Tales from the interview room

Taking on a new recruit is one of the most important things for a small business to get right. It is also one of the most difficult. As Jo Russell finds out, getting the right person is a lot more than a box-ticking exercise

How do you go about recruiting a new member of staff? Best practice advice generally tells us to pick candidates by comparing their CVs to a checklist of qualities. We’re then expected to ask them all the same questions at interview and score their answers using another checklist. We should offer the job to the person with the highest score.

This is an exaggeration, of course. But this sort of process is an efficient way of whittling down your applicants to those with the right skills and experience. According to the recruitment website studentgems.com, an average of 120 people apply for every job advertised.

This number can rocket if you advertise online - and most applicants are going to be totally unsuitable. So box-ticking can be a valuable exercise.

“We put an advert on Gumtree, and within the first hour we had 50 respondents,” recalls Ed Laccohee of London IT firm Controlled Projects. “We had people contacting us from India, carpenters offering to cross-train into programming, and a Canadian who said he would fly over for an interview - for a part-time job.”

The right skills, but what about the personality?

But even when you are concentrating on a pool of people who - on paper - have the right professional skills and experience, you cannot guarantee they will have the right personal qualities.

“We sent off one candidate for interview at very short notice who matched the job in terms of experience but who we hadn’t seen, because the consultant who normally dealt with her was not in the office,” explains former recruitment consultant Nina Greaves.

“When we asked for feedback, the client put his head in his hands. The lady, who was in her mid-fifties, had dyed purple hair, and four sets of earrings in each ear. The job was for a customer-facing role in a high-class accountancy firm.”

Interviews should weed out people who are not going to be a good fit with your company. But the nervewracking situation of a job interview means people are rarely “themselves”, which can make it hard to know which interviewee has the right personality for your business. Nina goes on to report the case of one lady her agency placed with a company after an interview process.

“The boss came up to her after the first day and asked how she was getting on,” she reveals. “She said ‘I was alright until you turned up, interrupting me all the time.’ She only lasted a week. Her sense of humour just didn’t match.”

Finding out more about candidates

Many firms nowadays will give candidates a skill-based test as part of the selection process. Some will even ask them to do a personality profile. But this can be costly and time-consuming, and it can mean your personal judgement counts for very little.

Michelle and Gary Fisher share interviewing responsibilities at Poole-based GF Electrical. “Gary asks more of the technical side and I focus on the personal side, which works well,” Michelle explains.

“We’ve also started checking skills as we had our fingers badly burned by someone who could talk the talk but not walk the walk,” she continues. “It cost us a lot of money and didn’t reflect well on us as a company. Now we have two trial days to check that they can do what they say they can.”

Ed Laccohee feels you need to create an environment in which candidates can perform at their best.  “There was nothing I couldn’t fail at school, so I am not a great believer in tests,” he stresses.  “So we ask people to submit something they have done, a piece of code, which we then ask them about at interview.

“It gives them confidence, and it lets us see the way they think - can they present a vision of where they are going, can they think on their own? It also shows up those people who have just copied something off the Internet.”

Making the right decision

If things are not working out, Michelle Fisher says you should cut your losses quickly. “We had one candidate who came in assuming she already had the job,” she recalls. “She was laying down the law over time off and pay, and I wasn’t getting the chance to ask any questions. I stopped the interview after 20 minutes and said ‘I don’t think we should take this any further’. I think she was quite relieved.”

Recruitment can be a bit of a lottery and you can never quite be sure who is going to walk through the door at interview.  So it is essential to load the odds in your favour because, in a small firm, the wrong person can easily upset your operation. From targeted advertising to rigorous CV filtering to finding out whether the person really is the one described in their application, it is worth taking the time to get it right.

• Find out more about recruiting good staff in the Management, recruitment and training section of the Marketing Donut