What should I Look for when I recruit new team -members?
As a leader, you should pay a lot of attention to the people you bring into your team. Selecting the right person for the job can make a major positive contribution to building the overall effectiveness of your team; get it wrong and you can cause serious damage to morale.
You also should recognize that it is always easier to keep a ‘bad egg out than it is to get rid of them once they have joined – and add to this the wasted costs of having to begin the search all over again.
Although many organizations now use job descriptions and employee profiles to aid the recruitment process, some leaders do not make best use of them and still place too much emphasis on gut feeling, which is a factor, but should not form the majority component of any recruitment decision. In seeking any new employee, you need to think about three dimensions:
| Background/experience | Skills/knowledge | Personal attributes |
| What education or training qualifications do you expect the ideal candidate to have to be able to do the job? | What specific skills and knowledge must they have already to do the job to the standard you require? | What overall personality/ disposition are you looking for in the person? |
| What level of work experience are you looking for? | What communication skills do they require? | What personal attributes must they have? Define them very clearly. |
Generally, you can determine what a candidate can do by analyzing their CV or by looking at the past jobs they have held but determining who they are – whether they are the right candidate behavior is far more challenging.
As you well know, candidates are likely – in terms of attitude and to tell you what you want to hear at interviews, but whether that is the whole truth is sometimes another matter. To avoid this pitfall, profile an ideal candidate and then benchmark all potential applicants against that profile.
Using the profile, devise a range of questions designed to draw out information you require, with particular emphasis on the personal qualities you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for a team the player, asking a candidate whether they are a team-player is unlikely to yield anything but a ‘Yes’ answer. So your questions must be better thought through than that, perhaps along these lines:
- Give me some examples of where you felt you made a positive contribution to your team in the past?
- What do you think your previous team-mates would say about working with you?
- What can you bring to our team that would set you apart from other candidates?
It is only by having a clear picture in your mind of what you are looking for that you can hope to find the best candidate from a pool of applicants. Otherwise, the interview process normally works like this: the first candidate sets the benchmark; the second is either better or worse; and so on down the line.
Thus, the interviewer does no more than compare one candidate against another, which allows them to be swayed by those who ‘do a good interview’. The approach described here prevents this from happening.
