Watch the Recruitment Trap!

I have worked in a number of different roles ranging from HR Strategy through to Operational Management in IT. This means I‘ve spent many years recruiting staff, whether for my own team, being on an interview panel for colleagues, or across an organization as the HR representative. I have to confess that I started out fairly naïve about how to recruit well. I believed the hype that behavioural interviewing was the be-all and end-all of interview techniques. What I came to realize is that this only gives you someone who has had experience in the field you are recruiting for and perhaps you miss out on a complete genius wanting a career change. Not only that, you don’t know whether your organizational culture will motivate them or make them desperately unhappy, or whether the way they work will fit in with your current team.

The other little trap I discovered early on is that we like people who are like ourselves. You know what I mean. They walk into the interview room and you instantly like them. They talk in a way that you can relate to and give most of the right examples. They might not have all the criteria you are looking for but you are willing to forgive them because they are just such a nice person. WATCH OUT!

Recruiting someone similar to you might be what your team needs, but more often than not you are not creating the balance that you need in order to deliver on your operational demands. I learnt from a colleague how wonderful it is to have someone challenge you during an interview and then to consider how that challenge might play out in the workplace. It could make your company grow, allow you to grow in your career by broadening your perspective, or just be a lot of fun.

Working with NNC I have been involved in the development of a recruitment strategy that makes a distinct step away from the (now) traditional behavioural/skills based recruiting. We focus on natural talents and the values that motivate someone at work. We also have some other clever tricks that we use like modeling your top performers to see what it is that makes them so good so we can use that information. Combining this with understanding how someone’s emotional intelligence contributes to their role, we have a recruitment process that gets it right the first time. And what we love most is being able to pass this process over to you so you can keep on recruiting right.

If you want to know more about how to establish a successful recruitment process for your organisation, contact me on T: (03) 9555 7955 E: roz@neuralnetworks.com.au or visit our website at http://www.neuralnetworks.com.au

Rosalinda