5 Questions You Need to Ask Every Candidate in an Interview

Building a high-performance team?

We think the formula for hiring top talent is straightforward – if you hire great people you must keep them engaged with interesting and challenging work. Oh…and you need to be a great leader too. The rest will take care of itself.

The challenge is twofold and neither one of those things are easy to do. Hiring people is hard, and so is keeping them motivated. Well, this month I will try to help, at least with the hiring part.

Here are the five questions we think a hiring authority should ask every candidate. This will help you determine and make great hiring decisions.

1. Tell me about your top accomplishment. Provide me with a specific example and one that can be measured or had results.

This question is a great insight question designed to get to know whether the candidate has demonstrated big things where they have worked. If they fail to provide specifics such as the people on the team, the details of the accomplishment and all you hear is “me: '' or “I” and it’s all about them, you may want to consider whether having that type of leader on your team is worth the risk.

2. Tell me your best customer success story?

This question provides the ability to view the candidate’s recall and detail including their level of engagement when talking about their interactions with the consumer. You can expand it to see if they know the difference between internal and external customers. We believe that nearly every role including non customer facing positions need to have an understanding of who their customers are and how to engage them.

3. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in the workplace and how did you overcome it? What did you learn from it?

You can learn alot about a candidate’s ability to learn and their humility because almost everyone has a story about struggling in a project or a task. This question helps you understand how they react to adversity.

4. As the (fill in a title for the role) what are 3 areas or KPI’s you would monitor and focus on a daily basis to hit the goal?

This question will tell you how much they know about their core competencies…for example as a Sales Manager retail is it the daily sales goal, closing rate and gross margin they are reviewing and protecting?

5. How often and in what forms do you communicate with your teams to set goals and review performance?

Whether a controller, production manager, sales manager, or GM…this answer will tell you how often they communicate to lead their functional area. Do they have startup meetings daily to communicate the day's goals or do they wait and only meet weekly? Some of the most successful organizations suggest that daily goal setting is critical, especially in retail and production area settings.

Remember, hiring is never easy and we have all been fooled. Anyone that has never made a hiring mistake just has not done significant hiring.

The biggest key to great interviewing is asking clear questions, clarifying for understanding, and really listening to the answers. From my years of experience, you should have the candidate do 70% of the talking.

As a bonus, you can download some other quick tips below including what to ask and what should never be asked.

Want more interview tips?

Interview Questions you SHOULD Ask

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Interview Questions you SHOULDN’T Ask

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Bill O’Malley is President of Connector Team Recruiting a firm headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia specializing in the Furniture | Appliance and Sleep verticals. Connector Team is a full-service Search Firm offering permanent placement recruiting and interim staffing solutions.

Feel free to contact Bill at bill@connectorteamrecruiting.com.

Employer TipsBill O'MalleyAugust 1, 2022Comment

The Secret Sauce for Recruitment Success

At a recent trade show, I was asked how I work with clients. I thought I could explain it best with our success funnel below. You’ll see that as you progress down the pyramid our overriding goal is to reach the offer and success phase by following a process-driven approach.

In a typical search, we typically input on average 80-90 hours of work to build a pipeline of candidates for a search.

Our Proven Process (Client)

But wait, there is more to our success formula.

Here is how I work with the Executive aka the Talent side of my business - the key is not just finding the talent with the most relevant skills and access to a robust CRM and databases, but also knowing how to engage, communicate and market the opportunity to the executive.

Providing what success looks like is one of the most important pieces of information we can acquire from the client company and convey to the executive.

Our Proven Process (Candidate)

Throughout the search process, our communication with both the client and the executive (candidate) is consistent and timely as we provide check-ins and updates. Our goal is to ensure that there is a high level of understanding and engagement with both parties.

We pride ourselves on having access to the actual Hiring Authority. This is established early on in the search process which we show at the top of our Success Funnel. This is why we are able to bring our search assignments across the finish line.

The Connector Team secret sauce is pretty simple…we follow a clear and consistent search process. We put in the hard work to source and engage with the talent…so you do not have to. Our ability to perform this detail work and heavy lifting as we move through the search funnel allows you to continue to do what you do best…run your business every day.

Feel free to contact Bill at bill@connectorteamrecruiting.com.

Employer TipsBill O'MalleyJune 29, 2022Comment

Which Employee Retention Metrics Actually Matter?

It’s April and everyone is talking about the Great Reshuffling of Talent or the Great Resignation and 2022 continues to see a staggering number of job openings versus the number of people in the labor market.

I think the HR Magazine for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) said it best.

“As we enter the year 2022 this is Year 3 of the Pandemic - CEOs and HR executives across the country are feeling the turnover pressure like no other time before”.

As a recruiter, I am hearing it firsthand in the calls and referrals coming into our office. It appears almost universal that everyone is getting touched by turnover and staffing is one of the primary concerns in this post covid employment market.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the economy added 431,000 jobs in March. Unemployment continued to decline, now reported at 3.6 percent. Among the college-educated civilian workforce, the unemployment rate was 2.0 percent indicating a continued tight labor market.

According to CNBC as of January, there were roughly six jobseekers for every 10 openings — or nearly two open roles for every available worker. Recruiters are fighting to hire for historically high openings and backfill for people moving to new jobs.

I wanted to review again the importance of knowing how you stand in terms of retention rate and also how quickly you are filling open positions.

BILL O’MALLEY’S INSIGHT AND RECOMMENDATION:

Most companies do not currently track the days to Hire or Time to Fill. Below is a simple formula that the HR team or your hiring authority can use to determine how quickly your key positions are being filled.

Here is the format of a simple tracking worksheet that can be set up in minutes.

Time to Fill (Tracking Worksheet)

Time Days to Hire – this is # of days the opening or requisition is approved to the time an offer is accepted or signed.

Time Days to Fill – This is the date the opening occurs or is approved for the start date.

From my point of view if you’re a small to medium-size business with a small HR department or staff the Days to Fill number is the number to focus on. I believe this is your $ money number to track.

Every day an opening is left unfilled = lost productivity and sales.

If it takes 26 days to fill each job opening, how much productivity and lost sales (customers not greeted) are you experiencing in those days when understaffed.

These lost potential sales can be staggering.

In your other work segments including the Warehouse, Office, and Buying or sales support areas…every day that an opening is unfilled will generally mean you are spending over time. This also means that added stress and workload have been shifted and your current staff picking up more share of the workload. This often contributes to more turnover in those areas.

TIP: Measuring and tracking your time to fill and turnover and reviewing it constantly as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) will benefit nearly any business.

This is especially true for those dependent on engaging the consumer in product sales and demonstrations i.e., Furniture, Appliances, and Sleep Centers.

The other key people metric to track is your employee TURNOVER RATE. It’s really much easier to track and in fact, most companies have the ability to pull the data from payroll.

I am always taken aback when I speak to CEOs or HR executives that do not measure or have a grasp of what their Employee Turnover rate really is.

HERE IS A SIMPLE CALCULATION TO USE TO PROVIDE A TURNOVER FORMULA:

The turnover rate is calculated by taking the number of separations during a month divided by the average number of employees, multiplied by 100:

Turnover Rate = # of Separations / Avg. # of Employees x 100

So why is tracking turnover so important, take a look at this chart below to see the gravity of the turnover.

Turnover Formula

Many of you when you first looked at the above it doesn’t appear that turnover is an issue. Once you look at the cascading effect that one or two resignations a month have on an annual turnover rate you realize that nearly your entire staff has turned by the end of the year. This leads to constant training and stress on your employees and leaders.

My recommendation on solving turnover is to focus on the metrics including “Time to Fill” and your monthly, quarterly and annual “Turnover Rate” trends. If you do this while focusing on your people and communication like never before, you’ll have a better opportunity at turning the tide.

COMING NEXT MONTH:
YOUR HOW-TO GUIDE ON CONDUCTING STAY CONVERSATIONS