Screening interviews done by interns and candidate experience

For some time now, companies recruiting interns has promised those students meaningful projects and the opportunity to assume responsibility. Ever since, brewing coffee has been labeled as the most ungrateful intern’s task ever and many companies, MNC and start-up alike, will address brewing coffee or actually lack thereof in their job adverts. See e.g. the one below by McKinsey.

Indeed, short of staff start-ups tend to entrust interns with quite a bit. One such task is interviewing candidates. The learning curve is steep and the responsibility huge. Then, interns can influence candidate experience greatly.

To ensure a positive candidate experience, HR department should not only train the interns in interviewing skills but also design the interview sequences right and manage candidate expectations appropriately. In particular, some techniques include:

* Plan the interview as a three stage process, interview questions asked by employer, questions asked by candidate and outline of the recruitment process.

* Prepare the list of frequently asked questions by candidates and answers and train the interns in answering them

* Encourage interns to inform you of new questions asked by candidates and consult with you on the best answers

* Continuously help interns improve their interviewing skills

* Select the right interns to do the job

Last but not least, leaders should keep in mind, that no matter how smart and well trained the interns are, they will be hardly able to engage in a discussion with the candidate. As a result, most intern screening interviews are one way questionings. Experienced staff may perceive them as unprofessional and may not feel appreciated accordingly as one recent candidate at Fab shared on kununu.

Multiple job openings on single job advert

Traditionally, one main difference between online and newspaper job adverts was that the former one did not allow for listing several job openings within one job advert.

Obviously, there have been some changes since I recently came across the following advertisements.

While Cersanit looks for intern in four different departments with a single job advert, American Express is looking for customer service officers for high-end clientele in four different teams.

About the reasons for such job adverts I could only fantasize.

Recruiting 2.0 – Jobseekers’ ads, social media profiles and personal websites?

In the German employment market there are two kinds of advertisements. On one hand there are job vacancies posted by companies (Stellenangebote) und seeking job announcements posted by jobseekers (Stellengesuche).

Traditionally, jobseekers announced their readiness to work in newspapers. Today, this option is mostly used by handcraft workers, often looking for private arrangements. While white-collar jobseeker set-up a social media profile (notably with a status option “seeking employment”) or register with a large job boards and post their CV.

Companies actively looking for staff buy CV contingents on these job boards, allowing them to review certain number of jobseekers within a given time frame.

In career advice literature, some consultants suggest setting up a professional website outlining the jobseeker’s experience, sample projects, etc. in order to land a dream job.

Do private websites help jobseekers get on HR’s radar?

How effective are such private websites, considering the surplus of social media platforms?

How often do HR departments just google the talent in Internet in order to find private website profiles and thereby possibly a dream candidate?

Hiring People is not a Formula 1

Hiring decisions are made slowly. Only a few companies will use speed to their advantage. Ability to make the call allows those companies to spot talent and get it, when the opportunity arises.

With an average time to hire of 60 days, majority of companies really take their time with the recruitment process. There are many reasons why hiring cycle is long:

1.      Candidates must observe their notice period with their current employer.

2.      The candidate requirements evolve as the interview process starts, so that search criteria change and the process extends.

3.      A long-term vacancy causes hiring manager to reorganize the work so that s/he is no longer so committed to fill the vacancy and more picky about the new hire.

4.      HR and hiring manager hope that tomorrow will bring even a more perfect match between the vacancy and the candidate.

5.      Companies do not have a clear picture about vacancy costs. Not only in Dollars, but also in terms of team morale, job stretch and amount of overtime (and corresponding burn-out risk).

6.      Companies cannot set the right recruitment strategy for particular type of vacancy. They usually try least expensive recruitment channels, employee referrals and job ads. Only with rising desperation, companies engage with recruitment agencies, but even then they are concerned about the recruitment costs and tend to be not very committed to the candidates presented by external recruiters, often in connection with point 3.

7.      Companies stick rigidly to the budgets. They make a big issue over the difference between the budget and the salary expectations of the candidate. Sometimes, the deals are broken over 5K on an annual basis in the salary range of 60K. As the result, the vacancy remains vacant for another 4-8 weeks, hiring managers frustrated, HR busy with a rising frustration levels as well and finally applicants suspicious why they see the same job ad for weeks.

8.      The drive to save recruitment costs at the expense of productivity and ability to execute the business strategy is an overwhelming and recurring issue. Finance does not see through, HR cannot make a business case, time passes.

9.      The decision makers are unable to make the call. They have no stamina or no confidence, call it what you want, they’re simply indecisive and that’s bad for recruitment.

For SMEs speed can be a recruiting advantage. However, even so it is good for HR not to act on the decisions made immediately. Two lessons, I learned a few years ago.

First, it is good for the hiring manager and HR to sleep over a hiring decision. This happened to me twice and it should not happen the third time. When the hiring managers say “Please issue an offer”, it is good to wait one day to do it. On those two particular occasions, the hiring manager came to me the next day with a question, whether the offer has been made, because he no longer wants to hire the candidate. Since the offer was send, I could either withdraw the offer right away or maneuver the offer negotiation process in a way that the candidate did not accept it.

Second, it is also good that the candidate sleeps over the job interview held. Since good candidates do have more then only one option, it is good to give them time to reflect on the job role, the company and the interview itself. Making an offer to the candidate shortly after the interview was for many overwhelming. They later reveled that they would expect it on the third day or so.

Hiring Funnel and its controlling potential

Metrics and KPIs are used in order to improve performance. When applying hiring funnel and reporting input metrics, HR intends to improve their performance as well, particularly measured in terms of the final outcome. It means that quantity and quality of new hires must be achieved.

Questions remain, however, how the particular input recruiting metrics must change in order to achieve higher level of performance by HR department. Then eventually, HR must move from the historically determined target ratios to performance standards leading the department to the desired quantity and quality of new hires.

Let’s look at the example again; I reviewed in the previous post on that subject. Based on the historical ratios to meet the quantity target, HR needed to interview 18 candidates and receive 4.8 applications per day (or 144 applications in total during a month) in order to hire 3 sales persons.

Assuming that high potential sellers are less likely to change jobs frequently and apply for jobs more often, the ratios should decrease in order to increase quality of hires. So HR needs to receive more applications and interview more candidates in order to hire the high performers.

With the chunk rate of 30% after first month of hiring sales people, standard ratios should be set 1/3 above the historical values.

Hires-to-interview ratio moves from historical 1/6 to 1/8, so that HR should interview 8 (6 plus 1/3 of 6) instead of 6 candidates. As a result HR must interview 24 candidates in order to hire 3 of them and no one drops after first month.

Interview-to-candidates ratio of 1/8 moves to 1/10.6, so that HR needs to receive a total of 255 applications, or an average of 8.5 applications per day.

When planning the recruitment activities and efforts targeted at motivating more job seekers to apply, HR need to remember the general job seekers behavior and job posting nature. The former suggests that job seekers rest on weekends and public holidays and get mostly active on Monday and Tuesday with their application efforts, when they realize this week is going to be as every other week. The latter implies that job ads must be refreshed and posted frequently, as a two-week old job ad does not bring as many applications as a new one, because it does not show up in the top of the search results.

Call for more research on usage of employer rating sites

A few days ago I started a LinkedIn Poll on usage of review and ratings site, which basically looks like this:

In order to find out more about a prospective employer, when do you visit an employer review and ratings site?

*  Before sending off my application

*  After I've got invited for an interview

* After I've attended the job interview

* As soon as I receive the job offer

* Never

As long as the poll is active, you can see it in the right column of this blog. I look forward to the results. Thanks.

Out of interest I recently also checked German employer review site kununu.de to compare two companies, two established Internet Start-Ups, one in B2B, one in B2C field.

Results? The B2B company received nearly 60 ratings, while the B2C company only some 15. While the profile of the B2B company was viewed nearly 20,000 times, the profile von the B2C company has been opened nearly 5,000 times. The average rating of the B2B company was worst by around 0.3 percent point.

Is it possible, that

* the brand image of B2C company influences the perception of their employer brand and blocks job seekers to seek out more information about them .

* employer rating of B2B company are viewed more often because job seekers may not have any associations with the company

* The better brand image of the company, the less likely the employer brand will be explored via employer review site.

Or is the varying activity level of ex-/employees and job seekers on these two employer profile sites just a result of the time lag in their profile existence, information that cannot be obtained on the kununu-site. Nota bene, both companies have been heavily recruiting based on the number of job advertisements on their career sites and job boards in May 2012.

“Knowing-doing” gap and employer rating sites

Employees have always shared their opinions by word of mouth. In Web 2.0 they have the opportunity to do so on employer rating sites, such as glassdoor.com, employerinformation.co.uk, aboutacompany.com, kununu.com, opracodawcach.pl, etc.

Employer rating sites have three main stakeholder groups, candidates, ex-employees and HR departments. Current employees are an insignificant minority, as I don’t think they would be genuinely interested in sharing their opinion.

Candidates, particularly, the young internet savvy generation, are the recipients of information on potential employers. Hopefully while doing so, the readers use their critical mind when reading the comments. After all, each posting is a personal experience, though the personal circumstances of its author remain largely unknown.

Leavers are the content producers. While companies’ career websites provide subjective positive case studies, the opinions on employer rating sites are quite often negative, and in best case, more balanced. Particularly, non-voluntary leavers cope with the detachment from the company publicly and anonymously before moving on with life. This public criticism is an act of revenge.

The HR departments are the observers. Though, they too can engage in the conversation. HR needs to decide with the management whether the company will comment openly or not. Though people respect organizations if they respond to criticism, "it won't always be appropriate for organizations to respond online" accordingly to Vanessa Robinson, Head of HR practice development at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Secondly, HR can also note those commentaries and pass them internally so that the company can act upon it. However, I am afraid that in this respect most of the management teams face the “knowing-doing” gap identified by Pfeffer and Sutton (2000). This “knowing-doing” gap describes the today’s general management practice at many companies. The problem is not that managers don’t know what do, but actually doing it. Then senior executives know exactly what they should be doing to improve, but lack the time, energy, techniques, commitment and maybe even incentives. As the result, employee feedback received on employer rating sites is pointless.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).