Job interviews are a necessary part of any recruitment process, however with the right planning and approach even the most nervous of interviewees can avoid difficult interview questions and give a good performance (see our earlier article http://www.wynneconsulting.co.uk/interview_preparation/ on how to prepare effectively for any interview).
Conversely – we regularly encounter situations where seemingly excellent job candidates have failed at an interview as a result of answers to one or two difficult interview questions.
Dealing with difficult interview questions that have a “negative” answer:
A scenario we experience regularly goes something like this. A client wants to recruit a key individual, so they assume the best strategy is to put the job out to 20 different recruiters. “Surely, if we put the job out to lots of recruiters, we’ll get a good coverage of all of the job seekers at that moment in time and we’ll then be able to recruit the best people available.”
The problem with this strategy is like you, a recruiter has to put hard work and effort into any inquiry to turn it into a result.
Any efficient, well run business knows that the key to success is to pick and choose the business they target, rather than working on every client enquiry.
Despite the uncertainties over Brexit; there are a lot of companies recruiting throughout the whole of the UK. That’s a fact. After years of recession and stagnation following the global financial meltdown of 2008 we are seeing strong demand from the majority of the markets that we service.
Over the last few years, employers have held the power and have tended to be very selective in their hires; and insistent on interviewing multiple candidates for a particular role. Decision-making has typically been quite long and arduous – as hiring managers see a wide selection of candidates as a good reason to “take their time” and make decisions slowly.
Fast-forward to 2019 and we are seeing what we call “candidate short” markets in the majority of our sectors. This means that in many instances there are more jobs than candidates, and this causes employers to have a different approach.
One of our top clients came into the office this week to talk about a major project we are undertaking to set up a new business unit for their organisation. Chatting away, he told us the story of his best friend who insists on doing all of his recruitment himself to save money.
He talked about how proud his friend is of placing job adverts in lots of different media, then taking all of the CV’s from “applicants” that he receives, all the phone-calls he gets from interested people who just “want to have a chat” about the job, etc. He then spends the next few evenings & weekends going through the CV’s, calling up the 15 or so interesting candidates and chatting to them about their background, experience, etc.
I was sat in a coffee shop over the weekend and overheard two friends talking about cars.
One was exalting the virtues of his lovely German saloon, with leather interior, cruise control, faultless driving experience,etc. His friend was also exalting how cheap his “Far East” manufactured car cost was to buy and run, the low “upfront cost”, low cost for spare parts, servicing, etc.
Although the conversation was about cars – the two friends were coming from opposite ends of the scale in terms of car needs and wants. Kind of similar to comparing apples & pears.
This set me thinking about clients “buying” recruitment services and their wants & needs; be it “Transactional” or “Value-add”.
We are all in control of how we spend our time. After all, it’s our life and we are the ones making decisions on how we spend each and every minute of each day.
But in reality, most of us fritter away our time on many different things that truly add no real benefit to our lives.
We live in an unprecedented age of information technology. The internet and “social media” now means we could all spend 24/7 working through the mountain of information that invades our lives from every conceivable angle. If you don’t believe this – just take a look around you on the train, in the coffee shop. How many people are using the “window to the world” that is the smartphone?
With all these new distractions adding to the “old fashioned” attention grabbers of incoming phone-calls, e-mails and colleagues asking for your time – it’s no wonder anyone can actually get any meaningful work completed. So – let’s look at some easy to use ideas to double your daily productivity:
Practical Time Management ideas:
The No1 advice is to be in control of your working day. You make the decisions on how to spend your time, don’t let events overly influence you. So – don’t take that phone call, don’t look at that e-mail, don’t deal with that colleague until it’s the right time for you. It’s not 100% possible to do this, but if you work at improving your control over your time the results will be remarkable. Continue reading Timestealers – overcome your time management demons and double your productivity.
Interviews aren’t a scary experience if you focus on some simple preparation. At Wynne Consulting we have many years’ experience of helping high quality people to be successful at interview, so here are a few easy tips to help you succeed:
The single biggest reason clients use Wynne Consulting is our ability to find people that aren’t on the “Open Job Market”. That means we find people who aren’t applying for Job Advertisements, talking to Recruitment Agencies or using CV Websites.
Growth in permanent staff salaries are also growing at their highest rate since before the financial crash in 2008.
One of the biggest problem companies face is how to recruit high quality people in today’s competitive environment.
The major issue is that the vast majority of high performing people don’t ever look for a job on the “open market”, so don’t talk to recruitment agencies, respond to job adverts and place their CV’s on CV Websites.
So how do companies get hold of these people to have an opportunity to recruit them? This diagram gives an accurate breakdown of a typical company of 100 people:
As a headhunt search company we are in business to help clients find the high calibre people they need to be successful.
We find people by identifying and then headhunting target individuals who we believe have the right skills and attributes that we are looking for. That’s great – but when a headhunter calls you, what is it really like?
As a rule of thumb, we will firstly call the individual and identify that it is in fact them speaking (and not their manager who’s answered their line); then we will make them aware that we are a headhunting organisation and that we would like to have a conversation with them about an career opportunity. We’ll ask “is it a convenient time to talk?”
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