Wachovia and what to do with all those excess candidates.

Most hiring companies make the fundamental mistake of managing their pipeline poorly. The inability to reject candidates, and to provide a reason leads to many problems with the recruiting process. One solution is to appoint a person specifically tasked to handle this problem. I suggested one solution in the my article, “The Candidate Advocate.”

Poor candidate management creates a negative impression of your company in the marketplace. If you handle someone’s candidacy poorly, they are less likely to apply to your company again, or buy its products or services. A job applicant requires as good, or better customer service than you would provide a valued client. Any contact you have with a potential customer should be turned to your advantage whenever possible.

Wachovia Bank posts 600 to 800 jobs per week, and averages 10,000 job applicants, declining almost 90% of those.1 This puts Wachovia in the precarious situation of potentially creating 9,000 bad impressions.

Wachovia, however, has introduced a system to deliver rapid feedback to applicants, along with a suggestion that may be helpful in their job search. In her article, “Too Many Candidates?” Leslie Stevens argues that the bank uses this system to create a good impression of their recruiters.

I would go one step further and say that they create a good impression of the bank, overall. This puts Wachovia in the enviable position of making lemons from lemonade. They use rejected job applicants as a way to access new clients for their bank.


Contact Jason Sanders



1 Leslie Stevens, “Too Many Candidates?” ERE.net, September 1, 2008.

Telecommuting

Many bosses worry about their employees living away from their workplace. CNN.com just printed another article touting the fears of bosses about their virtual employees.

In the consulting business, working remotely has simply become a fact of life. Consultants expect their teams at client sites most days of the week. Most firms have put structures in place to ensure the sooth operation of this system.

Here are just a few:

• A strong technological infrastructure
  
• Clearly defined work expectations and goals
  
• Culture building time together
  
• An ability to let go.
  

Let’s face it. Telecommuting is not going away. We need to find a way to manage it most effectively, and imitating business consultants may be a good way to start.

Contact Jason Sanders

The Best Interview Question Ever, part two

If you choose this question as a starting point, you create a theme for an entire interview. If there is time, you should dig more deeply by asking questions that qualify your candidates’ response. In the case of a consulting project, some of these questions might be:

What were the dimensions of the project? How was it sold? How long did it last?

What was the makeup of the delivery team?

What was your role in the assignment?

What was the overall business impact of the assignment? This is a critical question to assess your candidates’ understanding of the connection between their work and the goals of their clients.

Why were you chosen for this assignment?

What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?

Which elements of the project did you enjoy, and which didn’t you enjoy?

How did you grow as a person during the course of the assignment?

What did you learn from your client, and what did you teach your client?


When you begin with a strong open-ended question, you lead with a very powerful analytical tool. You can gather a lot of information in a short period of time. You also create an anchor, around which to base a longer interview.

This question makes it easy to structure your interview by introducing a theme for the meeting. Preparing interview questions is always a good idea, but even without an organized approach, you now have something to refer back to. If your candidate begins to wander away from the topic, you will be able to steer the conversation, and learn about the candidate’s ability to stay focused at the same time.

The questions you ask are less important than how you listen to the answers. You may find, for example, that a person needs a lot of prompting. This may mean that they have not accomplished much, or it may mean that they are introverted, or maybe they have not interviewed in years and are a bit rusty. Your evaluation must be flexible according to the circumstances, and other bits of information you gather.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you may find that your interviewee cannot stop talking about their work. Most hiring managers respond poorly to people who talk excessively, and with good reason. While overtalking may make a person sound prideful, the opposite is usually the case. It also shows an inability to rapidly synthesize information, and in the worst cases, may be rude to the interviewer.

This question provides you with a firm grounding to begin, and to guide an interview. You should challenge a person, but also make them comfortable enough to reveal themselves. Your questions, and your style give candidates an impression of what it will be like to work for you. Take advantage of every opportunity to leave a good impression.

Using this question puts you in position to gather information and to ask smart follow up questions. It serves as a kind of interviewing cheat sheet, which helps you get around some of the preparatory work, like reading a resume. Don’t misunderstand me; reading a candidate’s resume is extremely important. If you are caught off guard, however, you can refer back to this question without tipping your hand.

In order to make a good hire, you need to check many different aspects of a candidate’s background, skills, personality, cultural fit and drive. You will need to use different approaches to get all the information that you want. Somewhere in the process, though, you ought to ask this question. You may get more than you expected.

Contact Jason Sanders

The Best Interview Question Ever, part one

I spend a lot of my time interviewing high quality candidates, as you might imagine. Candidates talk with me about their career progression, skills, and experiences. Usually, I am most interested in understanding what motivates a person. That discussion generally provides the most relevant information to screen, and to attract excellent candidates. When you interview a candidate, you will need to balance both objectives in order to make a good hiring decision.

Normally, I spend about two hours total interviewing a candidate. Ideally, these conversations are broken down into an initial phone screen and a face-to-face interview. We cover many topics, including personal ones, and a general career history. But what if you don’t have two hours to spend evaluating a candidate? What if you only have twenty minutes, or maybe only five? How do you get the most information in the least amount of time? In short, what is the best interview question you can possibly ask?

You must accomplish a number of things to make smart hiring decisions. You need to find out about the candidates’ primary skills, their general experience, their ability to synthesize information, their ability to present well and think on their feet, their people skills, and their fit into your organization. In truth, you will never fully evaluate a person until you work together. You can cover a lot of ground in a short period of time, though, using this question:

What is your most significant professional accomplishment?

This question has the advantage of leading to a very short answer, or a very long one. It may put your candidates at ease, or make them sweat. You may learn about your candidates’ values, their self-esteem and their cultural fit. You will certainly learn about their ability to communicate, and think on their feet, or prepare well for interviews. If you listen well, you may be able to sort out sincerity from pretense. You may be able to tell how they view themselves in relation to a team. You may also be able to learn about the person’s overall drive.

You can use this interview question for any level candidate, and use it according to your own style. If you prefer, you may remain silent after asking the question, or you may use it as a basis for many follow up questions.

Next time: How to use this question as the basis for a longer interview

Contact Jason Sanders

How should I use my resume?

Part 3 of a 3 part article

Resumes serve an important function in preparing your career development. The simple action of writing a resume will refresh your memory about your accomplishments and outline a foundation for the future.

When you begin a job search, or if you are approached about an opportunity, it makes sense to reveal your resume over time. There are three basic steps to revealing your career in writing, though they may be combined in any given step. In certain instances, it will make sense to provide all the information up front, or to split it up in one or two pieces.

The divisions are:
1. Brief bio. This could be anything from a sentence, to a paragraph, to a page. It basically tells the person who you are in a very specific sense. It could be a line or two in an email. For example, “I am a twenty-year veteran of multiple SAP implementations in the CPG industry. I have had many different roles, including running all aspects of a multi-year, $50 MM program.” Another might read, “I am the CIO of a $500MM medical products company, with a history of management consulting with a Big Six professional services firm.” You should provide enough information, so that your audience develops a curiosity about you, but doesn’t know your whole life story. If a recruiter has a position in your area, she will call to gather more information, giving you an opportunity for an initial connection. If there is no job that fits your background, you will have saved everyone time and effort.

2. Curriculum Vitae or CV. This is a step-by-step outline of your responsibilities and accomplishments. It should show how you have gotten from there to here. Interviewers will take an interest in how you began your career and the choices you have made along the way. This document includes information like: companies you worked for with dates, your titles, number of people managed, sales or budget numbers, education, article, presentations and personal interests.

This document allows you to communicate information to let a recruiter, or hiring manager develop a two-dimensional, but important impression of you. You may come off as highly educated, or very pragmatic. You may look like a big company person, or an entrepreneur. You may look like a job hopper, or a steady-Eddie. Your ability to guide someone’s impression with your CV is fairly limited, because your career history is generally straightforward. You should aim for clarity and brevity in this document.

3. Project resume. Your project resume gives you the most flexibility to present your capabilities to a prospective employer. You may add or exclude items based on the specific opportunity and the impression you want to create. It is a good idea to keep a running list of your projects to give you a basis for creating shorter versions, as needed.

The project resume may be included with the CV to provide an overall package of information to a potential employer. You may also hold it back to present to the right person at the appropriate time. A resume screener, for example, may not be the right person to share these details with. You might bring this document to an interview as basis for a presentation. It will vary depending on individual circumstances.

This document is also important to give you an opportunity to review your past accomplishments in preparation for interview questions. It should clearly outline business or revenue impact of five to ten projects. It should be about two pages long.

While there are no absolutes in resume writing, a general formula may be helpful. Considering your own brand identity and how you present it, is a crucial part of your job search.

You may find resume templates in my brief article: “How Recruiters Read Your Resume.”

Contact Jason Sanders