Category: Recruitment

When I started my HR career, perhaps one of the most surprising things I found was just how much there was to juggle. Now, I came form an Executive Assistant role, supporting 3 SVPs and the President, so I was no stranger to juggling multiple tasks. But going from supporting four executives to supporting a client group of over 200 employees was like going from floating in a pool to navigating class 5 rapids with no training. No one teaches you about time management in HR school. For that matter, I think time management is a grossly underrated trait that school simply does not teach, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

The first three months in HR were the hardest months of my entire career. A big part of my job back then was recruitment, and in my rush to fill roles, I stretched myself too thin and got behind on my other work. It was enough to land me in hospital for a stress-related chronic condition!

When I returned to work three months later, I put some mechanisms in place to ensure I was never that overwhelmed again. Over the years, as I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve refined these to fit with my job. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that I urge all HR Business Partners to do some recruitment in their roles. And you’ve also read that recruitment takes anywhere from 20-25 hours of work over a 6-week period. So, how do you stay on top of it all? Read on for tips on how to juggle recruitment with your day job.

Put it in Your Calendar

I can’t stress this enough. This is tip #1 for hiring managers in my blog post on how hiring managers can fast-track recruitment. If it’s not in your calendar, it won’t get done. I know the weeks when I don’t block off time in my calendar for recruitment, I don’t move the needle on my open roles. If I go one week without making progress on my open roles, the weeks to follow get even crazier. Two weeks without progress, and I’ve got hiring managers beating down my door. Plus, I’ve learned the hard way that if I take too long to move through the recruitment steps, I lose candidates.

My suggestion is to block off recruitment time in your calendar indefinitely, not just for the 6-week recruitment period. I’ll explain why a little later in the blog.

But Don’t Block Off Too Much Time

This may sound counter-intuitive, but the title of this blog post is how to juggle recruitment with your day job. The key is to not neglect your day job in favour of recruitment. Remember earlier in the post I mentioned that I landed in hospital for stress? It was because I decided, in my zeal, that to close my roles quickly I had to book back-to-back in-person interviews. Now, you know my tactic on back-to-back 15-minute phone interviews, but in-person interviews are a whole other thing altogether. They take a lot out of you, and if you’re bringing people in, you want to show them your best side. It’s as much a sales game for you as it is for them. When you block off too much time, your other work will suffer and that doesn’t serve anyone.

My suggestion is to block an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon for in-person interviews. In other words, I don’t do more than 2 in-person interviews per day. If you use my 15-minute phone interview process, you won’t have too many in-person interviews anyway. And the ones you do have, you’ll want to give them your 100% and you won’t be able to do that if you’re constantly watching the time!

Develop a Solid Process

I believe in processes. I could devote an entire blog to processes. You can have the best people in the world, but without solid processes, your business will be mediocre at best. I believe that with a set process, you stay on track, you overcome procrastination (chronic procrastinator here!), you check things off your list, and you avoid distraction. James Clear, someone I’ve followed for years now and the author of the bestseller Atomic Habits, says that setting goals is great, but the key to achieving goals is refining your process to get there. Sure, you can tell your clients that they can expect to fill their role in 6 weeks and you can give them a timeline and weekly tasks, but if you don’t have a process to get those tasks completed, you will not achieve your goal. Or if you do, you’ll be winging it. Not the way to establish yourself in your career!

I’ve talked about a process for screening candidates in my 15-minute phone interview. I encourage you to establish a process for your full recruitment cycle from start to finish. Everyone does recruitment a little differently, but if you want some inspiration, post a comment below and I’ll send you my process.

Communication is Key

You can have the best process, but in order to stick to the process, you need to make it public. You need to communicate the process and timelines to your clients and any other stakeholders involved in recruitment. It’s all fine to have your own timelines and schedules, but if your hiring manager is going to be on vacation for 2 weeks, your process will only go so far.

I remember one time I was hiring for an urgent role. It was the end of June and we needed someone in place asap. Well, I did everything I was supposed to do, blocked off my calendar, put a timeline together, and had an airtight process to fill the role in 4 weeks. The problem? I didn’t share that plan with the hiring manager; I simply said we could fill the role in a month. I didn’t share the timeline with him because if I had, he would have seen that he wasn’t going to be there for 3 out of the 4 weeks because he would be hiking in Asia with no cell reception!

Share your timelines and key dates with your clients. It will save unnecessary delays down the road.

Do Recruitment When You’re Not Recruiting

When you’re managing recruitment for multiple roles, it’s relatively easy to stay on track. You have a vacancy and you work towards filling it. But you can reduce the time you spend on recruitment activities if you work on recruitment all the time. Remember earlier I asked you to block off time in your calendar indefinitely? When you don’t have a vacancy, use that time to source and network with candidates. I posted on why all HR Business Partners should do recruitment for their clients. The benefits of keeping your finger on the pulse of your client’s industry are innumerable.

To be fully transparent, I’m not great at this. When I don’t have vacancies, there are plenty of other things to fill up my time. But I have seen other HR Business Partners do this with much success. And when I work to get ahead of recruitment, I see the results ten-fold. When a vacancy does pop up, you will already have a couple of good candidates to start with. If we all recruited even when there was no vacancy, the time to fill a role drops and you have quality candidates that you have got to know over several months, and maybe years. The likelihood of that hire being a successful one shoots through the roof.

There are a lot of ways to juggle recruitment with your day job and be amazing at all of it. I’d love to hear what you do to stay on top of it all. Post a comment below and let us learn from you.

I’ve learned over the years that there is one thing every successful HR Business Partner does in their role. I’m going to tell you what that is in this post.

Before the wide embrace of the HRBP/COE model in HR teams, most of us were HR Generalists. There were a few Specialists, mainly in compensation, learning and development, and benefits. However, a vast majority of us were Generalists and we had at least basic knowledge of all functions across the HR spectrum.

Then HR departments started moving to the HR Business Partner/Centres of Excellence model, where a core group of HR Generalists would be the liaison between the business and the Centres of Excellence (previously known as Specialists). The unfortunate reality is that while this model was widely popularized by Ulrich et al, there was never a training manual for HR Business Partners. The COEs had their respective designations, conferences and other avenues to perfect their craft, but nothing for HRBPs.

And so, the unfortunate consequence of this became such that there was never a standard for HRBPs to work towards. Never mind that recruiting HRBPs has become a nightmare at best because no two HRBPs have the same skill set or expertise. Some have knowledge of all areas of HR, some are more like Account Managers to the business with no special knowledge aside from translating business objectives to HR action plans. I’m not saying one is better than the other, just that there is no consistency is how HR Business Partners operate.

As I had mentioned in a post earlier this year, HR has a reputation problem. And a big part of that comes from the fact that the group that is most client-facing has no playbook. I think Ulrich has since come out with theoretical approaches and consulting firm, Gartner, has come out with playbooks and guidelines for HRBPs, but these are largely for companies that are big enough to afford them. Small and medium sized companies, without deep pockets, are mostly left to figure things out for themselves. LinkedIn Learning has a couple of HRBP courses, and the HR Professionals Association in Ontario has a course.

In my mind, this is a glaring gap for which our profession desperately needs a solution, but in the absence of a fulsome solution, I’m writing these blog posts to help HR Business Partners with the day to day execution of their job. Today’s post highlights one thing HRBPs can do to almost guarantee their success. With this one thing, we can immediately get our finger on the pulse of our organizations, and quickly see gaps in leadership, policy, employee experience, and process. This one thing has helped me learn more about my client groups’ business and helped me learn more about the leaders of those client groups.

Yes, it’s Recruitment.

I’m not sure when exactly Recruitment separated from the HR Business Partner role, but I see it more and more. Perhaps it was always that way. Managers and Directors and even VPs of Talent Acquisition are hired to lead teams of recruiters. It has become a sort of mini-agency model. There was only one problem. Recruitment agencies, unless you’re looking for a very senior executive or someone you’ve worked with for a long time, are rarely effective.

I remember the days when I used to work with agencies. I was always frustrated with the model. I would speak to the account manager and explain everything we needed in the candidate. The account manager would then relay that information to their recruiters. More often than not, the account manager would not meet with the candidates and would blindly forward resumes from the recruiters. The end result would be candidates that were not a fit for the organization for various reasons, and a supreme waste of time for me.

I see a similar trend with this new Talent Acquisition team within HR. They’re perhaps slightly better because they’re in-house and have more knowledge of business needs. All that aside, even when the Talent Acquisition team is amazing and high performing, with this model, HR Business Partners are never involved in getting people into the company. Which becomes a problem when they’re then trying to deal with employee relations issues, motivating people, helping leaders with their team, and providing insight into the person. Plus, you can’t support leaders in executing on their objectives without knowing who is coming through the door.

Recruitment takes a lot of time… but it’s worth it

Now, I understand that recruitment can take up a big chunk of time. Over the years, I’ve calculated that it takes, on average, approximately 20 hours of work over a 6-week period to bring in one person even with my 15-minute phone interview process. A little more for senior roles, and a little less for junior roles. And if you have even 5 open roles at a time, that’s 15 hours per week over and above your day-to-day job. That’s a lot of time by anyone’s standards, but, in my view, the benefits far outweigh the cost. Keep reading, I promise you, it’s worth every minute you spend on it.

You learn the business faster

When I joined Oxford Properties back in 2012, they had a Talent Acquisition Adviser to support recruitment activities on the team. Having come from a generalist role, the concept of “outsourcing” recruitment was foreign to me. Almost all the other HR Business Partners let the Talent Acquisition Adviser manage their recruitment for them. I would have too, had it not been for sound advice I received from an HR Director at the time. He said, “Take on recruitment. We have a fabulous recruiter on the team, but my advice is to do some recruitment for your client group, at least for a little while. You’ll learn the business much faster and you’ll get unique insight into your clients.”

It was the best advice I received in those early days of my new job. I did indeed learn a ton about my clients’ business and got closer to my business leaders in less time than if I hadn’t done recruiting for them. The best compliment I got from a leader about four months into my job was that he thought I’d been there for years!

You know exactly who your clients are hiring

A big part of a leader’s job is to bring in the right talent. HR Business Partners have unique insight into the company’s corporate objectives and how well their clients’ goals align with the business goals. The people your clients hire have a direct impact on their success. It bears arguing then that hiring good people is the cornerstone of achieving business objectives. This is especially true in the knowledge economy where the success of a company is more reliant on people rather than machinery.

Aside from measuring your client’s success, the added benefit to being involved in your clients hiring is that you can help them shape their team. A big part of the HR Business Partners role is to help their clients with strategic workforce planning and be clear on the client’s goals to then help them staff and structure their organizations. If you’re not involved in hiring their people, you can’t influence hiring decisions.

Let’s face it, hiring is only a small portion of the employee life cycle. As an HR Business Partner, chances are, you’ll be seeing and hearing about new hires long after onboarding ends. This is one of the primary reasons I suggest HR Business Partners get involved in recruitment. You need to know what exactly, and who exactly, you will be working with in the future. As custodians of the company’s culture, it’s HR Business Partners’ responsibility to safeguard that culture.

You get a broader perspective of the industry and market

This is by far the best side effect of doing recruiting. Sure, it takes a lot of time, but when you’re hiring candidates from the outside, you inevitably have your finger on the pulse of the industry. You start to speak in an educated manner not just with your clients, but also with your COE partners. Whether you’re trying to help your compensation partners match jobs inside salary surveys, or help your L&D partners develop a specific program for your clients, you will have a much better idea of what your client group does when you’re involved with recruiting for their team. Plus, how cool is it to meet someone at an event and immediately know whether they’ll be a good fit for your client’s team.

It’s certainly a tall claim to say that Recruitment is the one thing that all HR Business Partners must do to succeed. Yet, I see the most successful HR Business Partners not only have immense knowledge of their clients’ business, but also have a huge network of people that they can match up with the right job. And it’s those HR Business Partners, the ones who incorporate recruitment into their roles, who climb to the senior-most HR positions and become industry leaders.

It takes effort to incorporate Recruitment activities in your day-to-day and the payoff is definitely worth it in the end. Next week I’ll be talking about how to stay sane while managing recruitment activities. I’m going to share my own process plus some tips on how I have consistently managed 10+ open roles along with a full HRBP job.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what you think about my claim that HRBPs must do Recruitment to succeed. Comment below and share your thoughts.

If you like this post, you’ll love our 15-Minute Phone Interview Guide – the tool that has saved me hundreds of hours during the interview process.

Many say that recruiters are the key to bringing in talent into an organization. I would argue that hiring managers are the real heroes of the story. Recruiters facilitate recruiting, but the hiring managers make the final decision. Recruiters will bring forward a number of good prospects, but hiring managers have to acquire the skill to close the deal.

There are many aspects to becoming the hero of the talent acquisition story. In keeping with last week’s blog post on expediting the screening process with the 15-minute phone interview, today I’m going to focus on speed and efficiency on the hiring manager’s part. This blog post works for hiring managers with or without a recruitment team.

If you know us over at Caras, you know that we value efficiency but would never compromise quality for the sake of speed. So, no doubt, while I give tips and advice on how to make things quicker and faster, these tips also ensure you’re getting a better way of doing things. A way to get more done in less time – everybody’s dream!

The hiring manager has many jobs in the recruitment cycle, but there are certain things a hiring manager does that provide more value than others. This blog post will talk about the few things a hiring manager can do to fast-track the recruitment process and bring in quality people in the shortest possible time.

Define the selection criteria

Your candidates are only as good as your criteria. I’ve worked on hundreds of positions and the best candidates came in the door in the fastest possible time when my hiring managers knew without a doubt exactly what they wanted in their hire. Of course, part of the responsibility rests with the recruiter too, but hiring managers who consistently hire well ensure they specify, in detail, everything they need in a hire, as well as the things that would be nice-to-haves.

Putting that information into a job description is key. However, it’s equally important to keep that selection criteria front and centre during the interview stage because it’s too easy to rely on the first impression of candidates. Here’s how I’ve seen it play out: hiring manager and recruiter spend hours writing up the perfect job posting. They tee up interviews and the hiring manager starts to meet with people. Hiring manager and recruiter take a liking to someone they meet, and they hire based on how well the person presented in the interview, instead of matching their responses to the selection criteria.

Now, presenting well under stressful situations may well be required for some roles. It’s when presentation skills and a gregarious personality are not a requirement for the job that we get into sticky situations. There’s nothing wrong with extroverted people, but extroverted people need people around them to energize them. When you stick them in a remote working location with minimal interaction with their energizer, the hire, no matter how good, is bound to fail. They simply won’t stick around, or they’ll be disengaged.

Defining the selection criteria is crucial to making a good hiring decision. It’s equally important to remember that selection criteria when making your selection.

Set aside weekly time for activities

If you know me at all, you know that it couldn’t be too long before I started talking about time management. I’m a productivity fiend because of one simple fact that I realized about myself. I am a procrastinator. There’s a misconception that highly productive people don’t procrastinate. In fact, us procrastinators absolutely need to be highly productive in order to get anything done, because if we’re not constantly doing things, we fall into a state of inertia that’s too hard to break out of.

So, my fellow self-aware procrastinators, I can’t stress this point enough. You must schedule recruitment activities into your calendar. It’s the only way you’ll make progress. I know it sounds simple, but I can’t begin to tell you how many hiring managers have told me that getting a person in the door is critical to the success of their team, and then they sit on various recruitment activities for weeks at a time.

If you don’t schedule weekly time in your calendar, recruitment activities will fall to the bottom of your interminable list of to-dos. Block off 2-3 hours per week in your calendar for recruitment activities. And if you’re not hiring at the moment, use that time to build a pipeline of people.

Communicate with the team

Setting aside time in your calendar is a great start, but it’s just the start. You need to fill up that time with meaningful activities. This means you and your team need to be on the same page. By team, I mean the recruitment team. I assumed at the beginning of this post that you have a recruiter helping you. You and your recruiter would have established the interview format and process. Your recruitment team consists of you, your recruiter, anyone else you want the candidate to meet and other stakeholders such as your HR Business Partner (if that person is not the recruiter), your boss, your peers, and your clients.

Part of your weekly activities should include a standing meeting or call with your recruiter. At that meeting, you can both go over your progress from your weekly recruitment activities. I also suggest keeping everyone in the loop on your progress. Hint: that’s something you can ask your recruiter to do for you.

Be decisive

You’ve met a few candidates, you have your selection criteria nailed down, but you can’t decide. So, you schedule another interview, just to be sure. A couple of weeks pass and you finally decide, only to have the candidate pull out of the race. This is not a story; this really happens. The worst is when both your top candidates end up taking other offers because the process was taking too long.

I get it, hiring a person is a big decision. You want to make sure you get someone with the right skills and the right personality to fit perfectly with your existing team. And in fact, the smaller the team, the harder the decision because one bad apple can completely sour the field. Yet, the longer you wait to make a decision, the longer your team suffers and the more revenue you lose (or less time you save).

Your HR Business Partner or recruiter can also double as your accountability partner. When you find yourself struggling to make a decision, pull out your selection criteria and go through each of your top candidates against it. Take 20 minutes to do that and then make a decision. Once you put out an offer, there are still plenty of decision points that may discount the candidate, but at least you’d have taken steps in the right direction.

Trust your instincts

I’m a bit of a unique bird. I make decisions based on my intuition, not analysis. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me because everything I read said I needed to make data-driven decisions. There was, it seemed, no place for my intuition at all.

Then I discovered that I made the best decisions when I trusted my instincts and followed through. And it was particularly obvious with recruitment decisions. I’ll never forget one time I was recruiting for a VP of Finance position. It had taken us months to find candidates that met our selection criteria and finally we found the perfect person. He went through the process and all the stakeholders liked him. There was only one piece of feedback that came back from everyone: he was a little on the arrogant side. No one said it was a deal-breaker. It was just a consistent piece of feedback that came back to me.

We were about to put an offer together when the hiring manager looked at me and said he was unsure about the candidate. The arrogance issue was noisy enough for the hiring manager to take notice. The only problem was that we had no number 2 candidate. Which meant that if we didn’t proceed with this person, we’d be back to the drawing board. His first inclination was to ignore this feeling he had. It would be easy to ignore because the need for a VP was immediate. I told him to trust his instinct and we went back to the drawing board.

Your instincts tell you something that cannot be defined in words and numbers. The skill you need to master is the one that allows you to quiet all other noise and really listen to what your instinct is trying to tell you. And recruitment is exactly one of those times when you can and should rely on your instincts.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. I’d love to hear your strategies for fast-tracking the recruitment process as a hiring manager. And if you’re a recruiter, how do you help your hiring managers make better and faster decisions. Comment below and let us know.

If you like this post, download the 15-minute phone interview guide to really fast-track your recruitment process

If there’s one complaint I hear from Hiring Managers and HR Business Partners most often it’s how much time recruitment takes out of their already-busy days. I know, I’ve been there. After years of struggling with scheduling hours for screening resumes, phone interviews, in-person interviews, assessments, offer letters, etc., I finally came up with a way to shave off some of the time.

Just one thing before you read too far. This blog post is for recruiters who either don’t have access to AI-equipped Applicant Tracking systems, or don’t want to rely strictly on AI or the ATS’s screening system. In my personal opinion (and, yes, it’s an opinion), these ATSs can sometimes eliminate people who don’t fit the minimum criteria, but who would be a good fit nonetheless because they bring some other element that would help them succeed.

Ok, with that said, let’s get to it. You can check out the video version of this blog post too (complete with screenshots of my process)

I found that the screening and interviewing process took a big chunk of time in the recruitment process. In fact, screening always took more energy out of me than anything other aspect of recruitment, and I ended up procrastinating more than I’d like to admit, causing the whole cycle to length, frustrating my hiring managers. So, I had to find a better way.

The 15-minute phone interview

I find that recruiters use phone interviews as a method of screening candidates, however, most recruiters don’t do them right. They usually narrow the phone interview candidate pool too much because they feel they need to spend half an hour or more per candidate. And they end up spending the 30 minutes only to rehash the same questions at the in-person interview. Certainly not an efficient use of time.

I use phone interviews to screen my candidates, but I only spend 15 minutes per interview. I don’t use it as a full-on interview, just enough to get the basics down and see if I want to get to know the person some more. And by doing that, I can get through more candidates to ensure I really have picked the best of the best applicants.

The idea of the 15-min phone interview is simple. You’re only asking them a few short questions and the key things you’re looking for are:

1. Can they stick to the time they’ve been given?
2. Can they convey their point concisely and explicitly?

The key to doing this without compromising the candidate experience is 3-fold:

1. Have a structure
2. Set expectations
3. Provide feedback

And it can all be done in 15 mins, plus a minute to spare.

In the following sections, I’m going to outline my exact phone interview process.

Of course, depending on the position you are hiring for, the questions will change, but I keep a few questions consistent to easily evaluate and compare the candidates.

Phone Interview Structure

Here is the basic structure I follow:

• I ask them to summarize their resume in 2-3 minutes
• I ask them to tell me why they’re interested in this specific position at this company in 2 minutes
• I spend 1 minute talking about the role, the manager, the team, and the company
• I pick 2 job-specific questions or the non-negotiable things that they need for the role. For instance, I ask them for an example of when they used a particular software, or an example of when they had to deal with a difficult employee. The key is to ask them for an example. Again, 2 minutes per question. Remember, the purpose of this phone interview is just to screen them. You’ll invite them in for an in-person interview if you like these answers they’re giving you.
• I ask them to tell me what their salary expectations are. If it’s way out of range, I’ll let them know and ask if they want to proceed with the process. Some people will back out at that point, and you’ve only spent 10 minutes of their time. A note here, even if you have asked salary expectations in you applicant tracking system, ask this question again. I find sometimes people will change their answer.
• Finally, I leave 3-4 minutes for them to ask me any questions and letting them know what the next steps will be and timing. At this stage, it’s important to let them know right away if they don’t have a key skill or qualification. For example, if you need strong software skills, let them know that you’re looking for someone more proficient and that you will not be proceeding with their application at that point. It’s best to give people immediate feedback if possible. It’s not always possible, but if it is, then please be human and do it so they’re not waiting around for you to call them.

What you learn in 15 minutes

The idea of the 15-minute phone interview is to get to the lowest possible level in the shortest amount of time. What I mean by this is you’re trying to get as much detailed information from a candidate without spending too much time. 15 minutes is enough time for you to give a high-level overview of the role and the company to the candidate. This is valuable if and when they come in for an in-person interview.

I’ve done phone interviews in many formats over the last 12 years of my HR career. Sometimes I’ll do a longer 30-minute phone interview, but over the years, I have learned that I don’t learn much more from a person in 30 minutes than I do in 15 minutes. In fact, because of the time crunch of the 15-minute interview, both the candidates and I are “forced” to get as much information in as possible. Believe me, there’s nothing like a deadline to get the most out of people.

Now, there is one caveat to that. Some people simply can’t deal with the pressure. I have had candidates with impressive, mind-blowing resumes completely bomb the 15-minute phone interview because they couldn’t find the right words. If this happens, it’s important to keep an open mind. I have, at times, brought them for an in-person interview and about 80% of the time I’ve made the right decision.

That said, I make a lot of decisions based on intuition (rather than data), so this works for me better than it would for someone who needs data to decide. I find there are limitations with data, and when you’re dealing with human beings, you need to look deeper than a statistic. That said, I did mention only 80% of my intuition-based candidates give a drastically different interview in the in-person. So, there are definitely limitations when I do it my way too.

In the end, the thing that most of us know as recruiters is this: Recruiting is no more a science than it is an art. And that means that you have to use a process, but you also have to use judgement and intuition. The best recruiters use both with comfort and expertise. Relying on your intuition to guide you is a topic for another blog post, but I thought it’s worth mentioning here.

The 15-Minute Phone Interview Process

Now that you have the basic structure and timing of the phone interview, let’s dive into a more detailed process. How exactly do I screen over 30 people over 2 days?

Prepare for the Phone Interview

Believe it or not, you do need to prepare for phone interviews. A little bit of preparation will help you do them back to back and you’ll remember who you spoke to. Believe me, after doing 30 of them, all the names and response will be a big jumble. To avoid that, you have to prepare.

First, determine the questions you’re going to ask. I’ve created a handy pdf one-pager for you to use during your phone interviews. Download the form here.

Remember, we’re only spending 15 minutes with the candidate. You won’t need to type more than a page of notes (if you’re handwriting, I’ll allow you two pages!).

I like to have all the resumes printed or opened up in tabs on my computer so I’m not wasting time looking for them while I’m going from one interview to the next.

Schedule the Phone Interviews

Block off 2 2-hour time slots in your calendar. That will cover 16 phone interviews. You can repeat the process the following day, or a day later in the week for additional interviews. They key is to block the time off in your calendar. I find time-blocking most effective because I can put a sign up on my cubicle wall or on my office door. This is a perfect activity for your work-at-home days.

Next, start putting the interviews into 15-minute chunks into your calendar with each candidate’s name. I put this in the meeting/event title: “Phone Interview – [JOB TITLE] – [CANDIDATE NAME]”. At this stage, I mark these meetings as “tentative”.

You might be wondering why I put in the candidate name before scheduling anything. This is where the beauty of my system comes in. My phone interview scheduling process is perfected to the point that it only takes me only a few minutes to set up interviews.

Here’s what I do:

1. Send them an email with the following language:
   1. Thank them for their application and resume.
   2. Tell them their experience looks interesting and you’d like to speak to them.
   3. Tell them you want to schedule a quick 15-minute phone call with them.
   4. Give them the date and time (from above) and ask if that works for them. Do not give them multiple options because 99% of the time people will say yes to my suggestion. Mainly because I mention it’s only a 15-minute call and they usually rearrange stuff. This method is 100x better than asking them what date/time works and going back and forth. This one trick has saved me hours over the years.
2. I send out multiple emails one after the other to each of the candidates I selected

As people respond saying yes, you can mark the meeting status “confirmed” or remove the colour if you colour-coded above. I then respond to them and tell them I’ll call them at the number on their resume. Or if they give me another phone number to call, I put that into the “location” area of the meeting invite. You can also send them the meeting invite at that time.

On the odd chance they say that the date/time does not work or them, you can move to another time slot somewhere else in the calendar. However, as I mentioned before, 99% of my candidates accept the initial date and time I put forward.

During the Phone Interview

If you’ve already set up the questions in the preparation phase, then there’s not much for you to do here. I usually launch right into the interview saying I want to ensure I get them back to their day within 15 minutes. Download the handy guide I created to facilitate this step.

Final Steps

If you’ve followed the structure above, you’ll have exactly 1 minute before you move to the next phone interview. Take this time to jot down 1-2 points that really stood out for that candidate, followed by an A, B or C (or whatever scale you want. Yes, No, Maybe also works).

This method of phone screening has helped me manage 10-15 open recruitment positions along with a very full HRBP work load. It has also helped ensure I’m not leaving good candidates in the ATS.

Your Turn

Now, it’s your turn. I’d love to hear how you implement this system. Or if you have other handy ways to screen candidates before brining them in.

Don’t forget to download the 15-Minute Phone Interview Guide I created just for you. It contains this entire process in a neat visual and includes a worksheet with space for putting in your own questions (along with space for answers). You can use it every time you recruit. And make sure you send me an email with how you’re using the guide!

 

Every Thursday, we bring you Endless Recruitment: tried and tested recruitment strategies to attract, interview and select your future star performers.

Last week I posted about how small businesses can leverage their size to attract top talent. This week, I want to build on a point I made about job postings. Here’s the thing – if you’re trying to recruit top talent, you need to put in some work. The days of recruitment being a one-way street are long gone. These days, candidates want the same treatment from employers that employers expect from them.

We expect candidates to have a great looking resume, spend time on a custom cover letter, show up on time for interviews, dress a certain way, ask amazing questions, send a follow-up note, the list goes on. Yet, so often we aren’t prepared to give them the same courtesy. Our job postings are boring and flat, we make candidates wait for us at the interview, we don’t make them feel welcome, and we don’t respond to their follow-up note.

You know who you are. If you’ve done any of those employer things above, times have changed. Candidates are revolting and the truly outstanding candidates, the ones who know they could go anywhere, are not having any of it. Believe me when I tell you, they will completely skip your job posting, if they’re even looking.

And if you manage to get them to the interview stage, and you don’t sell them on your company and the job, they will back out of the process. Ten years ago, this almost never happened. Candidates would apply for the job, we would call them in for an interview, they would need to sell me on how much they want the job, and I would take weeks to get back to them because, you know, we’re all busy. 99% of the time, they would still be waiting and holding out because the company that I worked for amazing.

These days, even top employers have trouble holding on to amazing candidates if they take too long to make a decision, or if the hiring manager is too brusque or arrogant, or if HR doesn’t get back to them on time. And these days, they’re not just going to pull out of the interview process, they will tell the whole world on social media sites like Glassdoor. By the way, if you think Glassdoor doesn’t matter, you’re very wrong. People look at Glassdoor ratings before even hitting the “Apply” button on your posting. I’ll be writing a blog post on how to notch up your Glassdoor ratings soon so stay tuned.

So, what exactly can you do to make sure your candidates take notice of your small, possibly-not-so-well-known company?

Make your job posting look and sound like a sales page.

All those sales page principles you’ve learned as a small business owner, apply to your job posting. Grab their attention, show them how they’ll benefit, talk about the features of the company, tell them what’s going to happen when they click the “Apply” button, and finally, what they can expect in terms of compensation.

So, let’s break this down.

1. The look

I’m sure you’ve seen job ads on LinkedIn or Indeed that look like this:

The posting jumps right into the details of the job. The next section is about what the company wants from you. If there is anything about what the company is offering, it’s an afterthought at the bottom, saying “Competitive compensation and benefits”. If the company is really trying, they’ll say something about education reimbursement or work-from-home benefits.

Now, here’s a job posting that is the complete opposite from Betterteam:

Notice the first paragraph/sentence that captures the reader’s attention right away. It talks about how great it is to work there, and then goes into what the company is looking for. But even that is written in a way that tries to match the candidate to the company. It’s not a list of qualifications.

2. Why should they work for you

The best sales pitches start with the benefits the product brings to the consumer. When translating that to a job posting, the best way is to talk about how your company solves a need in the candidate. Of course, in order to do this, you need to know who your ideal candidate is, and what motivates them. My last blog post talked about two universal truths about top performers. I’ll dive into this a bit more in a future blog post, but those are good starting points. Play up how your company is different from other employers and what you can do for them to “serve” their need to be fulfilled at their job.

This is also a good spot to talk about the ideal candidate. Check out the template job posting for how to position this without sounding like a checklist of qualifications. I’m also going to write a blog post on how to determine what qualifications you need for the job. Most times companies assume they need something, but they really don’t (or they don’t need as many qualifications as they think).

3. What they can expect as an employee

This is where you talk about the features of the job and the company. Most of my clients are in the professional services companies in insurance, technology, financial services, so I’m going to focus on that, but I find this works with any industry, though perhaps to varying degrees of success. Talk about how many (and which) projects they’ll be working on, or helping out with. Top talent like feeling a sense of accomplishment through the work they do, so highlight that. Talk about what their colleagues are like. Tell them to go to Glassdoor and see what their current and former employees are saying about you – if you have a Glassdoor profile (DISCLAIMER: only do this if your Glassdoor ratings are where you want them to be! I’ll be writing a blog post on how to boost Glassdoor ratings if they’re not). Finally, talk about the reporting structure (the flatter the better) and anything else that sets you apart from other employers.

4. What happens after they hit “Apply”

This is where you can really stand out from the rest. So few employers spell out exactly what the hiring process is for that job. Candidates apply for a job, and they feel like their application goes into the “black hole” of the company’s applicant tracking system. Most times, companies will say something like “Only those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted” which means that if people don’t hear back, they’re not selected for an interview. But it never tells candidates when that interview selection decision will be made.

So, let’s change that and tell these valued high caliber applicants exactly what happens once they submit their resume. Give them the dates when you’ll be reviewing applicants, the dates when you’ll be scheduling interviews, the dates when you’ll be scheduling assessments (if you have any), and the dates when you’ll be making the final decision (or expect to fill the position).

Two things happen with this approach. First, in a process that’s so fraught with ambiguity, this level of transparency is refreshing. Second, it holds your own team (and you) accountable for moving the recruitment process along. Too many companies spend far too long recruiting for one role.

5. Compensation

There are two schools of thought on listing compensation for the role. Most employers in the private sector will not list compensation. The reasons: 1) to protect the privacy of other people who hold the same jobs. 2) People are touchy about compensation and if they see that x job is paying $y, then their z job should also be worth $y or more. 3) Compensation shouldn’t be a driving force in the application process. 4) You might drive away qualified people. I agree with all those points.

However, when I think about the big picture, if you pay your employees fairly and are open and honest with them about their own compensation, then this should not be a concern. I’ve been helping companies with recruiting for 11 years, and the topic of salary expectations comes up right at the screening step. So why not eliminate ambiguity on both sides and just list a range? It will save you from screening candidates who don’t match your salary offering and it will save candidates time from applying for jobs for which they are too senior (or junior).

That said, I’ll leave this one up to you. You need to weigh the pros and cons and make a decision that’s right for you.

To make your next job posting stand out and attract quality candidates, download a free copy of our job posting template here.

Good luck, and if you want me to take a look at your job posting, just send me an email at ss@carashrconsulting.com.

Every Thursday, we bring you Endless Recruitment: tried and tested recruitment strategies to attract, interview and select your future star performers.

Do you ever feel like you’re constantly trying to compete for talent with large corporations? And getting left in the dust? You’re not located in a fancy downtown building, you don’t have fancy offices, or top-of-the-line benefits. Heck, you don’t even pay that well.

Does that mean you have to settle for less-than-stellar candidates?

Absolutely not!

Here’s the thing… the talent pool is wide and deep. No matter what job you’re hiring for, there’s someone perfect out there for you. Your job is to go and find that perfect person.

The things that I keep hearing over and over again from clients, especially those that are located outside of the downtown cores of cities is “nobody wants to work here” or “we only attract a certain demographic” or “young people don’t want to work in our sleepy little town; they want to go where the excitement is”

If your company is in suburbia, chances are you’ve said (or at least thought) the same things at one time or another. The truth is, you’re not entirely wrong. Getting top talent at smaller companies, particularly those located outside the downtown core, is harder.

Which is why you need to work a little extra hard to attract that top talent. With a few small tweaks and some incredibly easy hacks to your hiring process, you can not only get people to apply for your jobs, but you can also successfully target your ideal candidate on sites like LinkedIn.

Size Matters (but not in the way you think)

Believe it or not, your biggest advantage in the recruitment process is your size. I’ve worked at large companies and, let me tell you, it is incredibly difficult for them to quickly change hiring practices and tactics. They have set processes, set systems, and some serious red tape they have to wade through.

As a small business, with most likely one decision-maker, you’re nimbler when making changes. Now, this isn’t true of all companies. I’ve worked at small companies where change was incredibly difficult. And if that describes your company, then you’ll need to tackle that before anything else (and that’s for another blog post). That nimbleness works to your advantage when attracting top talent.

The #1 Universal Truth about High Achievers

Here’s how: it’s a universal truth that high achievers and top performers like to get things done. They like to complete projects and if things take too long, they lose interest. Fast. That’s the one advantage you can play up, and you should play it up BIG. Right on your job posting. Tell potential applicants how many projects you completed last year. Tell them how engaged a person in that job was in a high-profile project. Where possible, put in dollar amounts to show magnitude of the project. That will pique interest.

The #2 Universal Truth about High Achievers

Here’s another universal truth about high achievers: they like autonomy. So, while you’re playing up your fact-paced environment, also play up the fact that your reporting structure is virtually flat. Again, if you don’t have a flat reporting structure (i.e. no more than 3 levels deep), then you need to examine why and tackle that before you try to attract top talent. But if you have a relatively flat structure, tell people that. And tell them that you not only value decisive people but expect people at all levels to make decisions in the best interest of the company.

Job Postings are Ads – write them like you write sales copy

If you’re in business, then you’re selling something. Whether that’s a service or a product, you’re in business because you have something to sell. Your business exists solely based on your ability to sell. Employees are like sales. You need them to keep and build your business. Some companies need sales people to sell more.

Which is why I still don’t understand why companies write their job postings like military or legal documents. Think about a sales page or advertisement for your product or service. Would you ever list the features of your product and the ideal customer profile on your ads? So, why do we insist on writing “Responsibilities” and “Qualifications” on our job postings?

As soon as you start thinking of Job Postings as Ads for your company, you’ll change the calibre of candidates you hire. You could be located in Antarctica and still get quality candidates to apply for your job if you have the right marketing strategy. And, no, you don’t have to pay them seven figures a year either.

Treat your potential employees like something of real value, talk to them like they’re something of value. Stop talking to potential candidates like you’re doing them a favour by giving them the opportunity to apply for your job. Make the job posting so exciting that they want to work for you.

So, the next time you write a job posting, forget about including a laundry list of qualifications and job responsibilities. Sell them on your job opening. Sell them on your company. Sell them on the Unique Selling Proposition of working for your company.

Want me to review your newly minted job ad? Drop me a line so I can give you pointers!