More Great Hiring Questions
Computerworld’s July 30, 2007 issue has an article titled “Why Should I Hire You?” This article identifies a number of CIOs and asked each of them their favorite job interview questions for IT hires.
These questions included:
- Why should I hire you?
- Describe your toughest assignment so far.
- What will you do if you don’t get this job?
- Have you ever had to terminate someone?
- What book is currently on your nightstand?
- Tell me about a problem your company had and how you used technology to solve it.
I have a particular interest in finding out the true nature and abilities of any candidate for a job. I like to ask situational questions so that I can ascertain their future performance. For example, asking people how they dealt with another individual’s performance issues is a clear indicator of how they would do so in your organization. But sometimes it’s even more interesting to ask them a follow-up question regarding what they would do differently today. All of us learn on the job. We also make mistakes. I believe it’s far better for us to acquire the worker that learns than the one who keeps making the same mistakes over and over. When we hire great people we make ourselves and our employers better.
But before we can ask clever recruiting questions we still have to find out where the great applicants are in the first place. In the same issue of Computerworld, there’s an article titled “The Recruit/Retain Shuffle”. That article had some at depressing news about how the recruiting process works. It starts off telling a story about how Hewlett-Packard recruiters tried to interview potential job candidates through a Web 2.0 technology called Second Life. The results were dismal. What was even sadder was to find out in a Computerworld survey of 233 IT professionals:
“none used Second Life for recruiting. A scant 4% said they used blogs or social networking sites like Facebook to engage potential IT job candidates. And only 15% reported using professional networking sites such as LinkedIn. Moreover, 52% of the respondents said they don’t use any Web 2.0 tools for recruiting.”
I have used sites like LinkedIn for recruiting. The site does a phenomenal job of identifying potential candidates. However, recruiters have to be willing to reach out to these individuals to bring them into the pipeline. Passively waiting for job prospects to submit resumes is the wrong approach that too many recruiters make. It stands to reason that the best possible job candidates are the ones who are gainfully employed and will remain gainfully employed with their current employers. These prospects should be at the top of the prospect list for any recruiter. When recruiters view workers as simply plug compatible interchangeable drones, they’re willing to accept just about anything to fill a slot. That’s really sad. Great recruiters find great talent and bring it into the fold.
Technology is not going to change the success rate or lack thereof in IT recruiting efforts. What will fundamentally help is a change of attitude, work practices and a willingness to get ahead of the competition. When recruiters show imagination and originality in their approach to sourcing new talent, only then will they look for appropriate technologies to solve a business problem.
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