Barely Managing

Writing a Job Advert, Shortlisting, & Interviewing (Recruitment Part 2/3)

Disclaimer: Some regions and countries have specific laws around recruitment, including what has to be advertised, how it has to be advertised, and what the process needs to be. Most organizations will also have their own internal policies that you will need to adhere to. It's extremely important that you know the laws and policies that you need to adhere to and follow them before implementing any advice you read on the internet or in a book. So you've decided the sort of person your team needs, now it's time to get the recruitment process going and actually attract that person. 

Writing the job advert

Job ads are one of my biggest pet peeves, and granted, I know in a lot of places HR has their own template you have to use, but this is your chance to attract the person you want to apply for the job. So many times do I hear people say that they don't think they should apply for the job because the advertisement lists five hundred requirements and seventy years of experience.

Be realistic and take the job advertisement seriously. Put yourself in the shoes of a normal person out there in the wild who has most of the skills you are looking for. Would they be dissuaded from applying? Is the advertisement reflective of the average person in that role in the field, or are you modeling it off the super star that just left? Refrain from listing x years of experience when we all know there are people out there with one year of experience who are more competent than those with twenty. Use optional language like "should have experience with some of the following coding languages" rather than listing them all off and making the candidate think they need to know all of them.

Don't include the classic filler lines like "attention to detail," "great stakeholder skills or "team player" unless it (a) really matters—what job doesn't need attention to detail or being good with the team?—and (b) you're actually going to ask a question about it in the interview.

Use active language that aligns with the questions you're going to be asking, for example:

If you can align the qualities you are looking for with the advertisement, then your interview questions are mostly written for you. And if you find that you can't, in reverse, create an interview question with a quality you listed on the advertisement, then ask yourself if the quality should be on the advertisement in the first place.

I'd also encourage you to keep it short; just highlight the top five to eight qualities that you 100% are looking for; if they happen to have extra skills you might be interested in, then you'll see that in the CV or cover letter, or it'll come up in the interview.

Make sure your job advertisement both explains what your team and your organization do and how your team contributes to the overall mission. Many HR teams will have this templated into the advertisement, but in case they don't, it's really important to get that into the advertisement. This gives the candidate context for the day-to-day responsibilities of the role and avoids any misunderstandings. You don't want to make an offer to a candidate who responds, "Sorry, this actually wasn't the sort of role I was looking for.

#The shortlisting process Once the window has closed and you have a stack of applications to wade through, the next bit can be a bit daunting, especially if you have a lot to go through.

Do yourself a favor before you look at any applications and take the list of skills you were advertising for and rank them in order of importance. If you want to try and be extra zesty, you could nominate them for points, so in theory, the best candidate gets the most points. However, that's not a numerically sound strategy, and you may find candidates you want to interview that don't score highly. But it's important that you are consistent in how you go through applications for two reasons. Number one is that if anyone ever contests the process, you've got a leg to fall back on. Number two is so that you are being consistent as you go through the applications and don't start changing your own criteria as you read application twenty-three of sixty.

Now if you do have a whole boat of applications to cut through, anything more than twenty (that's still a lot), I'd first scan through them all and try to find some non-negotiables. People asking for too much salary, people who maybe haven't put a lot of effort into their application, or anything tangible that you might find wouldn't lead to a successful hire When I say tangible, what I mean is anything based on fact based on looking at their application. Say, for example, that their application mentions that they are overseas and want to do the role remotely from that country, but it's not company policy to facilitate that. I'd start there and try to avoid trying to cut the list short based on whimsy. Like the CV is formatted in a way you don't like or they have one or two spelling mistakes.

A comment about experience: It can be quite tempting to start culling applications based on your perception of experience. Either their application shows too little experience or too much. In the former category, let your ranking of skills exclude anyone who doesn't have enough experience. In the latter, I always caution against throwing out applications based on their seeming to have too much experience. For one, you'd naturally exclude anyone who has been in the workforce for a while, and this could be seen as ageism. People want different types of jobs at different stages of life; this isn't just a linear thing; remember the Rockstars vs. Superstars breakdown? So even if someone has a lot of experience, this may be the sort of job they want to return to. If you're worried about a candidate with too much experience getting bored, I'd recommend, if feasible, having that chat with them, maybe over the phone, as they might have genuinely misunderstood the role. Just call them up and say, Hey, I can see you've applied for the role; looking at your experience, I just want to walk you through an average day and what's expected in the role, and you can tell me whether that's aligned with the sort of role you are looking for and whether you want to proceed. Don't say the words overqualified. I think you'd be bored or too good. If they insist they want to proceed, then put them in the proceed pile and continue reviewing the rest of the applications.

Once you have done your first cull of the non-negotiables, go through the rest and score them based on your criteria. As you score them, you want to start thinking of sorting them into three groups: proceed, maybe, and no. You don't have to only proceed with those with a high score, as you will see people that catch your eye for whatever reason, and you need to give yourself the freedom to pursue them.

Once you have finished your sorting, I'd recommend giving the 'maybe' and 'no' piles a second look just in case, but it's time to move onto the next step.

Interviewing Process.

Your interview process should be pragmatic. Every single interview requires time out of your work day, as well as that of those on the panel with you, the interviewee, and your HR or recruitment person. That's a lot of time and money being wasted. So think twice before interviewing ten people or making candidates go through six interviews each. The cost of everyone's time needs to be justified; what risk are you trying to mitigate, and will another interview actually mitigate that?

It should come as no surprise that I also don't think highly of practical tests as part of interviewing. Now, I work mainly in corporate and IT spaces, so I'm not in a position to comment on the need and effectiveness of practical tests in other fields. In my field, an unsupervised coding test can easily be googled around, and it's often too 'light-touch' to really test anyone's ability, as it often depends on how you code in our particular environment with our specific challenges. Not to mention, organizations pay money for these coding test platforms, and I don't think it's worth the investment.

If you do require someone to test their aptitude in a technical sense, I would encourage a supervised activity. Get a member of your team who you can trust to judge someone's ability and have them work through a problem with the candidate; they don't have to get it correct, but you'll quickly be able to gauge their competence by talking to them about how they would solve the problem. Besides, most jobs are problem-solving jobs.

So ask yourself, What are the bare minimum interview steps you can get by with to be able to make the right call? and start there.

If your 'proceed' list is over five candidates, that's too many interviews, and so you need to add an additional step to reduce that list. I'm a fan of quick phone interviews to bring that list down.

Think about what you can ask that will help you make that decision. Would you ask them a specific question (if you are looking for a certain skillset) or do you want to get a feel for who they are and what they've done? You could refer to your skill list and try to ask questions that show they have your number one or number two skills.

Say you're a team that uses X technology, and that's a key requirement. You could ask a candidate to talk about examples of how they have used that technology or similar ones. If it's a certain soft skill that you value, like mentoring or managing multiple stakeholders, you could ask them to give an example where they showed that skill.

It's important that you don't force a phone interview on a candidate. Call them first, inform them of the phone interview step, and ask when a good time to have it will be. I do recommend not letting them go in totally blind, but I wouldn't tell them the exact question you are going to ask; instead, give them a high-level direction of the sort of question you are going to ask. For example, "I'm going to ask questions that dig deeper into your technical experience with the tools we use here", If they want to be extra prepared, they'll go back to the job ad and freshen up from there.

So at this point, you should know whether you need a phone interview or a technical test, and then you still need at least one proper interview. I would encourage you to leave it there. If at the end of the process you end up with two people you're trying to choose between, then maybe another step could be required, but that could be something less formal like an in-person chat over coffee.

Lastly, depending on your company structure, it might be part of the process or poignant for the most senior member of management in your division to also meet the candidate, as they will ultimately be signing them off, so bear that in mind.

In the next section, I cover how to craft your interview questions, how to do references, and how to give feedback, so head on over to the final part of this recruitment section to finish up.

Feel free to reach out if you have a question, all my links are in my Linktree and if you want to show some extra gratitude you can buy me a coffee through my Linktree.

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Next Article: Interviewing, References, Giving Feedback (Recruitment Part 3/3)