Who’s interviewing who?

Recruiting the right person to fill a vacancy in your organisation is a very important task and a very expensive one if you get it wrong.  The average financial cost to a UK business to recruit a member of staff is £20,000. Interviewing skills are very important!

Staff turnover

How many staff have left your business in the last 12 months? Now multiply that by £20,000.  You now understand why it is so important to recruit the right candidate from the swathes of potential available to you.

Or at least there were swathes of people. Over the last 40 years there certainly has been.  Every advertised vacancy received a deluge of emailed CVs, had recruitment agents banging at your door and everybody attempting to convince you that they were the best candidate.

Unsuprisingly, businesses have invested a lot of time and money in training managers to be effective recruiters – to help them invest the £20,000 wisely.

Finding the right candidate

Training support has been required on how to sift through the mountain of CVs and find the genuine candidate through interviewing.  Different interviewing methods have been devised to aid the process, from situational interviewing techniques to competence based assessments.  These have all helped but it is still a challenge.

Legal action

The risk of legal action being taken against a business for recruiting ‘unfairly’ has added to the skills needed of the interviewer and required an additional responsibility to be applied to HR departments to ensure fairness and consistency of process.

Can it become any more difficult?  Well it probably just has!

For the first time since the 1940s many industries are not only struggling to find the correctly qualified candidate with the right attributes and the right attitude, some are even struggling to find any candidates at all.

Unemployment is at its lowest level in a generation and the amount of jobs available has never been so high.  So not only does the recruitment manager have the challenge of finding the right candidate, but once found, they then have the challenge of convincing that candidate to join their business as opposed to one of their competitors.

Skills required

There is therefore a critical need for the recruitment manager to have the skills to ‘sell’ your business, demonstrating why the perfect candidate should join your Company and why they should want to plan their long term career with you.  In other words, they need to learn how to be great advocates of the business they represent.

Basic sales skills require the salesperson to discuss benefits with clients as opposed to features.  This is now a requirement of the recruiter too.  Every interviewer is likely to be aware of the features of the job being advertised but now they need to be well versed in turning those features into benefits. Building an understanding of what is ‘of value’ in a job to the candidate being interviewed is the first step. Once established, the interviewer then needs to identify the specific features that will add this value, then highlight how the candidate may benefit from them by joining your organisation.

That way, not only are you likely to fill your vacancy with a quality candidate but you just might also recruit a candidate who wants to stay. At a cost of £20,000 to recruit each individual, these skills could save you a lot of money.

Here at Unlock Staff Potential, we are committed to supporting and training your staff to ensure they have the appropriate skills to help your business flourish. Contact us for a bespoke training quotation.