How to recruit high-quality candidates?

Recruiting high-quality candidates who perform well has many challenges. Too many times hiring managers complain of candidates who were brought in for an interview to be greatly lacking the skills and knowledge to do the jobs correctly. 76% of the time to fill is taken up by the managers with recruiters feeling disappointed and frustrated thinking they had passed along excellent candidates.

While there may be many reasons for this result. One interesting theory may be that the candidates simply don’t know what they don’t know. A study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that unskilled and incompetent individuals actually have an overestimation of their skills and knowledge. It seems that people give themselves too much credit and overestimate their grasp on subjects they know nothing about. The study also found that the more knowledge people have on a subject, the more they are willing to admit that they are not the expert and have a great deal more to learn.

How does this relate to hiring?

Blissful Ignorance from a Candidate — Candidates who are unaware of their skills and knowledge required to be a top candidate will not be second guessing themselves and may be perceived as confident and enthusiastic during the initial phone screen. The candidates who are more knowledgeable and more experienced may come across as uninterested and unenthusiastic when really they are well aware of all the challenges that may arise and address the questions with a healthy bit of caution.

An overconfident recruiter — Taking this same theory regarding the candidates, recruiters may be overconfident in their knowledge of the position and what questions to ask. They may be unaware of the proper responses they should be looking for and when to ask for help or clarification from managers.

How can video interviewing help?

Enabling recruiters to collaborate with managers in designing effective questions and suggested answers will enable clear expectations between the hiring team. Recruiters may also be able to work with more than one manager to speed up the screening process as well.

Allowing managers to collaborate on the screening process will empower managers to be involved sooner in the hiring process resulting in a clear partnership between the two parties.

Asking managers to create questions themselves as well as suggested answers to look for in the case that they are too busy to review the pool of interviews.