52% of talent acquisition leaders say the most difficult part of their job is identifying the right candidates from a large applicant pool. Businesses across the globe would agree. How can organizations ascertain from a string of interview questions whether a candidate is best for the job?
As a business leader, I have experienced that employees who are willing to grasp new concepts and approaches, as well as, have the hunger to learn more each day, prove to be real assets for their organization. Unfortunately, in the small window that the interview provides, it’s hard to find out their Learning Quotient, and the decision to hire a candidate rests solely on his/her experience and domain knowledge.
I personally believe in evaluating a candidate’s train of thoughts. Lateral thinking questions or even questions that probe the logical faculties of a candidate such as, ‘How does a fan rotate?’ Or, ‘How a steering wheel turn the car?’ often work magic. Instead of looking for the right answer, I prefer to evaluate how the candidate logically deduces the answer. In today’s world, there are many situations that we may be coming across for the first time. These situations have not been studied in books and cannot be resolved by searching online. For organizations to succeed, they need people who have the capability to solve such situations. People who go deeper rather than stopping their thinking to the things that are visible to everyone – like knowing that a fan rotates but not thinking how.
Often, in organizations, we come across experienced employees with a good grasp of their domain, however, they are opposed to new learning and organizational growth. On the other hand, there are those who may be relatively less experienced or lesser qualified, yet they display a great zest towards learning new concepts and attaining growth within the company. Nonetheless, in any traditional organization, the former set of employees are the first to be awarded new responsibilities, impeding the growth of the latter.
Also, it is commonly observed that people averse to organizational growth and workplace changes, no matter how qualified they are, purposefully hamper the growth of their subordinates and team members. Such employees pay more attention to personal growth and gratification, ignoring industry and talent in their juniors, which is quite a scary situation for any organization.
As Tobi of Shopify says, ‘Cities flourish when they grow, but companies die when they expand,’ it is imperative that like flourishing cities, companies must also ensure that their expansion is scaled organically, where employees replicate the core organizational culture and spirit at each level and support each other in attaining common business goals. Therefore, just checking the fit of the employee with the job profile is not enough.
‘We will only grow when we take others with ourselves.’
To Dos:
- Take out the job profile for which you are currently hiring.
- Figure out what problems people are currently facing in that job role.
- Analyze what qualities are required to face those problems.
- List down those qualities to the interview team before beginning the hiring process.
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