When a single vacancy that needs filling immediately comes up in an unexpected manner and you have no standby candidates to fall on, there is an irresistible temptation to rush the entire screening process.
First of all, the amount of time you need to ponder over the talents of the newcomer and how to creatively capture this talent phenomenon in order to scare off the unwanted while at the same time attracting the very kind you want is shortened. And for every minute that you take away from this very first exercise in a chain of other equally important assignments ahead of you, the speed of your hunting may be great but the outcome of this exercise may be way below what may be described as an excellent job.
Jobseekers, especially those who are currently working but are in search of more inspiring, challenging jobs usually take a lot more time to ponder over the new opportunity in order to arrive at the decision as to whether they want to come on board or not. Except where you publish your vacancy announcement and allow it enough time, by the time the very talented are getting set to apply, you could be shortlisting.
Even if your target lies within the bulk of the fresh from college who are eagerly hunting for job opportunities, you still need to allow your announcement to last long enough to attract the attention of others who may not have heard of the existence of the vacancy. Because, as it often turns out, jobseekers talk to each other about new opportunities they have discovered and unless you allow a reasonable time to pass, by the time the second, third and even fourth generation of jobseekers are aware of the opportunity, you would have collapsed the job posting and deleted it from the web page.
When you move to shortlisting the prospects, if your process is not automated and you rely on manual sorting, again you could face the strong lures of hurrying this process. When the deadline that is staring at you is tight and you have no excuse not to deliver within the deadline, you may want to fast-track the process. And as you do this, you erect barriers in the way of perhaps, very great talents that your company needs in order to be up to the demanding task of the competition.
The next stage of the process after you have shortlisted job prospects is interviewing and it is here that some of the gravest errors have a chance of occurring. If you have two vacancies to fill yet have to talk to ten contenders, unless you tame the process and get it to move at the pace acceptable in normal recruitment circumstances, you may unfairly punish candidates who may be good but are late starters.
In normal job interview, especially if you have some reasonable amount of experience interviewing jobseekers, you will notice that a certain category of jobseekers tend to be early starters while others get warmed up late. But if you correlate the figures, the pattern you have is not one that suggests that all early warmers are great talents while late starters are lower breeds. But in situations where the department you are hiring for is constantly knocking at your office door to ask if the newcomer is ready, you naturally tend to have not enough patience for the late starter.
Some job candidates may be great parrots yet with little value when you narrow the interview to real and substantive subject matter. Jobseekers like these fall in the category of early warmers. They start right, seem to have the right set of verbal communication skills because they impress the interviewers on the preliminary subjects. But by the time you are done with the preliminary pleasantries and about to embark on the core skills matching exercise, a good number of the parrots may let you down.
The above observation is never an attempt to suggest that early starters and great speakers do not make the right candidates; a lot of them do but to assume that because they start right, they must of necessity be great talents is the area of great nuance.
When a job candidate takes averagely longer time to get into the real interview mood, this should not be mistaken as a sure characteristic of a dull-witted jobseeker. Except where the jobseekers had had earlier job grooming, they may think of you as a less serious job-giver. For them, the job interview is supposed to get underway straight away and spare no room for pleasantries. During your attempt at de-stressing them, the jobseekers may consider such gestures as not necessary and unrelated to the real exercise. Candidates like these may be mistaken for misfits.
Other calibre of jobseekers may understand the essence of the initial “trivialities” but they may have a personal setback for starting a great conversation with a “stranger.” If you are vetting engineers, technicians and a wide range of skilled persons whose field of endeavour does not place a great premium on the polished skills of great speaking, you may throw out a great talent simply because they are not up to your initial game.
To make the right decision and chose from the score of job candidates, you will have to vary your method depending on the personality type that has just taken their seat in front of you. Varying the method to suit the candidate’s personality is key and having a lot of patience for them in the initial stages when they are struggling with adjusting to the interview mood is another important requirement.
When the pleasantries seem to bore them, jumpstart the real interview. That way, maybe you will unlock the verbal setback that may be impeding possibly a great talent.