be you.

Quick Tips for Building an Effective Phone Screening Process

Sourcing candidates to create a substantial top of the funnel is one of the biggest challenges in the talent hunt. This is where most people fall off – having a long list of candidates becomes a good and bad thing. Without the right resources, recruiters can fall behind in reaching out to, following up with, and filtering through the right and wrong people.

One way to alleviate the candidate drop-off is to create a quicker interviewing process. Whether or not your company is in an active hiring mode, recruiters may often find themselves doing a multitude of screenings every day. A good phone screening communicates what the company and role is about, and gives a candidate an idea of what the culture is like since it’s the first point of real interaction between the candidate and the org.

Use these techniques to bustle through your candidate funnel.

4 Red Flags to Look Out for When Interviewing Candidates

Let’s get this out of the way: Interviews are by no means a perfect mechanism for evaluating candidates.

They’re highly subjective, are often biased and not very predictive of performance on the job. Having said that, there are valuable insights you can derive from interviews, especially when it comes towards catching potentially devastating red flags for how they may perform on the job.

Here are a few red flags to be on the lookout for with prospective candidates.

4 Interview Questions to Build Your Referral Network

A few birds, one stone? Try using the candidate interview as a platform for finding hires to fill your open reqs and to leverage your talent’s networks to make even more connections.

Here’s a tag line we’ll try to coin: If you’re not using your network, you’re losing your net worth. In other words, recruiters, if you’re not curious enough to comb through deepest trenches of your network and your network’s networks, someone else will be, running the risk of losing out on undiscovered qualified talent.

Build your connections and measure someone’s qualification for the role by poking around during the candidate interview. Try these questions to start:

Why the Designer Role May Be Your Most Difficult Req to Fill

Hiring designers is just as complex as hiring engineers.

Where there are twists, there are turns. Where there are umbrellas, there are terms, and calling someone a “designer” is as nondescript as calling last night’s dinner date “nice.” You get the idea.

Depending on the industry you work in, you’re likely hardly recruiting someone who’s labeled as just a designer. There are product designers, game designers, UI/UX designers, illustrators, visual designers, web designers, interactive designers, to name a few and then some.

The process for filling an open req for the company’s creative-engineering roles doesn’t start with understanding what types of interview questions to ask, or key factors to look for in a resume – it’s taking a top-down approach and understanding how to answer:

What business goals does the company want to achieve? What type of designer is the company looking for?