First Contact with the Candidate: Tips for Success

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apply now dallas, attract candidate, dallas jobs, dallas temporary staffing, potential candidate, recruiting company, searching for jobs, trend personnel dallas, trend personnel services

by Stephen Bruce | BLR

Your technique may vary, but you should have a basic process to follow when getting ready to call your candidate. First, prepare what you need to make the call. Next, rehearse what you have prepared so your words sound natural when you say them. Now you are ready to make the call. Regardless of what happens when you call, don’t forget the crucial step that many ignore—following up.

A Matter of Perspective

When you pore over résumé after résumé , especially if you work for a recruiting company, the candidates can seem like just a bunch of files or a set of numbers. But remember, on the other end are living, breathing people who have no idea you exist. Furthermore, if they are searching for jobs, it’s possible that more than a few less-reputable companies have tried to take advantage of them already. They could be on guard. They could be suspicious. Or they could be a delight. The point is, you won’t know until you call—and putting the wrong foot forward could cost you a perfectly good employee. Perspective counts, and taking a moment to remember that really helps.

Prepare and Prevail!

Again and again, experts underline the absolute need for preparation before you make a call. Calling without preparation makes you sound unsure and might cause a potential candidate to leave the recruitment process before you have a chance to assess his or her potential or attract him or her to your organization.

Here are some good ways to make sure you’ll be ready for whatever happens when you call your candidate. A little bit of homework can make all the difference.

1. Know what you are going to ask. Even spending a short time jotting down some general questions you want to ask is better than no preparation at all. If you have the time, a complete list of questions works best.
2. Keep it concise. Summarize who you are and what you want with a few sentences and have it on hand. This way, if someone other than the candidate picks up, or, more likely, the call goes to voicemail, you’ll have a quick, to-the-point response ready to go.
3. What do you already know? Construct a fairly detailed list of everything you already know about the candidate. This serves two purposes: first, you can tailor your conversation around those points; second, simply confirming these points with the candidate is a decent good way to organize an interview.

Rehearse First

You’ve done your preparation. So you’re ready to pick up the phone right away, right? Well, if you want to sound natural (and unlike a telemarketer), you might want to take a few moments to read what you wrote down. A few quick things to consider at this point.

• Make absolutely certain you can pronounce the candidate’s name. It’s amazing how well a call can go when the candidate’s name smoothly rolls off your tongue. It’s equally amazing how defensive candidates can become if you botch their name.

• Be ready to go off-topic. While you may have an agenda for the conversation, sometimes you can learn a lot about a candidate based on how they direct the conversation. Don’t become annoyed if they wander; instead, take notes. However, try to stick to business and the job at hand, as casual conversation can lead to finding out things you don’t want to know, for example, race, religion, or disability.

http://trendpersonnel.com/en/news/item/148-first-contact-with-the-candidate-tips-for-success

Job Interview Best Practices

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apply now dallas, ask questions, attract candidate, dallas temp jobs, discrimination, experience requirements, hiring team, HR Best Practices, Interview preparation, interview questions, interviewing a candidate, interviewing and hiring, Job Interview Best Practices, trend personnel dallas, trend personnel services

by Bridget Miller | BLR

Many of the items on this list are meant to keep the hiring team on the right side of the law and avoid situations in which an applicant could assume any type of discrimination or bias. Other tips are meant to ensure the hiring team is effective and consistent in order to find the best applicant for the role. Here are the tips:

• Be sure that anyone involved in the hiring process is trained in and fully understands the laws that relate to hiring and the implications for each step of the process.
• Avoid behaviors that could imply a discriminatory bias. For example:
  • Do not ask about disabilities. Focus on the ability to do the job.
  • Treat all applicants the same. in other words, don’t require some groups to meet higher criteria than others for consideration.
  • Don’t ask about medical issues or other personal information.
  • Don’t ask any questions that could serve to gather information about:
    • Marital status;
    • Whether the applicant has children; 
    • Race;
    • National origin;
    • Age (besides confirming the applicant is over 18, if necessary);
    • Religion;
    • Sexual orientation (in many states it is illegal to discriminate on this basis); or
    • Protected activities, such as past filings of workers’ compensation claims. 
  • Don’t imply there is any type of problem or bias related to the applicant (e.g., “Our customers may react negatively to a woman in charge”).
• Be consistent in how applicants are assessed. For example: 
  • If an applicant must prove his or her ability to perform the job (such as via a performance test), this should be required of all applicants, not just a few. Requiring it of some but not others can appear discriminatory.
  • Stick to enforcing minimum education and experience requirements that are truly consistent with job needs, and do not vary this assessment for certain individuals. If the minimums are realistic, it won’t be necessary to make exceptions.
  • Be consistent with the questions you ask to avoid the appearance of biases. It can seem biased if some interviewees are required to pass a higher threshold than others.
• Be well-prepared.Before interviewing a candidate, you should:
  • Have questions ready, and know what you’re trying to learn from each of the questions you choose to ask. The questions should be related to the job or the person’s ability to perform the job. 
  • Know what the next steps in the hiring process are and advise the applicant of such either during or at the conclusion of the interview.
  • Review all of the information available about the applicant, including the details of how previous interviews went (if applicable). 
  • Plan to be in a space that is appropriate for the interview, free from distractions, noise, and interruptions. 
• Be aware of subconscious biases. We all have biases that cloud our judgment, but it can help to simply be aware of this in order to take steps to ensure it doesn’t affect the interview process. For example, how an individual dresses or styles his or her hair may create an instant assumption, but it does not necessarily mean that person is not a good job candidate. 
• Allow silences. Sometimes interviewees need time to formulate an answer. By filling in silences too quickly, you may lose the opportunity to hear what the applicant has to say. Always give the applicant time to talk—in fact, he or she should do the majority of the talking—so that you can get a clear understanding about the applicant and how he or she will fit with the organization. 
• Ensure everyone involved in interviewing and hiring knows the next steps, knows who is authorized to make an offer to an applicant, and what processes must be completed before an offer is made (such as conducting background checks, reference checks, and so on). Know what applicable conditions the offer is subject to, such as passing drug screening. 
• Remain objective in your assessments.
• Remember to assess soft skills as well as specific skills required to perform the job tasks. The issue of cultural fit is often just as (or even more) important as skills that can be trained. 
• Be sure that the interviewing team, especially the person making the offer, knows to avoid making any kind of reference to a contract in terms that could be construed as an implied employment contract. (Unless, of course, you’re offering an actual employment contract, but this is the exception rather than the norm in the United States.) This might mean avoiding phrases like “permanent position” or “long-term role” or anything that implies that the applicant cannot be fired without cause. 
• Give the applicant the opportunity to ask questions.

What would you add to this list?

http://trendpersonnel.com/en/news/item/143-job-interview-best-practices

Recruiting for Those Critical, Hard-to-Fill Jobs

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application tips, applying for jobs in dallas, attract candidate, carrollton staffing, dallas staffing, Recruiting, rockwall jobs, staffing agency dallas, trend personnel dallas, trend personnel services

by Stephen Bruce| BLR

The issue of unfilled positions is a major problem that affects the entire economy.  It makes it difficult for small businesses to grow if they cannot adequately and quickly staff key positions. But what can employers do? Some of the solutions that organizations have turned to include:

• Evaluate your pay and benefits for positions that are hard to fill. Are you leading or lagging in the market? You may have to bite the bullet and offer more, especially if you have been relatively stagnant with your annual increases in rate ranges.
• Offer training programs to existing employees or candidates. Many employers are finding success by instituting their own training programs in order to get the skills they need when candidates don’t already have them. Pay will be lower than for fully trained individuals, and you get to train people in your specific systems and to your specific standards.
• Work with local education and/or training institutions. Perhaps they will be able to offer the type of training you need candidates to have.
• Send employees to school. Similarly, some employers are opting to pay for the education that their existing employees need in order to advance into new positions.
• Widen the recruiting parameters. Maybe you need to recruit from an expanded geographical area and commit to paying relocation expenses.
• Consider telecommuting. Many employers don’t like telecommuting but have found that that’s the only way they can attract the candidates they want.
• Change too-specific experience requirements to be broader. Sometimes industry-specific experience is a nice-to-have but not a must-have requirement to find a well-qualified candidate, and some employers have recognized this and revised their requirements accordingly.
• Provide customized assistance. When you run into a situation like a dual-career couple, or someone whose home is “underwater,” figure out what sort of package you can put together to solve the candidate’s problem—and yours.
• Consider outsourcing the function. Is this a task that can be performed by contracting it out?
• Work on building your employment brand. Employers that have a reputation as a “great place to work” have an easier time with recruiting.

http://trendpersonnel.com/en/news/item/137-recruiting-for-those-critical-hard-to-fill-jobs

Recruiting in 2014—Basics Still Apply

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attract candidate, dallas jobs, Hiring managers, job description, jobseekers, Recruiting, Recruiting basics, resume tips, staffing agency dallas, texas head hunter, trend personnel staffing

by Stephen Bruce

The most basic failure in hiring hasn’t changed for decades: Looking before you know what you are looking for.

Basic #1.

You have to know what you are looking for. 

Hiring managers are always in a hurry to hire, hire, hire, but when you rush, you make mistakes that lead to bad hires.

Slow down and make sure that the hiring manager (and you in HR) knows what he or she is looking for. Typical problems:

• Focusing on incumbent. Don’t be swayed by the last person in the job. “Get me someone just like Terry.” That’s not going to happen. Say what you want. Think through what the job requires, not what any particular person brought to it.
• Failing to realize that the job has changed. Don’t just drag out an old job description or an old ad and push it out again. Has the job changed? Many jobs have, especially as technology takes over in many areas. For example, maybe there’s a loan officer who used to have a very important and critical job—analyzing clients creditworthiness. But today, the computer does the analysis. That’s a new job, no matter what the title.
• Failing to look into the future. What’s in store for the department where the new person will work? New technologies coming in? New responsibilities as a result of a merger? Factor likely future changes into your requirements list.

Basic #2.

You have to develop a way of describing the job that will attract candidates.

For example, if you just say, “looking for an accountant,” that’s not too attractive. You might do better starting, “Join a team of highly qualified accountants working on defining new approaches to financial analysis.”

Basic #3.

At the same time, in this world of thousands of resumes, you have to let interested jobseekers self-select out of the running.

 

http://trendpersonnel.com/index.php/en/news/item/112-recruiting-basics-still-apply