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Most of the media coverage these days about recruiting is devoted to social networking, mobile recruiting, and blogging, but the recruiting technology likely to have the most impact if it continues to catch on at the current rate is interviewing candidates “live” from remote locations. The approach I call “interviewing from anywhere” takes advantage of widespread broadband Internet access and inexpensive webcams, two factors that severely restricted videoconferencing as a feasible alternative to face-to-face interviews a decade ago. keep reading…

For many people on the job market, the Art of Interviewing seems like a mystery. That’s why I decided to demystify it a bit by offering a few clues that will hopefully put the whole experience into perspective. I’ll start by looking at a few common words that hold within them a hidden clues about what it means to join an organization. Keeping these words in mind will help both recruiters and the candidates they are working with. keep reading…

I’m constantly quite amazed at the level of ignorance, and often arrogance, which exists with some hiring supervisors.

Do you ever ask yourself how a person got into the position they occupy? I know I do. I constantly hear the overplayed and overstated “people are our most important asset” cliché — yet actions seldom back up this widely accepted ideology.

Recruiting great talent, even in a down economy, isn’t easy, and we’re not even going to talk about retaining them once they arrive. We make it hard enough just to get candidates to take us seriously during the interview process. Down economy or not, great people always have options.

So, for those of you who still need some help in figuring out how to completely sabotage your recruitment efforts, I’ve compiled a quick guide of six easy steps that will get you there faster then you ever thought possible.

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More often than not, it is the simplest things in life and in business that produce the biggest impacts. Having spent more than 30 years analyzing corporate recruiting practices and strategy, I have noticed there are some rather basic questions that, if only posed, would have a profound impact on the effectiveness of most recruiting endeavors.

Unfortunately, the questions are rarely asked, resulting in inefficient, ineffective practices.

Do not pose these questions periodically; incorporate them into your approach to build an engaging candidate experience, a more compelling offer presentation, and ultimately, a more productive hire.

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People are always writing articles about the best interview questions. One author (who positioned himself as a hiring expert) actually advised, “In terms of ‘canned’ interview questions, my suggestion is to select a few questions you like and ask them.”

This is a fine strategy for making friends, but absolute nonsense for a recruiter (I had another word in mind, but it would have been politically incorrect.)

After some initial chit-chat, the only interview questions a recruiter or hiring manager should ask are ones that provide trustworthy and reliable data about whether the candidate has the skills for the job.

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A new job board launched a few days ago, providing evidence that entrepreneurs aren’t intimated by the worsening recession and that they’re still struggling with Web 2.0 forms.

InovaHire is the latest offering in the crowded job board market. It’s a traditional job board except that job postings and employer profiles are free. The company generates revenue on a pay-per-view basis for display ads and links back to advertiser websites. For now these reside in two resource centers: one for candidates that offers things like resume writing and office supplies, and one for employers offering drug testing services and office furniture.

There’s also the usual employer profile enhanced with a clever Amazon-like feature that shows job-seekers what other sites people who visited that employer also viewed. That works both ways. Employers searching candidate profiles get to see who else other employers looked at.

What sets InovaHire apart is a sort of Instant Interview request. When you come across a candidate interesting enough to talk to, InovaHire enables you to contact them and schedule an online interview. Both of you need to have a microphone and webcam, but these are so ubiquitous — and so cheap — that it’s almost a non-issue. Of course there are other online interview solutions out there, but InovaHire’s solution is free and doesn’t require anything special in the way of software or connections.

In other ways, InovaHire is fairly standard, perhaps a touch dated. Resumes have to be entered manually in the fields the company provides. Jobseekers must provide a date of birth, but are told it won’t be displayed, so we have to assume it will eventually be used to target ads based on demos.

Founders Eric Schifone and Tanya Willette hail from New England, in the Boston area. Schifone has experience in high tech recruiting, while Willette, recently out of Southern New Hampshire University, has been working as an independent consultant to small firms for several years.

Originally published August 6, 2008.

Dating and recruiting have a lot in common. Learn how to improve your recruiting efforts by applying the most common dating rules.

Dating rule #1
First impressions are critical.

Recruiting application:
Differentiate yourself. Resist the “I have a great position for you” especially if you have never spoken to them.

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Let’s face it: YouTube, Break, Hulu, and Veoh have changed the way we view movies and videos and, more important, they have changed the way we use the Internet.

We rely more and more on pictures, graphics, and videos to display data, deliver the news, give us instructions, and keep us up-to-date with our families. The facts are amazing. Using Quantcast as my source, here is a rough idea of what’s going on. The online version of the New York Times, for example, has a monthly readership that averages about 14 million people in the United States. And that’s the largest readership of any print media I could find. The online Wall Street Journal does a paltry 4 million and even the prestigious Economist does only 3 million globally and most are seeing declining readership.

On the other hand, YouTube averages about 71 million viewers monthly — just in the U.S. And its rivals are also doing well and growing. Veoh does about 23 million, Hulu about 19 million, and Break about 15 million globally.

This indicates a decisive trend: more and more of us are getting information and education from video, rather than from words – whether in print or online.

We have already seen video slowly gaining in popularity and importance in recruiting. All top-tier career sites incorporate both pictures and video. Usually the videos are of employees talking about their jobs, but some include campus tours or chats with the CEO or a hiring manager. Many recruiters have received a video resume, and chat rooms have buzzed with concerns over the legality of such resumes and whether they should be accepted.

I don’t believe there is any serious legal issue in using video resumes, as long as your organization has a policy about how they are used. They are no more discriminatory than a face-to-face interview and may actually help to showcase communication skills and other positive traits. They can speed up the pre-screening process and may even eliminate the need for the number of interviews we subject candidates to.

Younger candidates, who are just entering the job market, may prefer to create a video resume as it reflects the media with which they are most comfortable. I can also easily imagine a time when the face-to-face interview is replaced with a live, virtual interview, perhaps with the hiring manger and several others also present virtually. The use of video lowers costs, expands the number of people who can participate in an interview, allows asynchronous viewing, and makes it more convenient for a candidate.

Here are just four of the ways organizations are using video.

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An interview with Rich Kenny of Northwest, who talks about the company’s combo with Delta; reducing time-to-hire; background checks; on-the-spot hires; recruitment advertising; and improving the candidate experience.

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Over the past two years, I’ve attended 15 different recruiting events and HR-related trade shows. Surprisingly, over 95% of the recruiting solutions presented had more to do with technology, sourcing, Web 2.0, assessments, and tracking data more efficiently.

Yet in our annual recruiter survey, 50% of most hiring problems are attributed to the lack of assessment, interviewing, and recruiting skills on the part of the hiring manager.

Taming this 500-pound gorilla is the big problem that should be addressed, not seeing more candidates who won’t get hired by anyone. From this cynical perspective, here are some ideas on how to tame your personal gorillas:

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The idea of redirecting recruiters toward internal movement and succession planning seems like a good one, but I’m afraid it is another dead-end recruiting street unless some basic principles are applied.

Wrong-Way Thinking

There is a common fallacy among a significant number of people that anyone can do anything: a good-looking applicant will make a high performing employee; a high performing employee will make a good manager; or, a highly skilled employee in Job A will also be a highly skilled employee in Job B.

Sorry, folks. We all know from experience this is general nonsense. Stories are legend about a top salesperson or technical whiz who failed as a manager; or, about a marketing whiz-kid who fast-tracked into the executive suite only to crash and burn on the job.

Let’s put this puppy to bed. The only time that past performance in Job A accurately predicts future performance in Job B is when both jobs are require virtually the same competencies. If Job B is different, requires more competencies or better quality ones, all bets are off. In fact, the only reliable way someone might even guess at future performance is to know the employee screwed up his or her last job.

Consider the Peter Principle. If you don’t know the term, either Google “Peter Principle” or look it up here. In short, Dr. Laurence Peter gave multiple examples of how employees tend to rise in the organization until they reach their natural level of incompetence. His message: every time that job requirements change — or an employee changes jobs — there is a strong probability that they will not be competent in the new role. Although Peter uses corporate ladder-climbing as his examples, his principles apply equally to all people holding jobs. The Peter Principle is a classic must-read for every recruiter or hiring manager.

In the next few paragraphs, I’ll explain why the Peter-Principle is alive and well.

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Too many recruiters rush the closing process, trying to push the candidate across the finish line before the race has even started. If you want to win the recruiting game, stop the Hail Mary’s.

Instead, consider successful recruiting more like a well-planned football drive, where time of possession is key. If you’re not into football analogies, the idea here is that top people don’t make critical career decisions on the first call or after the first interview. And if you try to push too hard to get a commitment you’ll drive the best away. This is equivalent to a turnover.

With a great football weekend ahead, here’s what it takes to turn a successful drive into a touchdown:

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Many execs put industry experience at the top of their criteria list for sales-management candidates.

“The successful applicant will have 10 years experience in the widget industry.”

Hogwash!

The end result of this approach is that companies hire the industry retreads.

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Over the years, I’ve been involved in developing hiring tools for sales representatives in a variety of industries including high technology, financial services, industrial products, consumer products, auto sales, woman’s cosmetics, business services, medical products, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare.

Surprisingly, most sales managers make the same bad decisions, regardless of the product or industry.

Here’s the list of where most sales managers go wrong. Start eliminating these error-producing behaviors and just about all of your sales hiring mistakes will go away.

• They think their job is unique. They’re not. There is a common sales process behind each one, that when understood can be used to benchmark any candidate’s past performance against.
• They overvalue first impressions. First impressions don’t predict performance. People with great first impressions are frequently incompetent and people with marginal first impression often have a track record of great success. It’s best to measure first impression at the end of the interview and then determine how the candidate’s first impression affected their performance in consistently achieving quota. From what I’ve seen, the best sales managers don’t worry about first impressions, they worry about the candidate having a track record of achieving good sales results selling similar products, to similar buyers, in similar situations.
• They overvalue their gut or instinct. This is only acceptable when the sales manager has a track record of hiring all top performers who all make quota in combination with very low department turnover. Emotions, intuition, or instinct are poor predictors of on-the-job success. A track record of past performance selling similar products or influencing similar buyers is a great predictor.
• They don’t know the job. Sales is a process that starts with lead generation and ends at closing. Certain aspects of the process are more critical than others. If a sales manager doesn’t know what these are, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to accurately assess them in the candidate. As a result, the sales manager shifts the decision criteria to first impressions and gut instinct.
• They assume they’re great managers. Most great sales people aren’t great managers, yet this is the person most likely to get promoted. It takes a great deal of work to build, develop, and manage an effective sales team. As part of the assessment process, the sales manager has to assess the fit between her style of management and how each person on the team needs to be managed. This directly relates to Hershey and Blanchard’s situational leadership model.

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I wrote a rather controversial article last week comparing Obama vs. McCain using our 10-factor evidence-based assessment system. The stated purpose of the article was to propose that Presidential candidates should be vetted just as rigorously as any candidate for any job.

The underlying purpose was to demonstrate the point that many important decisions, especially hiring decisions, are based on invalid assumptions, false impressions, personal beliefs, and lack of objective data. (Join this Ning Recruiters Roundtable network to submit your views.)

With this article as a starting point, let me offer some expert advice on how to make really bad hiring decisions:

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“Sumak was a dream candidate. He graduated from MIT with a Masters degree in electrical engineering. He had 3 years of experience working for a large defense and commercial electronics firm, and he was willing to relocate. But he insisted on sending me resumes filled with photographs of his family. He even sent me some currency from his home country because I had mentioned that I thought it colorful.  He told me and the potential hiring manager all about his family connections back home and how those might be useful to us, and when he learned that I was single, he insisted that I at some point meet his sister! I was actually afraid to recommend him for fear I would be in trouble.”  - Senior Recruiter, large defense contractor

“Rapinee was sure she would be offered the position we had open because she had the highest GPA possible from her home university, which was rated the best in her country.  She also came from a titled family and her father was a very important businessman with government connections. She was reluctant to interview at all and answered my questions in a superficial manner. She thought she should just be offered the position!  I was so angry (although I did not show it) that I immediately decided not to pass her excellent resume on.”   - Director of Technical Recruiting, Semiconductor firm

These two vignettes illustrate issues that can arise when recruiting someone from another culture. While most North American recruiters have a basic understanding that people are different, most assume that the person being interviewed has been “westernized” and knows our operating principles.

It is usually a shock when either overt or subtle behaviors begin to show how different our cultures can be. Even recruiters who have lived abroad and have experienced other cultures are often caught off guard by the actions of candidates who seem very much like us and have excellent academic and experiential credentials.

I teach courses in cultural competency and have lived and traveled extensively in other countries for half of my life. I speak other languages and I am married to someone from another culture. Still, it is often surprising how often I react in negative or positive ways to the cultural differences that are increasingly part of our life.

Those of us who are in urban, coastal areas work with people from other cultures on a daily basis and are often deluded into thinking we are cultural experts. Yet, we get surprised as much as anyone else. As organizations expand their recruiting to other countries and as different cultures mix, being culturally competent is critical to recruiters’ success.

North American recruiters tend to operate under a number of assumptions and unspoken rules. Here is an incomplete sampling of some of them:

• Interviews are more or less formal affairs and exchanging personal information or getting “chatty” is frowned upon as unprofessional.
• Degrees are only important for a short time after graduation. By the time someone has been out of school for 3 years or so, the kind of work they are doing and where they are working plays a greater role in deciding who to hire.
• Where someone went to school, where they are from geographically, and who their parents are plays little role in selection.
• Family is not discussed during the recruiting process except in a general and superficial manner.
• The fact that a candidate has been a favorite of the boss or that s/he has received special praise or recognition internally is either frowned upon or of minor importance.

However, each of these may be deemed very important to those from other cultures. Many cultures place great importance on family connections, titles, and schools. Bringing these up in the interview is expected and necessary in order to gain the favor of the recruiter.

Anthropologists divide cultures broadly into those that are collectivist and those that individualistic.

Collectivist cultures are family- and group-oriented. We in North America are brought up in a very individualist culture where accomplishing things independently of others is considered a virtue.

However, in collectivist cultures, such as those in most of Asia, the opposite is true. So showing your commitment to the family and the group is important to them.

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First, some interview rules:

• Hiring managers have a bigger fear of failure (making a bad hire) than the person being interviewed, and the consequences of making a bad hire is greater than making a poor employment decision.
• Most hiring managers are excellent at making widgets but they are terrible at conducting interviews.
• 80/20 rule: 80% Compatibility/20% Skill Sets. At the beginning of the interview, skill sets are important, but once the interviewer is confident that candidate’s skill sets will help them sleep better at night, compatibility becomes the primary hiring motivator.

So you have just spent months networking to uncover a highly marketable candidate. You have screened, interviewed, evaluated, checked references, and created a stellar marketing campaign. Because of your efforts, your candidate gets the ultimate compliment: an invitation to interview with your client. You do your standard candidate interview prep: Company, Job Description, and Interest in the job. So why is your sendout-to-hire ratio still low?

Very few recruiters understand that making a hire in this market is more about “risk” assessment than “skill” assessment. Candidate interview preparation should not only be about helping the candidate understand their strengths within the job description; it should also be about helping them understand the psychological battles that hiring authorities go through just to present an offer of employment.

If you want to increase your sendout-to-hire ratio, share the following with your candidates during the interview prep.

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A candidate interview with Celeste O’Neil of the Biondo Group is not your typical interview. While many companies rely on technology to conduct candidate screening and interviews, Celeste takes a more personal approach with her candidates. In some instances, her interviews are scheduled around morning walks or family dinners at the CEO’s home. After hearing Celeste’s story, I was intrigued to find out more. I decided to invite her over for a non-traditional interview at my parent’s house in Milford, PA, to discuss her non-traditional interviewing.

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You need to become a better interviewer than your clients if they’re excluding good candidates even before they meet them, or if they’re not too good at assessing competency. This was the reason I developed the one-question performance-based interview, just to prevent having to do searches over again. Here’s how it works.

After you complete a work-history review, ask the candidate to describe a significant major accomplishment. Then ask these follow-up questions to better understand the person’s actual role and the significance of the accomplishment:

1. When did it happen and how long did it take to finish?
2. What was your specific role and who was on the team? As part of this, please draw a work chart describing the people you worked for and those who worked for you. Also, describe those you worked with, inside and outside your department, or company.
3. Describe the environment and culture. I’d like to know how decisions were made, the systems you used, how your boss managed the team, and what you liked and didn’t like.
4. What was the actual impact you made? Please provide specific details and facts.
5. What were the two to three biggest challenges you faced on this project? Walk me though step-by-step how you handled the most difficult one.
6. Describe the technical skills you used and those you learned. Give me some examples of how you applied these.
7. Give me two to three examples of initiative, where you went the extra mile, or where you exceeded expectations.
8. What did you like most and least about this project?
9. Give me a specific example of the biggest problem you had to solve, whether it was handling something technical, a team issue, or meeting a tough schedule.
10. What recognition did you receive for this?

While these questions can take at least 15 minutes, they provide the interviewer great insight regarding the candidate’s abilities to handle significant accomplishments. Then ask the same questions for a few more accomplishments over different periods and connect the dots. By repeating the questions for different accomplishments, the interviewer can quickly observe the person’s consistency, performance, and growth over time.

To increase assessment accuracy, have other interviewers use the same questioning process, but have them focus on different job factors and time frames.

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Below:

• Monday’s Question of the Day
• Building an ATS From Scratch
• Search Engine Marketing
• Sendouts vs. PCRecruiter
• Candidates Going Out of Their State for an Interview

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