5 Questions Recruiters Should Ask

As a recruiter, your job is fishing out the best talent from the sea of applicants. It’s a tough responsibility that needs adequate preparation and requisite skill-set to help find out candidate’s strengths, skills, knowledge, abilities, and weaknesses. And to succeed at it, you need to know exactly what the employer is looking for.

But there is a challenge: The internet has transformed how job seekers discover and apply for jobs. According to Jibe, job seekers, on an average, use 16 resources to search for their jobs. That means an average job seeker could be having a lot of information about different employers out there. And, if you are not careful, you might second a quack for recruitment.

According to a Career Builder survey, 58% of employers found lies on CVs. For example, if a candidate cannot answer some questions without looking at what they have written down, that would be a red flag.

That’s means, apart from investing in good recruitment software, you need to be supplied with sufficient information that will help you single-out the most deserving candidates and convince them to work for the company you are hiring for.

5 Questions you need to ask before diving right into the recruitment process

1. What are some of the non-negotiables your ideal candidate must possess?

   As a recruiter, you need to have a list of must-haves that you can focus on when hiring. However, there is no perfect candidate for any job. The best way is to know if the potential employees are real about non-negotiables. A candidate pool is easy to narrow down with must-haves.

   Some of these traits include

   • Coachability – While it is easy to learn new skills and procedures, not everyone is always ready to learn. While the world keeps on evolving, you will be doing yourself a disservice if you hire those rigid corporate cogs opposed to any changes within the organization.
   • Agility – An ideal candidate should not come stuck with a preconceived role and a title he/she are looking for or be stuck with a specific job they feel at home with.
   • Adaptability – The best candidate is not necessarily the most experienced, rather the one who is willing to learn the rules of the game quickly.
   • Curiosity – For survival in business, you need to adapt. Hence the best individual is required to adapt continually.

2. What your candidates need and needn’t know?

   “Everything” definitely should not be the wrong answer. Some information is best kept under wraps. Identify tasks or responsibilities that the candidate is mandated to do. It will also enable you to construct the perfect questions for the candidate based on the duties and roles that they will be expected to perform.

3. What personas should the most deserving candidate pull?

   Persona-based recruitment is one of the hottest trends when it comes to hiring. It allows the recruiter to understand if the potential employee has the desired personality and makes a cultural fit before making a hiring decision.

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   However, this is not a universal fit. Different companies prefer different personalities. Personality and cultural fits are judged based on gut feelings and intuition because it is more about good vibrations and not scientific facts.

   As a recruiter, persona-based recruitment will provide you with an essential, semi-objective criterion that enables you to match prospective candidates against desired personas. Unfortunately, your recruiting software will not be of help here but it would surely save you a lot of time to invest in persona-based recruitment.

   Hiring on persona-based criteria shows that the organization is thinking beyond conventional ways of recruitment. It is one way of honing in factors that are considered to be intangible. One of the most important aspects is to ensure that your candidate is not divorced from the talent market realities.

4. How would you describe your most successful candidate?

   Your candidate needs to have those specific soft-skills that your company is looking for. Every individual is competent in their own way but some distinct values and character traits will make you choose the person you would want to work with. Otherwise, you should be able to explain why you chose them.

5. What is your biggest challenge when hiring a new employee?

   Candidates are the best researchers when it comes to job hunting. Talk of polished resumes and well-articulated answers. However, some individuals are far different from what they display. As a recruiter, that is why you need to know the candidate in-depth to ensure that you get the ideal person.

Your takeaway

You must be more creative and thoughtful with the questions you ask the candidates. As a recruiter, you need to have the best recruitment software. But, most importantly, you need to have all the information you need to find the best person for the job. Formulate a number of questions that will help you gain valuable insights into the behavior and mind of the candidate. With the right recruitment tools, you will be better placed to handle the recruitment process.

Hone out the ideal traits and hire the best. You need to know the nuts-and-bolts of the job at hand and assess if the candidates have what is required of them. Otherwise, you might recruit a totally incapacitated person for the task.