I assume that while working in recruitment, you have at least once experienced a situation in which a decision-maker for your process rejected someone who, in your opinion, met the requirements of a previously established job advertisement. It is also possible that you have talked to several Hiring Managers (hereinafter referred to as HMs) who had different opinions after meeting the same person after a meeting. I suspect that in such moments, getting specific feedback could be quite difficult ;) What's more, it may have even happened that you disagreed with their assessment and tried to convince them of your point of view and defend the candidate. If you have answered yes to the above questions at least once, then this article will be something for you. How to avoid such situations or - if they occur - how to deal with them? I invite you to read!

At the beginning of the process

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After conducting several hundred recruitment processes, I know that for ultimate success (i.e. employment), consistent action from the very beginning of recruitment is key. All the more so in the current market situation, where we receive a lot of CVs for most job advertisements and the selection of candidates is even more difficult than before. In order to take good care of this topic, we need to focus strongly on a well-made profile of the person we are looking for.


First of all, it is worth starting by establishing with HMs the must-have competencies, i.e. those that our candidate must have. And here it is very important to really specify and separate these mandatory requirements from other, additional ones, which will be nice-to-have in principle. Their number is also key - the more must-haves, the less chance we will find a person who is 100% matched to the requirements. Especially in the case of new (non-repeating) recruitment, it is worth performing an initial market benchmark for the HM - e.g. based on a basic search on LinkedIn - in which you can present a short simulation of how the availability of people on the market changes assuming 10 must - haves , and how it changes with 7, 5 or 3.

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Example: Below is a quick example of how our pool of candidates is limited, for example, when we select a specific industry for the position of Sales Manager from Warsaw. When we do not indicate industry , we have a pool of candidates larger than 4.4 thousand. Adding the FMCG industry alone reduces this database by more than 3 times, and this was only the second must-have requirement apart from location.



More about market mapping in one of our customer studies here .

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We must always be proactive in our communication and remember that although HM hires for their company, we as recruiters often have much more experience with similar roles and processes, so the client can rely on us in these matters. Of course, we will not force anyone to hire, but it is worth talking about your experience - if only to reduce fears.

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In addition to showing our perspective to others, sharing data, knowledge and examples can help minimize potential difficulties in finding the right person later on. It may also turn out that - due to the nature of the industry - the Hiring Manager is not looking for one person for a single role, but for example several specialists for different positions that overlap in terms of duties. As we know, the number of candidates who fit a given position is not unlimited and in such a situation it may be a better idea to find two people who complement each other in terms of their competences faster than one "ideal" person, who may not be available on the market or may be in short supply (read more about this here )!

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Example: You are starting a recruitment process for a Senior Fullstack (Java + Angular) Developer role in the fin-tech industry and you are in ongoing contact with 3 people in the process - an HR representative, a tech leader and the CEO. Each of these people is interested in a candidate who meets several criteria. After the first exchange of emails, you notice that each of the people involved has a slightly different perception of the ideal person for the position you are looking for. All the more reason to organize at least one meeting with all decision-makers at the very beginning and align the requirements (at Bee Talents we call such a conversation a kick-off).

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Questions like these may be helpful:

1) How many years of experience do you think a senior level person has? (the answers may surprise you, especially since years of experience do not necessarily equal specific skills ;))*

2) Should the new person specialize more in back-end or front-end (or 50:50)?

3) What versions of Java does the candidate need to have experience in?

4) Similarly with Angular - experience in which versions is crucial for you? Or: does a new person really need to have experience in Angular, or maybe if they know React or Vue they will also be accepted? Or maybe general knowledge of JavaScript is enough?

5) Is experience in the fin-tech industry necessary?

6) What technical skills should a new person have beyond those above?

7) What about soft skills? And so on**.


To avoid potential rejections and inconsistencies later on, the recruiter's role is to leave this meeting with written specifics that must be recorded and sent in a summary to all involved. Why? Mainly so that they can refer to the common arrangements later.

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*Specifying the number of years of experience can make the sourcing process easier for us and not show people under 3 years, for example, but this filter in itself is not always accurate - you can have 3 years of experience or 3x years of experience. That's why it's worth asking what a given person is supposed to be able to do and what problems they may have to deal with on a daily basis, etc.


**It is also worth emphasizing that the conversation should not only concern “hard” skills, such as technical ones, but also the expectations of HMs regarding the behavior and attitudes of the future candidate. “Soft” issues are very often discussed later, so it is worth preparing for them as best as possible from the very beginning 🙂 Especially since it often turns out later that the so-called culture fit is more important to HMs than technicalities, which the recruited person can learn over time (and changing a specific behavior may be impossible). It is also worth having all the issues written down - including soft ones - to mitigate the potential risk of prejudice and discrimination in recruitment (in our archived post in English you will learn more about the so-called biases and here about the symptoms of exclusion).

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In the process

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It might seem that after determining the most important issues regarding the person you are looking for, you can immediately start recruiting. However, you cannot do this without determining the stages of the process.


Why is this important? Let's start with the fact that the more stages there are to go through in the process, the longer it takes ( obviously ) and the less satisfied and engaged our candidates may be. For recruitment to be successful, we must constantly take care not only of the responsiveness of HMs (more on this in Weronika's latest blogpost ), but also of the people in the process and their candidate experience and engagement at each stage.

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To simplify our example, let's assume that the people you talk to and forward your messages to are really interested in the process and meet the must-haves previously agreed with the HM-(k)s.

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What could be the reason for the HMs rejecting half of the candidates sent? How should one proceed then?

As a rule, it turns out that either the initial definition of must-haves was lacking, or some new variables appeared during the recruitment process, or - despite their prior determination - not all people in the process (both HMs and us) understand and evaluate specific competencies, behaviours and attitudes in the same way.

Of course, first of all, it is always worth referring to the initial arrangements (that's why we wrote them down). If this is not enough, it may be necessary to deepen the topic in an additional conversation with decision-makers. Of course, you should prepare for such a conversation and during it, as a partner, present facts and hard data, as well as statistics with comparisons to other similar processes, to show a broader context. It is also worth deepening why someone was rejected, if, for example, the candidate did this, that and that, which was theoretically sufficient for them to invite the person further in the process or make an offer - sometimes this is a sensitive issue or bias, which I mentioned earlier.

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I myself had many such situations and it often happened that after an additional conversation, the HM finally gave a chance to the person he/she had previously wanted to reject, and eventually even hired him/her. On the other hand - even if it was not possible to convince the decision-maker, it was eventually possible to receive and understand a different point of view. And consequently to make changes to the earlier notes from the kick-off and search conversations (so-called search calibration), or later conversations with other interested people. This usually translated into better conversions at individual stages of the recruitment funnel (my colleagues wrote more about the recruitment funnel here ).

Of course, here we should once again emphasize the enormous importance of collecting and analyzing data - without it we know nothing about our work. Also related to this are: testing changes and different approaches and constant education of people in the process, including the fight against biases and the desire to compare candidates with each other. We are human, and each of us has a unique set of competencies and attitudes. They should always be referred to the must-haves for the role we want to fill and assessed in relation to it (however, we should never compare people with each other, especially based on unfounded feelings). What's more, comparing people with each other is a type of ipsative test (i.e. it has more or less the same character as an unstructured interview). In turn, normative tests work best in recruitment, i.e. those where we compare answers to the standard we expect (the assessment is more objective).

Competence matrix

If discussions with HMs are repetitive, a competency matrix (which is in fact an example of the standard I mentioned above) will certainly help in a better (objective) assessment of candidates. In fact, the more biased feedback we receive (or feedback that is difficult to explain and pass on), the greater the value it will give. Not only within the entire process (the quality of individual stages translates into the company's image), but also for people who were rejected - increasing the positive candidate experience from the process (specifics from the competency matrix can provide valuable information on which areas are worth developing further).

What's more, it doesn't have to be very extensive - you can use the example of an employee competency matrix from infor.pl or our internal one at Bee Talents below (slightly more extensive, but already divided into specific areas that are important to us, from junior to expert/lead roles).

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It is enough to establish with all the people involved in the process the key skills for a given position, and then - questions related to them and an assessment scale (eg 1-5, or such quarters as in the example given above).

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Thanks to such a matrix, HMs will be able to evaluate a given person's answers using the same model and a specific key, which will make it easier to talk about specifics and similarities instead of "impressions". Asking the same questions to each person (and collecting the HMs' ratings and taking an average from them, for example) will help make a final decision based on data, not opinions and hunches. P.S. All the more so because already in 1988, research by Weisner and Cronshaw (authors of "A Meta-Analytic Investigation Of the Impact of Interview Format and Degree of Structure on the Validity of the Employment Interview," Journal of Occupation and Psychology, 61) showed that structured interviews yield significantly higher average corrected validity than unstructured interviews (0.63 vs. 0.20).

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Example:

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By the way, it is also worth updating the matrix - especially in longer cooperations - both in terms of questions and must-have competencies themselves. It is important that the matrix corresponds to the real needs related to recruitment for a given role. Sometimes during the process (or even at its end) it turns out that the questions or expectations asked at the beginning are not at all consistent with who we need and they need to be revised.

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Examples of other ways of verifying the knowledge, skills and behaviours of candidates at various stages of the process (apart from the competency matrix), which will facilitate the assessment of people’s skills in the process:

  • preparation by HMs of additional technical questions and preferred answers for the interview with the recruiter (e.g. a question about the order of clauses in the SELECT query for a role related to SQL),

  • a behavioral interview instead of an unstructured HR interview (during which we ask about specific events from the past, e.g. "Give an example of a situation where the process did not go according to plan and how you solved it"),

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  • technical interview, during which the technical people ask exactly the same questions to each candidate, in order to be able to relate their answers to those expected (and not compare people with each other),

  • a test or technical task to be completed at home or during an online/office meeting, e.g. created internally by people from the company (it is worth noting that this stage should not take too long, as it may demotivate candidates, especially those who are taking part in several processes at once, and we will deprive ourselves of a large pool of really good specialists and expose ourselves to the risk of inappropriate people, e.g. those who have been unemployed for a longer period of time and have no other tasks/responsibilities to perform - they have more time, but it does not mean that they have better skills than those who resign due to lack of time),

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  • using ready-made technical tests on the market that check "hard" skills, e.g. Codility or Devskiller for programming (and here, similarly to the above, the test should not take too much time - too long an employment period means higher administrative costs resulting from the extended employment process and prolonged recruitment cycles, although it is worth remembering that for some people a ready-made test with a countdown may be a rejecting factor due to potential stress/time pressure - especially if the role does not require it on a daily basis),

  • competency tests, aka psychometric tests, typical of large companies, e.g. TestGorilla or AssessFirst (where, apart from technical skills, cognitive issues, motivation or adaptation to changes and preferences for individual or team work, etc., can be checked and compared with the expected ones),

  • AC/DC - i.e. Assessment Center (during recruitment) and Development Center (later, when someone joins us), in which several candidates are simultaneously invited to one meeting, during which they perform previously established group and individual tasks (and their behavior towards the preferred ones can be assessed).

Of course, you shouldn't use all of the above suggestions at once, but adapt the tools and length of the processes to the needs and culture of the client's company. However, taking into account recruitments that ended with employment, most of them had (and have) 2 or maximum 3 stages. Most often, there was (is) an introductory interview (often with elements of a behavioral interview), a technical interview with a short test (psychometric or technical) or a task to do at home, and a final interview, when a decision is made in the process. It is worth constantly reminding HMs that a candidate can take part in several processes at the same time, so ours cannot be too much of a time burden, because then they can resign/choose a company where the process ends faster. Even in the current market situation, where we are observing a long-unseen advantage of the employer, and there are more potential employees on the market than in recent years, our ideal candidate can quickly escape to another company.

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End of process

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For me, the way the process ends is just as important as its beginning or the individual stages during its duration. We are rarely able to do without a cyclical recruitment summary in discussions with clients, but it is also worth remembering to summarize the process after hiring (or in less pleasant moments - when suspended).

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After the process is complete, we clearly see the final numerical structure, i.e. our recruitment funnel and conversions at individual stages. We also see to what extent the person we have employed corresponds to the initial arrangements. We are also able to clearly assess our actions, including the quality of selection and the number of profiles that are 100% consistent with the expectations of HMs. What's more: they can be a confirmation of our well-done work or additional arguments in subsequent discussions with the same - or other - clients. All data - both those obtained internally (e.g. from the database) and externally (from the market from candidates) provide us with valuable information that allows us to hire more effectively, including making better selections.

This is important both in the case of employment and unemployment (here even more important, because it allows us to properly account for the process). Often, such a summary, done well, can also result in the client returning in the future, with the same or another role to fill.

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Summary

I hope that the above post explains what causes problems during the selection process and provides specific examples of how to avoid them. I tried to provide tools that can help during the recruitment process, but also to show how important it is to have discussions with HMs and analyze data at every stage of the process, not just at the end (although the final summary after the process always gives us the full picture).

If I had to focus on the most important message that I would like to be remembered, I would choose above all:

  • the need for continuous education (of yourself and your clients),
  • avoiding comparing candidates with each other based on “it seems to me” and biases (by the way, we wrote more about this here ),
  • and instead - focusing on objectively assessing their competences in relation to the sought profile based on the average assessment of all decision-makers (e.g. within the competence matrix).

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What are your experiences on this topic? Or maybe you have other ideas and thoughts related to candidate selection and questions for HMs? Let me know on LinkedIn !

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More links (if the ones in the blogpost weren't enough for you):

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wrote
Marta
Kamińska-Królak
Recruitment Quality Expert
,
Bee Talents