This goes out as a letter to all HR colleagues who are working hard to serve their companies and recruitment agencies.
While I strongly believe that you guys know exactly what you are doing, I think it’s a good idea to hear what people from the other side of the table think you can do to make things better. And with this, I will share with you some of the secrets that we as employees hope you will not just see as understandable, but also appreciate when you are sitting with your next prospect.
1. Understand our job:
Yes we know some of our jobs are quite technical and need a certain amount of understanding, but I don’t think by the end of the day that thousands of us are rocket scientists or expect you to have PhD in nuclear chemistry. However, we do expect you when you sit across the table from us to have a general idea about what we do, and to have a certain level of appreciation even if I am a truck driver who will be delivering your company goods. At the end, I’m going to make your company grow which means we all get paid by the end of the month. So, take the time to understand our roles and responsibilities, and note that they are not just a set of bullet points.
2. Ask us!:
A Good job seeker always wants to be asked with further details rather than yes or no questions, because it gives him the ability to demonstrate his skills, knowledge and capacities. While limiting the answers to Yes/No puts you in less knowledgeable situation and you may not see the difference between a good and bad potential employee.
3. Questions can cost prospects:
Make sure my colleague in the department next door doesn’t ask questions that can cost you a good prospect! You ask me how? Quite simple, when you for example ask a question that shows no understanding of his role or his line of work like point #1, some questions can be actually offensive. Let’s take for example a person who works in the sales are for the IT industry asking them a question such as ‘Sell me yourself’. This is a question that reflects that you have no knowledge as to how the business works and makes them think that you are treating the same person who is selling an IT solution the same way as someone who’s selling a cartoon of soda drinks and trust me the difference is enormous.
4. Experienced vs Juniors:
While I am quite sure you know the difference between a junior and an experienced employee but still let’s take a moment to touch base on some basics. A junior or fresh graduate is someone who is hungry for experience, wants to learn and is willing to an extent sacrifice financial gains a bit (While that shouldn’t always be the case depending on their skills matrix). An Experienced person is someone who’s had a certain amount of years in the market with a different set of skills and a certain level of knowledge; this needs to be taken into consideration when asking those questions about salaries. Experienced people view themselves as people who have walked their miles, which are visible to everyone and expect you to have a look at their profile and have an idea of what they might expect; especially that they are sure that by the end of the day, they know that you have estimated budgets and expectations.
5. They are thousands, but I am one:
We as prospects do know and realize that you are hundreds of candidates daily and sometimes some of the roles have tens of people applying for it, but still always deal with every individual as a unique entity and not as one in one hundred. Some candidates might be shy and are unable to show their skills while being true gems that are waiting to be discovered you can either be responsible for uncovering these gems or burying them in the sand until someone who is smarter than you do the job. It’s always important to get to see the candidates distinguish themselves from others and stand out, but you can be smart in how you do it.
6. Read the profiles well:
Always read your candidate profiles very well. You don’t want to end up in an awkward situation where you raise a candidate’s expectations too high only to surprise them. The rejection is based on something that you should have already known! It makes you and your company look bad. Another example, you are interviewing someone for a role to manage a team, but on the candidate’s profile it shows they’ve never managed a team or your initial screening didn’t reflect it and the team management was a job pre-requisite. If you take him to the second level for the job interview with the people, who will actually work with them and then you reject him/he because of that lack of experience in team management, it is something disappointing. This is because, if this pre-requisite was very important to the job, then you should have not taken that person to the next level to begin with. You just raised their hopes on their first chance for management role then shattered it by incompetence from your end.
These are a few point I will just go through and in my next letter I will address the employees on also some points when applying for or doing a job interview!
Go out there and recruit good people!
By: Tarek Hassan Refaat
Photography: Mahmoud Mansi
EDITOR: Nada Zeyada