Overcoming post-interview identity challenges
When you invite twenty (20) candidates to come and compete for six openings in your business, there is the tendency that even if you properly labelled the jobseekers, by the time you are set to select the most qualified, you might find yourself faced with a challenge of identity.
Advertisement
But if you allow the documents containing the various candidates’ performances to gather dust, you may add to the first challenge, another problem of proper facial identification of individual candidates and the spectacularly impressive tipping argument which might be central to the decision you wish to make.
A particular candidate may have fared way below the marks obtained by the most ideal candidates but may have particularly attracted the attention of the job-giver as a sterling prospect due to this candidate’s self-confidence, positive outlook, logic or their point of view on a certain issue that was examined at the interview. Without a proper mode of identification and relying solely on the marks on the score sheet, this candidate may be missed, especially if enough time is allowed to elapse between interviewing and real final selection.
During a normal skills matching test we call a job interview, a lot of factors that cumulate to give the interviewer the final impression of the jobseeker have different weights and so play varying roles in the choice of the best-fit. Screening 20 job-seeking prospects for six positions can be akin to wrestling a wild bull, especially when the interviewers wish to do a thoroughly good job.
Even if you allow each candidate a third of an hour, chances are that by the time you are readying to receive the eighth, ninth and tenth candidate, your memory may be losing grasp of the earliest prospects. Apart from the special effects one or two candidates may have engineered, your photographic memory may have either lost the images of some or may be having difficulties matching the faces with the names and subsequently, the individual scores of the candidates.
When you are selecting for positions where the prospects will interface with customers, certain personal characteristics carry relatively more weight. Even though the ideal must be intelligent, outspoken, confident and gifted with abundant verbal and non-verbal communication skills, the candidate’s general physique, facial values and other bodily statistics tend to count in the final analysis and consideration.
But when you are selecting six from 20, keeping these non-scoring yet very essential bodily statistics in the overtaxed memory of the interviewer is difficult and nearly impossible. Because, as it may turn out, while some candidates may possess the required bodily characteristics as well as pass the real interview, others may be deficient in either one of the standards set by the job-giver yet may have attracted the positive attention of the recruiter because of one thing or another.
Overcoming these challenges will require the selection team to hold a brief meeting ahead of the selection exercise. Deciding who an ideal candidate must be should precede the drawing of the checklist against which a prospect should be weighed.
Other Trending Stories
Open and frank discussion
This discussion should be frank and open and must be decisively conclusive before the selection begins. The outcome of the meeting should inform the agreed questions and the corresponding marks that are allocated each question.
Too much dust should not be allowed to gather on the interview results. The longer it takes to decide who comes on board and who gets no admittance, the more the identity of the candidates continuously stale and fade in the memory of the recruiter. In the end, when the interviewers gather to select the ideal, controversies may erupt. Some selectors may not be able to correctly match candidates’ faces with their corresponding names and marks.
When the tasks that have occasioned the job opportunity is physically challenging, persons with certain physical characteristics may be more ideal than those deficient along these lines. In order to forestall the unpleasant incidence of inviting the wrong interviewee who may not have the right physical features, the score sheet should have a column for remarks about the person’s physical fitness and their closeness to the ideal standard.
The challenge with photographic memory may be overcome by requesting qualified candidates to include a passport-sized photograph if you accept physical résumés. If you restrict jobseekers to only electronic mails, you may request them to send CVs that have a scanned copy of their most recent passport-sized photograph or their full portrait.
Alternatively, it will be no offence to request permission from candidates to take a shot of them individually when they enter the interview room. Before this, the candidate should be made aware of the need for the shot and their consent should be sought before embarking on an enterprise such as this.
During a normal job interview, the general performance of some candidates may not meet the minimum expectations of the job-givers when evaluated in broad terms. But when considered in a special way, these candidates may represent a certain caliber of personnel with the right mix to outdo the ones who might have performed better than them in the interview.
When you do not take special note of this kind of candidates, you may finish the exercise only to go back to the pile of CVs, searching for the résumé of that special jobseeker.
When you are used to interviewing job prospects without a structured set of questions with corresponding marks, always make available little stickers on which you note your remarks as the interview is in progress. These little remarks will assist you to get back on track when you end the exercise and get down to reviewing the outcome of the interview.