Finding Good Talent, Remains a Challenge for Startup Community Everywhere
Whether it's China, U.K. or the US, hiring good people continues to be a painstakingly difficult task to accomplish for startup community, due to a number of reasons. A limited domestic talent pool, disconnected talent networks, competitive market and even public policies, are just some culprits to name.
Recruiting is a time and resources intensive business activity, especially for businesses that are in midst of scaling for new growth. The process of identifying the right candidates in terms of expertise, behaviour, attitude and compatibility with work culture is arduous. But asking over recycled interview questions and employing self-discriminating filtering criterions, will only lead to a suboptimal process that eliminates much of your “A Team” potentials.
Interview Questions that fails to extract useful Candidate Informationh
For a start, we should question why executives tend to use the same 10 to 15 standard interview questions, that we so often find on the Internet, if every business has a different DNA? Even worst, when the same questions are repeated by several executives in different cycles of the job interview. Shouldn’t questions prompt response to reveal or demonstrate the qualities that you are seeking in a candidate?
Questions, such as “What is your strength, weakness or tell me about yourself ?” existed since the seventies. Back then, there were no social media, mobile devices, cloud, or widespread Internet service to submit applications online. These questions were created at a time when most job seekers carried their printed CVs into walk-in interviews. Many of the questions asked by hiring managers today are redundant and is only an echo of the CV which was also used to filter for the first interview.
Start by Outlining Assessment Criterions and Expectations
Preparing interview questions starts with the listing of categories of expertise, qualities and traits you are seeking in the ideal candidate for the role you intend to fill based on the responsibilities and expected outcomes. You also need to factor in a weightage to the criterions to assist in decision making process (e.g leadership – 20%; sales – 30%; pipeline management – 30%). This process should be initiated even before the job advertising begins, to ensure that the adverts clearly communicate key requirements and will serve as a guidance for candidates to respond accordingly. For example, if you are looking for a senior enterprise sales hire for large deals, the following can serve as the baseline for your expectations;
Listing the criterions helps to keep focus on what really matters and fully utilise the interview cycles to gather incremental information on the shortlisted candidates. The filtering criterion shrinks and expands your talent pool. For instance, by inserting ‘startup experience’, as a necessary filter, you may automatically turn away from other credible candidates with a broad background in building businesses from ground up. As such, practicing a bit of caution as to how the criterions will impact your search is necessary to avoid over filtering very early in the process. Phase the filtering based on the weightage.
Align Interview Questions with Business Requirements
Once you know what you are looking for, designing the interview questions is swift. Ensure, that the questions are geared to obtain information according to criterions that you have set and prompts spontaneity from candidates. Spontaneous reactions are reliable benchmarks on how one would react to situations in reality. Thus, reveals a lot more about the candidates’ true character and attitude to their surroundings in stressed or difficult situation.
You don't need many questions, use "Let's Kopi's" 5 Questions, 90 Minutes Conversation rule to substantiate constructive conversation in each cycle. Ensure the questions are phrased cleverly to extract and capture incremental information on the candidates in each cycle. Also, allow for clarifications and subservient questions from both parties, in between. For example, falling back on the previous sample of criterion above, the following questions can help pull the necessary information;
1. What can you tell us about the market you are currently covering?
2. How does enterprise technological advances e.g. Internet, web, cloud, mobile devises, AI, AR/VR and etc. are affecting your role and the sales process?
3. What are some of your favourite projects to date and why?
4. Describe how you manage a crisis situation ? E.g a team member turns into a loose canon in front of a client during a crucial meeting.
5. Moving forward, what is a lucrative deal to you and what strategies you employ to stay ahead of quota requirements?
Apart from being a good instrument in helping the hiring team to match candidates’ skills, expertise, attitude and character; these questions serves as a blank canvas to the candidate in demonstrating creativity, communication maturity, conflict management, negotiation, curiosity, intelligence deployment, exposure to various situation, relationship building and their unique differentiators that sets them apart from other candidates.
Smart Companies Develop People for Tomorrow
Good people will continue to be the success foundation of startup businesses, no matter how much automation and digitalisation infiltrates the future. Making scrutiny of the interview process, imperative. Just following the increasingly “talent only” focused best practises of larger companies puts startups at risk of not having the right team in place to take on opportunities and grow the business.
The wide-spread adoption of SaaS HR services, to a certain degree is adding to the problem as most systems simply mimics processes of large enterprises instead of allowing the flexibility in creating the right filtering tools, assessment criterion, flows or interview execution functions suitable for startups.
Your business success, lies on your ability to pull high potential individuals that you can cultivate. People who in return, turn themselves into the backbone of businesses to deliver business functions that maximises outputs of human, machine and carbon resources. So pay close attention; dare to flip outdated processes and tools; search for balance between talent, traits and potential. Envision a future workforce optimised for learning, to ride a highly competitive tomorrow.
Whether it's China, U.K. or the US, hiring good people continues to be a painstakingly difficult task to accomplish for startup community, due to a number of reasons. A limited domestic talent pool, disconnected talent networks, competitive market and even public policies, are just some culprits to name.
Recruiting is a time and resources intensive business activity, especially for businesses that are in midst of scaling for new growth. The process of identifying the right candidates in terms of expertise, behaviour, attitude and compatibility with work culture is arduous. But asking over recycled interview questions and employing self-discriminating filtering criterions, will only lead to a suboptimal process that eliminates much of your “A Team” potentials.
Interview Questions that fails to extract useful Candidate Informationh
For a start, we should question why executives tend to use the same 10 to 15 standard interview questions, that we so often find on the Internet, if every business has a different DNA? Even worst, when the same questions are repeated by several executives in different cycles of the job interview. Shouldn’t questions prompt response to reveal or demonstrate the qualities that you are seeking in a candidate?
Questions, such as “What is your strength, weakness or tell me about yourself ?” existed since the seventies. Back then, there were no social media, mobile devices, cloud, or widespread Internet service to submit applications online. These questions were created at a time when most job seekers carried their printed CVs into walk-in interviews. Many of the questions asked by hiring managers today are redundant and is only an echo of the CV which was also used to filter for the first interview.
Start by Outlining Assessment Criterions and Expectations
Preparing interview questions starts with the listing of categories of expertise, qualities and traits you are seeking in the ideal candidate for the role you intend to fill based on the responsibilities and expected outcomes. You also need to factor in a weightage to the criterions to assist in decision making process (e.g leadership – 20%; sales – 30%; pipeline management – 30%). This process should be initiated even before the job advertising begins, to ensure that the adverts clearly communicate key requirements and will serve as a guidance for candidates to respond accordingly. For example, if you are looking for a senior enterprise sales hire for large deals, the following can serve as the baseline for your expectations;
Listing the criterions helps to keep focus on what really matters and fully utilise the interview cycles to gather incremental information on the shortlisted candidates. The filtering criterion shrinks and expands your talent pool. For instance, by inserting ‘startup experience’, as a necessary filter, you may automatically turn away from other credible candidates with a broad background in building businesses from ground up. As such, practicing a bit of caution as to how the criterions will impact your search is necessary to avoid over filtering very early in the process. Phase the filtering based on the weightage.
Align Interview Questions with Business Requirements
Once you know what you are looking for, designing the interview questions is swift. Ensure, that the questions are geared to obtain information according to criterions that you have set and prompts spontaneity from candidates. Spontaneous reactions are reliable benchmarks on how one would react to situations in reality. Thus, reveals a lot more about the candidates’ true character and attitude to their surroundings in stressed or difficult situation.
You don't need many questions, use "Let's Kopi's" 5 Questions, 90 Minutes Conversation rule to substantiate constructive conversation in each cycle. Ensure the questions are phrased cleverly to extract and capture incremental information on the candidates in each cycle. Also, allow for clarifications and subservient questions from both parties, in between. For example, falling back on the previous sample of criterion above, the following questions can help pull the necessary information;
1. What can you tell us about the market you are currently covering?
2. How does enterprise technological advances e.g. Internet, web, cloud, mobile devises, AI, AR/VR and etc. are affecting your role and the sales process?
3. What are some of your favourite projects to date and why?
4. Describe how you manage a crisis situation ? E.g a team member turns into a loose canon in front of a client during a crucial meeting.
5. Moving forward, what is a lucrative deal to you and what strategies you employ to stay ahead of quota requirements?
Apart from being a good instrument in helping the hiring team to match candidates’ skills, expertise, attitude and character; these questions serves as a blank canvas to the candidate in demonstrating creativity, communication maturity, conflict management, negotiation, curiosity, intelligence deployment, exposure to various situation, relationship building and their unique differentiators that sets them apart from other candidates.
Smart Companies Develop People for Tomorrow
Good people will continue to be the success foundation of startup businesses, no matter how much automation and digitalisation infiltrates the future. Making scrutiny of the interview process, imperative. Just following the increasingly “talent only” focused best practises of larger companies puts startups at risk of not having the right team in place to take on opportunities and grow the business.
The wide-spread adoption of SaaS HR services, to a certain degree is adding to the problem as most systems simply mimics processes of large enterprises instead of allowing the flexibility in creating the right filtering tools, assessment criterion, flows or interview execution functions suitable for startups.
Your business success, lies on your ability to pull high potential individuals that you can cultivate. People who in return, turn themselves into the backbone of businesses to deliver business functions that maximises outputs of human, machine and carbon resources. So pay close attention; dare to flip outdated processes and tools; search for balance between talent, traits and potential. Envision a future workforce optimised for learning, to ride a highly competitive tomorrow.
