Recruitment - doing things differently

Bringing other interested parties into the recruitment process can help validate your choices.

In the current recruitment climate there are a lot of opportunities being created as well as positions being lost. The market is busy, and making the right recruitment decisions is even more crucial at this time with anxiety and people’s awareness of their own and their teams’ mental health higher than normal.

Changing jobs or hiring new employees are big decisions that affect people. But of course, people management is fundamentally at the heart of FM. What’s needed is to do as much as possible to ensure any new hire is the right fit, both for them and those they are to work with.

The interview process hasn’t really changed much over the years. You request CV’s (admittedly the design of these has changed radically), you sort through the CV’s (those using automated systems you could be missing out), you read through the selected CV’s and then you start the interviewing process. This has anywhere between two and four rounds, depending on the role. HR is involved early, a line manager perhaps introduced for a second interview.

Pre Covid-19, interviews were generally conducted face to face when we could use our other senses to make judgement; whether we like it or not, we can make sub-conscious decisions based on a simple hand-shake.

Many interviews are now being conducted via video. So what can we do differently to best understand the candidate? While we can bring other colleagues into the interview process, how can we take a 360 degree look at the role before we even interview the candidates?

There is plenty of advice about how to get rid of people, but surely there is a gap in the recruitment process? The onus should be on the organisation to ensure the candidate is the right fit for the role and for the organisation.

Additional voices:

So what can you do to look deeper into the role you’re seeking to fill?

1. Are you matching the role, the candidate AND the cultural values of your business before you make the employment offer?

2. What would be the financial impact if the hire turns out not to be the right fit and leaves?

3. What is the mental health impact on an individual – in terms of anxiety, stress, exhaustion, pressure – when the role does not match their natural basic behaviours?

One option is to provide support by bringing a third party into the process from the start. Ask the line manager, fellow team members and any indirect team members who may have an interaction with the role to complete a profile on what they feel the key behaviours skills are for the role.

Once completed, draw a Venn diagram using the section in the middle to draw out the key behaviours that all parties agree are important for the role. Accuracy, detail, influential, supportive, decisive, team player, self motivation – which of these do all interested parties think are critical for this role? 

By identifying them in this way, the behaviours can be focused on as part of the interviewing process. I know from personal experience that when this process is used, the eventual relationship between, candidate, role and organisation becomes much more harmonious.

Every person deserves the right to have a happy and fulfilling career. That starts when an organisation hires the right fit for the role and the culture.

“Thank you Vicky – We used this method for a recent receptionist role. We invited another receptionist, the team leader and a client to complete the profile tool, which gave us a true 360 holistic approach to the receptionists role. Our client was really impressed on how important we found it to get their input to a busy reception in a multi-tenanted site. We where able to draw out the behaviours for this role, from three different perspectives. Not only was it a refreshing way to approach the role, but to also understand the role from the client side. It highlighted to us that not only did we need someone to be multi-skilled but an individual who also needed to adapt their own behaviours for the client. We shall be using this method for future roles. “ Head of Operations, FM Division