3 Strategic Information To Identify During a Recruitment Interview

The recruitment interview is first and foremost an opportunity to get to know the candidate who is applying in your company and to evaluate his skills and abilities to join your team. But recruiters spend their day trading with candidates, and each of these exchanges is a mine of information about your competitors and your position in the market. So, how can you use your recruitment interviews to serve other teams in your company?

The FP Executive Search & Recruitment team warmly thanks Nedchanok, our Sr. Recruitment Consultant, for her contribution to this article.

On average and depending on the complexity of the position, it is necessary to interview between 8 and 40 qualified candidates to recruit the right person. If the range seems wide, it is even wider when you think of the number of interviews that will pass each candidate: frequently two, three, four or even five rounds of recruitment, including each time meetings with different members of your team.

In other words, all the recruitment processes on a single post alone are equivalent to fifty hours of exchanges with candidates. And these candidates often have extremely varied origins, which are as likely to gather strategic information about your company, your market position, and your level of attractiveness. This is a real opportunity for recruiters to assume their strategic function for the company. Fischer & Partners has gathered the three key information that the recruitment interview should allow you to identify, and that will be very useful to the teams you work with.

Understand what's happening with your competitors

When they decide to leave their company, many candidates want to stay in the same industry, because of their affinity, because their profile is more valuable, and so on. When looking for a new job, they have a good chance of turning to the competitors of their current company.

Whether in active search or just listening to opportunities, each interview with a candidate working in the same sector as you or in a similar structure (large group, start-up, association ...) is an opportunity to explore the reasons why they wish to leave their current position.

Poor distribution of tasks? Lack of internal communication? Strategic disagreements with management? Observation of a culture change?

The first advantage, these elements allow you to identify the frustrations of the candidate, and to highlight the strengths of your company to fill those frustrations. But also, they allow you to identify the mistakes of your competitors, and adjust your actions to not reproduce them. After all, if it is normal to make mistakes, take advantage of those of its competitors as a source of learning!

More generally, consider being attentive to weak signals. If you realize that among your competitors, the candidates are suddenly more likely to say that they are listening to the market or responding to your requests, it is worth investigating more.

Identify the strengths of your HR value proposition

In marketing, the basic idea is to listen to customers to understand their needs, and then adapt their offer to meet this need. At a time when HR marketing and one of the 2019 HR trends, your approach must be similar!

Each recruitment process is an opportunity to test your value proposition. Do you find that many candidates drop out during the process? Ask them what made them unmotivated, and at what stage of the interview you lost their interest. Conversely, you attract candidates of excellent level, while you know that your wages are not the most competitive of the market? It is because these candidates have seen something "more" at home! Do they agree to join you? Thanks to your corporate culture? The vision of the founders? The working atmosphere? Their confidence in your ability to train them and make them progress quickly?

It's the same as when you decide to buy a product: we trust the person or the brand that offers it.

Identify why candidates trust your business, and make the most of it to attract candidates and build your brand! It's a safe bet that the marketing, communication and strategy teams will be very interested in your conclusions.

Evaluate your position in the market

Finally, recruitment interviews are an opportunity to evaluate how you are perceived in your market. Does the candidate work at one of your competitors? This is an opportunity to see how you are perceived by the competition. On the contrary, this is a young graduate who does not know the sector yet? Test your image with everyone: a new vision is always precious!

Also, the interview allows you to retrieve valuable quantitative data: what is the level of compensation required by applicants applying at home? How much is their current remuneration? What are their demands in terms of the package? (restaurant tickets, telecommuting, etc.). Once again, do not hesitate to analyze the results of your study and share them with the rest of the HR team to set up projects to make your employer brand even more attractive.

Conclusion: recruiters, strategic partners of the company

These three tracks show how the recruiter can exploit his privileged position in contact with the candidates to gather a lot of key information useful to the rest of the company. By taking the initiative to compile this data, analyze it and disseminate it to other teams, it will contribute to helping them achieve their objectives, and will be able to build a valuable bond of trust! It is when a person sees that you are giving trouble for her, that she will be ready to give herself for you. Perhaps you have the solution so that your operatives are finally more reactive to process the CVs that you send them?

Overall objective: to create a bond of trust, to show that we are capable of being a strategic function, to set goals and to achieve them. In exchange, the operatives will make themselves more available.

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