Employee Selection Teams

A Timely Idea!

It’s amazing how difficult we can make things!

Just think about the way many of us put together interview schedules.  Let’s say we decide to bring candidate “Charlie” to our site for a day of interviews.  Typically, the first step would be to drop Charlie’s resume onto the desk of John, an Administrative Specialist, and request that he arrange an interview schedule.  John knows what will happen and dislikes you for the task already: He will call 7 or more people to try to get 4 of them to agree to interview Charlie on the appointed day.  Most will “be busy” and some will play the politics of asking, “So, who else will be on the interview schedule?”  Others will agree, but only for a specific time.  After wrestling to put the schedule together, John will finally have four people to interview Charlie – and they likely will not be those who should be conducting the interviews; rather those who are available.  Shouldn’t it be easier with better outcomes?

The answer is an absolute yes.  Pre-designated selection teams are the answer! 

Interviewing …Six Common Areas Of Inquiry!

In an interview, does your organization know what it’s looking for?

Or do you?

Over the last 34 years that I’ve been involved in interviewing and selection of professionals from the entry-level to the boardroom, I’ve been trained and practiced a variety of methods of interviews.  My professional observation is that regardless of the training or the skill of the interviewer, the vast majority of them attempt to scrutinize six primary areas of the candidate’s background.  Those are:

• Affect – The way one presents him/herself (dress, punctuality, professionalism, deportment)
• Education – Major, quality of school, GPA, reasons for choices
• Experience – Type, length, quality of employers, turnover, training
• Performance – Indicators of how well the person performed and was esteemed
• Potential – How well will the candidate fit here; now and in the future
• Character – Indications of work ethic, initiative, interpersonal skills, and other characteristics (in more sophisticated terms, the competency model)

When It’s Game Time, Will You Be Ready?

The bad news …we’re still in the worst recession most of us have seen. The good news …the economic indicators and experts tell us it’s getting better. My question to corporate America is, “when it’s game time, will you be ready?”

Let me define “game time.” In our business of helping clients be successful in generating the best of candidates, interviewing and selecting well and retaining their human capital, game time will be that point where they are again focusing on attracting, hiring and retaining a world-class workforce. We all know rationally that we can’t just simply stop recruiting, building our reputation as a premier employer, developing and maintaining our relationships with our sources for candidates …but, when business is bad, that’s what we’ve done. Many organizations have, because of hiring freezes, layoffs, reductions-in-force, etc., significantly reduced or even stopped their efforts to maintain their campus recruiting presence, develop and maintain their relationships with recruiting and search firms, maintain levels of advertising and public relations to build their attractiveness as a fine place to work and even to communicate well to their own employees!

So, You Have A Plan?

During these days of economic upheaval and tremendous job losses, it’s hard to think about workforce planning …in fact it initially seems counter-intuitive! But wait; there’s more! While we’re in the middle of making decisions of huge impact regarding reductions-in-force, hiring freezes, plant closings, compensation and benefits redesigns and other employee-related issues, it makes perfect sense to really understand what we’re doing …and that involves workforce planning! Think about it for a moment; how many of us really did this process well during good times? How many of us will do it well during the bad times?

Many previous surveys demonstrated that most organizations, though being aware of the issues of the retiring baby-boomers, the aging workforce, different generations working together, etc., really didn’t understand the specifics of the impacts on them. Now that we’re in “survival mode” many companies are making mistakes that they might regret later. Let’s talk …