Microsoft Office Professional 2007 blog recruiting

As I've talked about, I have been in recruiting for Microsoft for the past five decades. In fact, I like to think that I was born and raised into recruiting at this company. I feel lucky to have started off on the International Recruiting Team and been taught the key skills that I think make any recruiter successful: how to effectively source, evaluate and place candidates. I think the one thing that I may have missed out on is what recruiters at other companies do. I also have never been a third party recruiter or vendor. So I started attending some of the events in my local area to get to know what other recruiters do and also learn more about my profession outside of Microsoft. On Wednesday last week I attended a luncheon held by the Employment Management Association of Seattle where there was a presentation by Lou Adler. Lou is a prominent member of the recruiting community and the president of The Adler Group. I've been reading his articles on the Electronic Recruiting Exchange for some time now and thought it was neat that he agreed to come speak to us in Seattle. His talk covered two major areas; making the job description match the real job and then interviewing appropriately to determine if the candidate you have is a match for that position. In his first point was really that you create a job description that defines the job and what success looks like. For example, instead of talking about what skills or academic requirements you need for a specific person/position you should build a profile that talks about performance objects such as growing sales, launching a product or reducing costs etc. The argument is that if a recruiter limits their search based on the job description you are minimizing your pool of top candidates. What I took away from this is that having the manager think about building a “performance profile” will also help him/her realize that they are looking for people that can produce results and not relegate themselves to a group of candidates with a list of skills on their resumes but an inability to perform. In theory, I 100% agree with Lou;s ideas. In practice, it is a little harder to get something like this adopted in a corporate recruiting environment that already has established methods for specifying job descriptions. I think Microsoft mixes some of the “performance profile” into their job descriptions, but as we talked about before in my post on job descriptions we are far from perfect. What I also see as a positive effect is that we spend less time interviewing people that say they have a skill on their resume and actually interviewing people that know how to use that skill to achieve results. It might also help me as a recruiter broaden my search pool for people that have actually achieved results vs. just keywords on resume. Not sure how to actualize that one yet though… The second portion of the conversation really focused on interviewing candidates appropriately for positions. Microsoft really taught me how to take a candidate and really dig deep to find examples of how someone has worked in the previous. So it was a surprise to me to hear that there are still interviewers out there that are looking at the wrong qualities in making a hiring decision: first impression and interviewing ability. Lou also said that interviewing a candidate based on skills and experience in the resume was also the “wrong stuff”. Not sure yet if I totally agree with that point or not yet. Anyway, one way to mitigate this is to have a pretty rigid interview process and use the “one question interview” technique. Basically you ask one question – Tell me about your most significant accomplishment. It is then up to the interviewer – recruiter or hiring manager – to take that information and dig out as many details as possible. From this you should be able to counteract the mirage of the first impression or someone that just interviews well. You should also be able to determine if the person has what it takes for your position and to be a member of the team/company. I have to admit at first I though that this method was short sighted. How are you supposed to evaluate the person's long term value for the company? After looking through the slides again and digesting the information, I realized you probably would be able to find out more about a person's potential, competencies etc through this interview method. I don't know if it is something I will try soon, but I guess I'll post on that when I do actually do it The overall take away for me is that if you take the time to do one or both of these things that you will have a better opportunity to attract, assess and hire the best employees vs. the best candidate. The differentiation here is that the best employees are competent, motivated, take initiative,Microsoft Office Professional 2007, meet/beat goals and have potential. The best candidates look good on paper, give a great first impression, are assertive, and articulate but potentially lack the skills of a good employee. My advice? Watch closely for these types of questions in your next job interview. It might even be a good idea to read Lou;s article above if you are planning on interviewing in the near future. Going through this exercise could also help you prepare for your big day. I also wouldn;t be surprised to hear a lot of companies in the Puget Sound or across the US using this interview method in the near future J zoë