Jeremy Hoffman, Author at EasyHire.me - Video Recruiting Platform

How Well Do Your Candidates Interview?

June 23, 2018 Jeremy Hoffman

Grill candidates with video interview prep to cool their nerves and increase confidence on game day

Whether you’re working in a search firm setting or a corporate environment as a contract recruiter, think for a moment how much of your time you spend sourcing, screening, and recruiting candidates. A lot. Now think: how much time do you spend preparing your candidates for actual interviews?

Before in-person interviews are scheduled between the candidates you’ve recruited and the companies you represent, it goes without saying you’ve already done a whole lot of work developing the matches, the “good fits.” However, understanding the role and its context within the company and confirming a genuine candidate is great due diligence, but is it enough?

Question for you: “How well do your candidates interview?” If you don’t know, you need this article.

Preparing candidates for real-life interviewing is critical to your success. Using a video interview platform allows candidates to comfortably practice on their own time and gives you the opportunity to review and provide feedback where needed.

1: Record, Review, Refine…

In the few days, hours, and minutes leading up to the interview, everyone gets nervous. No matter how much coaching you provide, it’s simply how we’re wired. Video interviews can help simulate some of the same pressure felt in in-person interview. Additionally, get used to curveballs. Prepare candidates for questions they may not have thought of candidate can be asked questions they might not expect. Being able to practice this scenario over and over will create flexibility in candidates’ responses.

2: “Why do you want to work here?”

The well-prepared candidate should know the company he or she is interviewing for better than their own resume. If candidates don’t prepare for this question, it will not only be obvious, it may be a dealbreaker for their candidacy. Asking this question and reviewing it in a recorded video interview will help your candidate avoid the longest most awkward silence ever.

3. Ready, Set…

Video interviewing platforms such as Easyhire can simulate the challenging interview environments by prompting candidates with similar questions in a live or pre-recorded scenario. Alongside timed assessment, multiple-choice, extended text, including coding / whiteboarding windows, written response, and others, you can be more confident in your rockstar candidates on their big day.

4. Go with confidence!

Even with years of experience and qualifications a candidate may have, don’t take chances and assume your candidates will do great until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Some may be ready to go off the bat. However, many candidates may have been out of the market for a while or are entering a new industry. With new technology, preparing candidates with video interviews may be innovative to some, but it’s really just common sense.

-Jeremy Hoffman

VP Business Development

EasyHire

3 Surefire ways to ensure candidate drop off

March 16, 2017 Jeremy Hoffman

Who are you? What do you do?

The best candidates are aligned with your mission but how can you ensure the candidate is on board with your goals if they don’t know what they are. The term elevator pitch is often used indicating you have 30 seconds to tell someone what you do and why it’s important and what’s in it for them. Too often you have job descriptions that are written by the legal department. In that case, the candidate is going to judge you not a great place to work and move on. Your brief statement of who you are and what you are trying to do and how the candidate will play a role should be the first paragraph vs. can lift 50lbs, can work weekends etc.

Broken Connections

A link that takes the candidate to your home page of your website or at best /careers is a surefire way to ensure some of the best candidates to abandon. The candidate ideally should be able to go directly the application process right from the source for the job advertised. You should be tracking how many views you are getting vs. applicants. This will give you an idea if you are hitting your conversion benchmark or if something is off the will give you a heads up that something may need to be tweaked.

No credit needed!

An expression of interest in a job is not a mortgage application. You need to ensure you convert the best candidates as soon as possible. The best candidates don’t have an afternoon to fill out their full employment history (which should never be required if the candidate has a resume), the reason for leaving and their home address for the last 7 years. Ideally, you should capture their Linkedin profile and a few questions to qualify. With a combination of smart precise screening and on-demand video interviewing you can have high-quality candidates for the manager to review in no time.

How to recruit high-quality candidates?

March 6, 2017 Jeremy Hoffman

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.

Employment trends that won’t continue in 2017

January 3, 2017 Jeremy Hoffman

1. The trend of increasing job openings in Leisure and Hospitality will level out.

There are several factors to consider. I don’t believe we will see a decrease in the number of establishments that would be caused by poor economic conditions. I do however anticipate the repeal of Obamacare that may cause the part-time opening to turn into full-time employees, thus 2-3 openings become a job. Also, it is likely that the Fair Labor Standards Act will be overturned as well allowing for more hours to be put in by Salaried employees and less need to hire part-timers to avoid paying more overtime wages.

2. The number of contract (gig) workers will decrease.

A couple of factors may affect this trend. The first may be an increase in the level of complexity of hiring foreign workers under the Trump administration even in contract positions. New legislation that will include tax advantages to hire full-time workers will make it more attractive to bring these workers on full time.

3. The stagnation in the number of open positions in healthcare will end.

Increasing numbers of baby boomers needing care will allow more positions available in all areas of Healthcare as well as anticipation in the repeal of Obamacare that has disrupted budgets nationwide.

4. The downturn in energy positions will end.

I don’t anticipate this being caused by increasing oil prices. I don’t see the price of oil to rise over $60 a barrel for some time. I see a leveling off of oil between $50-$55 over the next three months enabling confidence that we have some sustainability at those price levels. This as well as the easing of environmental laws, will enable more exploration and drilling to take place in the coming year.

Impact of negative feedback

December 8, 2016 Jeremy Hoffman

Negative feedback is defined as any input or comments provided as a result of and adverse outcome in job performance. This form of feedback is most often used to improve performance but can very easily backfire on a manager. Often negative feedback is given with a position of authority and superiority which is a large blind spot and one of the largest contributors to managers being rated poorly and having low productivity and poor retention.

According to a study by Joseph Rosse and Howard Miller the best approach to negative feedback is to approach employees from their level with an attitude of problem-solving. Too often the result of negative feedback is counterproductive behavior such as retaliation, exits, or general neglect going forward.

Another hurdle to face with negative feedback is the associated with the impact of the negative feedback bias. This theory states that even though people might receive several doses of positive feedback they will always place more emphasis and more importance on negative feedback given even if a performance review is overwhelmingly positive. Psychologists say that negative thoughts take more neurons to process and thus naturally consume a larger part of our thoughts.

Alton Simmons is a good example of providing negative feedback in the form of a traffic ticket. Alton has 0 complaints from citizens reported to the department. Over the last 20 years after more than 25,000 traffic stops this officer has received 0 complaints.

Alton says he never looks at himself as a position of authority. He simply sees their behavior as a temporary problem and tries to help them solve it with a good attitude. As one driver stated “I’ve never been so happy to get a speeding ticket in all my life. This was the best part of my day so far!”.

Influence of positive feedback

November 15, 2016 Jeremy Hoffman

Can you think of a time when some good timely feedback made the difference in your career? Can you remember a few times when feedback steered you in the right direction and improved your performance, but was delivered with the precision of a sledge hammer. Not only did it damage your relationship with your manager it affected your confidence when dealing with customers. It’s not that you didn’t appreciate the feedback but it was not delivered strategically.

Many times performance feedback is not given at all and we tend to find out about it when a project fails or a customer or employees leaves or when we lose a big deal. There are clear strategies to provide feedback in a precise timely strategic manner that will both engage and develop the employee and not make them ashamed or embarrassed causing disengagement.

Positive Feedback

Great managers give regular feedback as part of their daily work. Great managers know which type of feedback to give according to the individual and the situation. One method for providing feedback is positive feedback. When someone is given positive feedback from a great performance they are more likely to repeat that behavior again and again. Positive feedback:

Indicates what aspects of your performance is most important.
Gives employees and sense of control and achievement.
Helps employees set future performance goals.
Supercharges engagement and learning

Expectations

Richard Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen conducted an experiment in an elementary school in the 1960’s. They gave students a mick IQ test and chose students at random and gave them the following feedback. They identified a random group and labeled them as intellectual bloomers. This group who was randomly selected proved to constantly score higher on future exams. This is known as the Pygmalion Effect. This theory states that positive expectations are directly related to positive performance outcomes. Positive expectations need to be provided to both over performing, average and underperforming employees as well. Positive employees produce positive results.