martin zeman's blog

This is the third and also the last part of my triptych about recruitment. In this post I try to summarize my thoughts about recruitment process and maybe inspire you to look at recruitment from a slightly different angle.

Recruitment funnel

We can take recruitment process as a task of elimination of unsuitable candidates. If we take all the incoming candidates as one group – let’s say there is 100 of them. Our task might be to reduce those 100 to let’s say 5 who are the most suitable for the role. We have several tools for reduction (CV check, interview and test).

Each of the tools has different efficiency (i.e. it will eliminate different percentage of candidates) – we could call this an elimination quocient. And application of each tool takes different time which can differ for a recruiter and a candidate. In reality elimination quocient differs based on the order in which we use the reduction tools and it is also dependent on the industry and role we are interviewing for. We can show the reduction of overall number of candidates as a funnel – recruitment funnel.

Here’s my view of recruitment funnels for recruiting an analyst:

Firstly – starting with a CV check, followed by interview and test.

Secondly – starting with a test, followed by CV check and interview.

I won’t go into the detail as I believe the pictures are illustrates well enough what I had on my mind. I will just mention a couple of things I find interesting.

1. While the second approach leads to more effort overall (between interviewer and candidates) during the recruitment process, maximum time per a single candidate is the same as in the first approach. But the key thing is that a recruiter in the second approach can save some 40% of her time.
2. Recruiters who use the CV-first approach tend to be more aggressive with reduction of candidates in the first round (eliminating for example 80-90% of them). But because correlation between CVs and actual skills is not very high, the higher the elimination quocient the bigger the chance that a recruiter unintentionally eliminates also some of the best candidates. And this, I believe is the core reason why companies recruit good people instead of the great ones. Which is a Lose-Lose strategy.

This is a second part of my triptych about recruitment. In the first part I mentioned couple of things I don’t like about typical recruitment process. Now it’s time to look:

How I did it.

As I was hiring an analyst I wanted to test analytical skills of candidates. I prepared a simple Excel based exercise (to create a report) and, as we were using an agency (btw it was Full Circle Recruitment and they are awesome), I have asked them to let each candidate undertake the exercise first.

I would then typically look at their exercise and if it was good I would have checked their CV and invited them for an interview. I was extremely surprised how much I have learned about the candidates from one simple exercise. I had find out how they think, how well they can put themselves into the shoes of end-users of a report, I could see their attention to detail as well as how efficient and dedicated they are as I have also asked them to let me know how much time they had spent on the exercise.

I got so much information that I didn’t even have to use CVs as a filter to reduce the number of candidates for interview. This was another big surprise – although this time it was not a good surprise – the quality of returned reports was not very good. Out of ten returned exercises only 2 of them were good. And that’s only exercises I have seen – guys from Full Circle Recruitment have told me they have filtered out some really bad ones without even sending them through to me – shocking.

If you want to see how simple the exercise was take a look here: Excel exercise – blank. I won’t be posting any of the returned exercises but if you would like to test your own analytical abilities feel free to send it to me on martinzeman83 [at] gmail.com and I will give you a feedback.

I wanted to share some thoughts about recruitment for a while now. I wanted to blog about it about a year ago when I was looking for a job in New Zealand. But now is even better time as I got to experience recruitment from the other side so my view is better balanced.

The blogpost got slightly out of hand in terms of its length so I decided to break it down to three parts. I hope you will enjoy it.

What’s wrong with recruitment?

When I told my boss that I would be quitting full time empoyment I offered him that I would help find my replacement. I felt I know the best what sort of person is required to do my job and leaving a legacy is quite important for me. My offer has been kindly welcome.

Up till then I only got experience as an interviewee but it gave me a solid idea what it is about. What struck me quite often, when I or people I know were being interviewed, was how little recruiters tested the crucial abilities for a given role. Typically they would just go through a CV, talk to a candidate and eventually check references.

But CVs get written by candidates themselves who are strongly incentivised for making them look as good as possible and it’s the same case with references – candidates provide contacts for references which gives them the power to pick the good ones or even make some up. Hopefully not many people do so but still cheaters benefit from cheating and that’s not right, right?

I believe that what really matters are the skills candidates need for a particular role and that’s what should be tested. When I am hiring a call centre operator I should role play a test call, when I am hiring a chef I will make her cook for me and when I am hiring an analyst I will test her analytical skills.

I was wondering why is it that the skills are tested so rarely. I think it’s because interviews are usually led by managers who don’t always possess the skills they are looking for. They might be excellent managers but they might not be experts in the field they are hiring for. I believe that in such cases when a manager is not an expert it is better if she utilises her current staff to test the expertise of a candidate. Managers are still important though as their experise lies in the people skills – will a person fit well into the team and company culture?

Sometimes the key skills really get tested but they are tested at the end of the process – after a preselection from CVs and after an initial interview. I think this approach is good but not great – it’s a waste of time for interviewer whose time is precious compared to time of job seekers who typically have a lot of spare time.

I also believe that this approach of screening CVs first can lead to elimination of some of the best candidates. Candidates who naively believe CV is not as important as actual skills or honest and open people who will mention even negative things in their CV because they believe a potential employer has right to see it.