Modeled after Pinterest, Weddles.com offers four channels of information and resources found nowhere else on the Web. And, one of those channels is specifically tailored for those Employers and Recruiters who are determined to find the best talent for their openings!
What’s in the Employers & Recruiters channel at Weddles.com? There are:
- Books & Tools for recruiting & sourcing excellence
- An archive of Next Practice Recruiting Tips
- An Association Directory organized by career field & industry
- Insights on Career Activists – the passive prospects who are so hard to recruit
- And much, much more!
So, make Weddles.com the place where you start your business day! And, encourage your colleagues to join you there, as well.
Next Practice: The Parallel Interview
The purpose of candidate interviews, of course, is to assess each person’s competency for a job and their fit with the organization and their future boss and coworkers. To make such judgments effectively requires the use of strong interviewing skills and the elimination of unconscious biases. The Next Practice of parallel interviewing provides a structure for doing both.
Traditional interviews are typically “one-on” affairs. They either rotate a candidate through one-on-one sessions with the recruiter, the hiring manager and others from the work team or they use a one-on-several panel to assess the candidate from multiple perspectives at one time. However, it’s done, it’s always the candidate by him or herself because, the reasoning goes, that’s the best way to get a true and accurate sense of the person.
Recent research, however, calls this reasoning into question. A study conducted at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, asked supervisors to assess job applicants one at a time and side-by-side. When the traditional one-on interviews were performed, the supervisors judged men to be better on quantitative tasks and women to be better on verbal-based activities. It wasn’t a conscious bias, but it was a real one.
In contrast, when the supervisors performed the interviews in parallel with men and women together, they tended to focus on issues of individual performance and overcame or at least ignored their gender biases. In essence, the different structure of the interview created a clearer set of options which caused the interviewer to focus on the best data for making the best decision.
The Next Practice of parallel interviewing leverages this research. It eliminates or greatly reduces the potential of bias in the selection of job candidates by structuring the interview process to place individuals of different gender, ages or ethnicity in the same interview. That provides several beneficial effects:
- It helps ensure that the interviewer will focus on issues of performance rather than on non-job-related factors;
- It enables the supervisor to assess how well each of the candidates will perform in a multicultural and team environment;
- It offers a clear contrast between the personalities, outlooks and mannerisms of each candidate.
and
Practicing Parallel Interviewing
Do a browser search on “how to conduct a successful interview” and you’ll get back over 128 million documents. They’re proof positive that there are many ways for an interview to go wrong. While the goal is always to find the person who will perform the best on-the-job, all too often interviewers select the candidate they like the best, or the person with whom they can best relate, or the one who interviews the best. In effect, performance is obscured by behavioral factors.
A parallel interview, therefore, doesn’t obviate the need for strong interviewing skills – they are still critically important. In addition, it also requires more conscious management of the process by the interviewer – they aren’t simply showing up in a room to ask questions of a single candidate. They must control the interaction among candidates to ensure that it doesn’t devolve into a competition but rather becomes a three-way conversation about how the work of a job can best be accomplished. The goal is to give each candidate an opportunity to contribute her or her insights, alternatives and ideas, while constantly probing for more detail, challenging assumptions and looking for desired traits.
In the end, a parallel interview is best seen as a proto-team meeting. It provides candidates with an opportunity to demonstrate how they would contribute to the work team in the performance of a job. It also creates a structure that eliminates or at least greatly reduces the potential impact of unconscious biases and, as a consequence, leads to better candidate selection.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com
Next Practices – The Book
Best Practices are so yesterday! They are sourcing and recruiting techniques designed for a time that has passed.
Next Practices are strategies and tactics for winning the real War for the Best Talent – the one you actually face today and will face tomorrow. They modernize your approach to:
- Recruitment Advertising
- Social Recruiting
- Candidate Engagement
- Optimizing the Candidate Experience
- Managing Your Own Recruiting Career
so you maximize your success.
The book is composed of short, straight-to-the-point essays that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes and still transport you to a whole new dimension in the state-of-the art for recruiting and sourcing talent. With titles like Become a Talent Whisperer, Post-Social Recruiting, The Inconvenient Truth of Recruiting and Don’t Post a Job, Advertise Respect, they are sure to entertain and enlighten you.
So, don’t recruit with yesterday’s techniques. Get Next Practices and start recruiting right now with the next generation of recruiting mastery.
The book is available on Amazon. Click here to place your order.
What’s Happening In the Job Market?
Despite all the happy talk about the growth in job openings, it’s still incredibly hard to find a GOOD job and one that pays anywhere near what it costs to live in this country. That’s as true for recruiters as it is for everyone else in the workforce.
So, What’s Going On?
There are plenty of talking heads opining on cable and more than enough blog posts and magazines offering their take on the situation. But, wouldn’t it be nice to look into this situation and what’s causing it without having to endure a lot of self-appointed punditry?
Well, now you can. Read Peter Weddle’s novel about the 21st Century world of work in America called A Multitude of Hope. It’s the story of three people trying to make sense out of what’s happening to their careers in the face of seeming incessant change.
To read a FREE excerpt of A Multitude of Hope, click here.
The Recruiting Resources You Deserve
The best recruiters use the best resources to get the job done. And, when it comes to reaching top talent online, their choice is clear. It’s WEDDLE’s Books. Get yours today!
WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet. This is the 11th edition of the Guide the American Staffing Association called the “Zagat” of job boards and social media sites.
The Talent Sourcing & Recruitment Handbook. This is Shally Steckerl’s tell-all guide to his sourcing secrets and cybersleuthing for hard-to-find talent.
WEDDLE’s Guide to Association Web Sites. This book details the recruiting resources and capabilities that are available at the Web-sites of over 3,000 professional and technical associations.
Finding Needles in a Haystack. This one-of-a-kind guide lists over 25,000 keywords and keyword phrases, across 5,400 job and position titles in 28 industries and professions.