Experiences in Recruitment for Queen’s Young Leaders Seminar

I have offered to run a session on ‘recruitment’ for the QYL programme but while it is designed for people involved in recruiting to a small organisation, it could also be useful for someone trying to join a similar organisation as an employee. I do not have years of experience in recruitment as I have only been an employer for four years and now I only employ about 28 people but during Xavier Project’s history people have joined our team through very many avenues, from just being my old friend to passing gruelling two hour interviews.

Here are a few things to think about before even starting the process:

1.       The golden rule of recruitment – make sure you like them.

This is by far the most important thing about choosing a new member of your team. It doesn’t matter how experienced or skilled the candidate is, if you think your personalities will clash it will not work.

 2.    Select on potential and not necessarily on experience

This is connected to the last point. If you really like the candidate and they seem to be keen then it is likely that they will be able to learn the necessary technical skills to do the job. What is more, employees will be far more motivated to learn if they are a little bit out of their comfort zone. In my opinion one of the most motivating factors for a lot of people is feeling that they are being trusted with a responsibility that is slightly too big for them, because they want to see and then prove that they are able to deal with it. Most people are also very motivated by learning new things and in the back of their mind they will be hoping to gain skills on each job which will make them more marketable in the future. Engagement in a role, as long as the employee is not seriously incompetent, is far more important than technical skill, because if they are skilled but not engaged they will not use their skills anyway. If they are engaged but not as skilled as they could be they will gain those skills quickly.

3.  ‘Interview’ them to be members of the organisation’s team not for a specific role.

One thing I have learnt to do in the last few years is move people around according to the best fit. In one case this even involved directors of two separate departments literally swapping jobs and leading a totally new team. There are several people in Xavier Project who have tried their hand at various jobs from HR to logistics, admin, operations and finance within the space of a couple of years. You may say this is only relevant to very small organisations, which is true to an extent, but having a full picture of the whole organisation is vital in really understanding the vision and I find that the people who have been pigeonholed less are able to get the bigger picture more easily. They are also the first ones to step in and help out when a key staff member is absent or needs assistance. These are the types of people you really need when you’re starting out so avoid those who will keep referring to their job description or contract and complain when as asked to do something remotely different.

With these thoughts in mind, here are a few tips for when starting the process for looking for someone:

 Be open to various forms of selection process

This is harder for a big organisation that has strict policies on recruitment etc, but when you are still small don’t feel you have to interview every time. This is particularly the case considering the last bullet point – it is not always easy to write a job description for what you are really looking for. For example, I have sometimes just needed an addition to the team who was a solid team player, with no specific background or skills who can work under pressure and deal with some very unusual challenges. How do you write a job description and then interview for that? As a result we have recruited quite a number of ex-volunteers/interns to the team. This has had two main benefits – firstly we know a lot more about the person we are recruiting, and secondly they may have at least some idea about the whacky job you are asking them to do, often for little financial compensation. Most interns and volunteers have no idea initially that you are watching their every move in case they are up for the job and this is another bonus because they are not putting up the facade they could easily pull off in an interview. It is obvious that you can really get to know someone when you are spending hours and hours with them in the work place, and most importantly you get to see how they interact in a team environment – something that is very hard to do in an interview process despite being such a crucial element of the job.

 If you have to interview.... be careful with the JD

If you are going to interview for an important position you need to get as many applicants as possible to give you strength in numbers. We had over 400 applicants for one job and in the end there was only one candidate we were close to hiring (and luckily s/he was outstanding). Had we been more unlucky we would have had to turn everyone down and start again, and if you are not happy this is what you have to do.

• ·         Give yourself time. From posting the job description to having the hired employee in the office will never take less than a month, and often can take two months. You need about two weeks or more for the job to be live on-line, a week for organising the interview, and then the successful applicant will need to give his or her notice.
• ·         Before you send out the job description, make sure you have worked out all the platforms where you can promote it in advance so that it is posted everywhere at around the same time.
• ·         Set up a new email address eg jobs@.... Because otherwise your inbox will be spammed
• ·         Think of ways to filter people out, for example, DO state the salary or at least the salary bracket with 10% variation on each side. This is to avoid someone excellent getting into the interview and then turning down the job because the salary is too low. If you want to renegotiate the salary downwards later because you think you pitched it too high this is not a problem and in my experience the applicants have always accepted.
• ·         Find other tricks to filter, for example, say in the JD that the applicant must explicitly state why they are interested in working with refugees (insert orphans, mobile technology, algebra etc) then when you receive the applications go CONTROL F ‘REFUGEE’ and if they don’t even mention the word don’t read any more. It may sound crazy but in Kenya for a job working with refugees over 80% of the candidates did not mention the word ‘refugee’ in their cover letter (tip for cover letter writing right there).
• ·         The best way to get around this is to set up your own application form, but there are pro’s and con’s to this. It is a lot of work and some websites and agencies might not post them so you will get fewer applications and could maybe miss some hidden gems. 

  The Interviews

Try to dedicate as much time as you can for the interviews. People can surprise you at interview and contradict your expectations of them from the CV and cover letter. If it is a position that you feel really strongly about spend a few days interviewing, this might mean covering 12 – 15 people but it will be worth it to get the right person.

• ·         Get help interviewing. This might be a neutral person or a colleague, but it’s best not to have someone on the panel who will be managed by the successful candidate because it could create uneasiness in the future.
• ·         Give very clear directions and the number of a receptionist etc because people WILL get lost and will be very late. Some will be very early and you can swap them around in that case.
• ·         Allow two hour slots per interview. This is so that you can have a break between each one, because if you interview well they will be draining. Also, an hour goes quickly and you may easily find you go over if you are enjoying it and also if you still need more time to really get to the bottom of something.

When the interview kicks off the interviewee will be nervous. Of all the people I have interviewed there have been very few exceptions to this and that usually meant they didn’t care. With this in mind it can be good to ask a fairly generic question that lets them loosen up. From here on in I recommend that you turn it into a conversation. If you interview well you should try and pick something from what they said in the last answer to move on the next questions, and if not make it clear that it is a definite progression to a new topic (“OK let’s move on to some management questions”). This style will enable the interviewee to relax and open up a lot more than if you ask jolted bullet point questions. Don’t feel constrained to keep to the prompt sheet, let the interview take its own course and let them reveal what really motivates them. In the same vein, make sure you respond positively to their answers – I cannot see any benefit at all in intimidating them and making them feel uncomfortable, even though I know a lot of interviewers do that.

• ·         Make notes make notes. It can be hard to do this and may seem austere, but you WILL forget what they say if you don’t. By the end of the day your mind will be a mush.
• ·         Discuss each candidate immediately after each interview with the other panellists. This can be interesting to see how first impressions can differ but you will also remember those discussions a few days later when making your final decision.
• ·         Then prep up properly on the next candidate before they come in. You will already you feel you know them because you had to short-list them for interview but remind yourself of the crunch questions and the areas of their experience which you want to know more about, and which they will probably want a chance to highlight. 

When the whole process is over, go back to point number one at the top and follow your instincts – your brain will be telling you all sorts of unravelled logic but when you finally make that decision you will not know exactly how you got to it, but make the call and be confident. Tell them you want to offer them the job but that you would like to talk about it in person. Only when it is all tied up should you go and reject the other applicants. Remember that for some people they are interviewing you while you are interviewing them and they may not yet be 100% set on the job so don’t presume that they will take it.

Rejections

One thing I have always done is email each of the other interviewees with an individual message explaining that they did not get the job but stating something that I enjoyed in the interview. This has gone down well and is good easy PR for your organisation as well as being the right thing to do. Then I have written a copy and paste message for the other hundreds who didn’t get invited to interview at all and asked a volunteer to log on the jobs@ email and send it to every single applicant with their name at the top! (I hope none of them are reading this and finding out that it was a copy and paste!) That is an unusual thing to do but it doesn’t take that long and is very well appreciated by people who might have had big hopes of getting the job.

Now you’re ready to get hiring.