The following is an interview guide for hiring a successful corporate recruiter. The key traits are listed in bold. A list of behavioral interview questions is provided to help screen for each trait. Take a few minutes and reflect on your conversation with the candidate and compare your observations against the high/low probabilities listed after the questions.

You can also download the guide here.

Focus

Every corporate recruiting process is full of iterative tasks that require consistency and focus to complete. With the amount of information created in a corporate recruiting processes, it’s not good enough to just be ‘good with people’ anymore. Successful corporate recruiters must be disciplined, organized and efficient.

High Probability of Success	Low Probability of Success
Task Oriented	Social Orientation
Purposefulness	Flighty
Need to Complete Tasks	Need to Relate
Intense	Easily Distracted
Serious	Frivolous
Prepared	Winging it
Need for Achievement	Disorganized

Confidence

Recruiting can be a pretty thankless job. Often times, recruiters take the heat when jobs go unfilled whether it’s their fault or not. When jobs do get filled quickly, a recruiter’s job or contract can be in jeopardy. And, in many industries, recruiters face steady diet of rejection that is often due to factors like intense competition, lack of hiring manager respect, etc. As such, successful recruiters must be self-reliant, assertive and highly confident.

Key questions:

• Please give me an example of a time when you’ve faced a contentious situation at work with a peer or hiring manager and describe how you solved it.
• How soon could you learn this job, our space, our company well enough to be productive?
• What kind of criticism have you been given by your managers and peers in previous positions? How appropriate is that feedback?
• We all have our ups and downs. What typically can pull you out of a “funk”? How to you manage your “attitude adjustments”?
• What is one of the biggest disappointments you have experienced professional or personally? How did you weather it?
• Tell me about the most challenging internal customer you’ve ever had and how you were successful in building a working relationship with that person.
• Rating yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being low and 10 being high, how would the people you work with rate you as a recruiter”?  How would you rate yourself?  Why?
• How do you prefer to receive critical feedback?
• Tell me how you deal with a candidate when they reject a job offer? What do you do after a candidate has rejected your offer?

High Probability of Success	Low Probability of Success
Emotionally Secure	Insecure
Self-Assured	Needs Praise
Even-Tempered	Emotional
Believes in his / her abilities	Self-doubting
Self-Accepting	Self-depreciative
Weathers Disappointment	Pensive
Optimistic / Positive	Negative / Pessimistic

Resourcefulness

Heavy req-loads, low budgets, lack of modern tools, highly nuanced jobs and unresponsive managers are just a few of the challenges that corporate recruiters face every day. A successful corporate recruiter must be the MacGyver of the company, an independent, uber-resourceful soul able to make use of the most limited resources to solve any problem with little or no support. Additionally, given that recruiting has almost entirely shifted online, recruiters must now be “digitally resourceful”. A notebook and spreadsheet doesn’t cut it anymore. Recruiters have to be technically competent. willing to adopt new technologies and ready to jump into the deep end – head first.

Key questions:

• Provide an example of a time when management would not allow you to take necessary action, even though you felt it was necessary to do so. (For example, a chance in process.)
• Have you worked in an organization that did not provide all of the tools to do your job successfully? How did that impact yon and what did you do to overcome it?
• Give me an example of a time when you were given tasks to accomplish without advance warning or proper tools. What was your approach?
• Give me an example of a time when you had to learn a new system, process or tool on the “fly”. What was your approach?
• How would you rate your ability to learn new technical / internet tools. Give me an example of a time you were asked to use a new tool. How fast were you able to come up to speed?
• What are your three favorite recruiting tools? Describe how you use these tools every day? What do you think are emerging recruiting technologies and why?
• How do you stay on top of trends and innovations in the recruiting industry? What recruiting centric news do you read? What are you favorite recruiting content websites?

As a part of our blog series “HR and Recruiters the New Marketers“, I want to share practical ways HR and recruiting professionals can put real marketing concepts to work to improve corporate recruiting programs right now. Now, I am not advising everyone to run out and spend tens of thousands of dollars on full-blown employment branding initiatives (if you want to, we have a great partner for that). Rather, I am suggesting that while the year is young, HR and recruiting pros should consider creating (or revamping) a marketing framework to optimize recruiting communications. Here is where to start.

The company that provides candidates with the most information almost always ‘wins’. Remember, when people look for jobs, they are simply assessing risks. Relevant, well organized information mitigates risks and assuages fears.  Your organization may not pay the most. You may not build the sexiest product. You may not provide free organic juices or host foosball tournaments. But, if you provide opportunities that truly leverage people’s strengths, reward hard work, have flexible working hours, provide good benefits, allow people to work from home, you absolutely need to communicate this and highlight your unique attributes as part of your corporate story.

When building or refining your corporate story you need to really think about your audience. Who are you trying to appeal to?  Next, think like a marketer and build a framework to organize your message. The story needs to be personal, genuine, compelling, and delivered with commitment and consistency (we’ll get into the delivery in a bit).  Below is a framework that I’ve used to build and organize Newton Software’s corporate recruiting story. When you create this think Twitter not War and Peace.

• Mission statement: short company history, clarify our purpose, who we serve, how we provide value
• Key differentiators:  what makes our product exceptional in a market of mediocrity
• The culture:  how we treat our employees, why people choose to work here, what to expect

Anyone who has the opportunity to interact with a potential employee has the privilege to tell the corporate recruiting story.  Keep in mind, interview processes should be bi-directional exchanges. It’s critical to choose interviewers that will not only effectively assess skills,talent and character but are willing and able to convey the right message.  Additionally, it’s imperative that anyone that will be exposed to candidates is a trained ambassador for your recruiting brand. Everyone’s behavior has a direct impact on each candidates’ perceptions about the organization. This is easily and often forgotten.

To take this further,think about this concept in practice. You’re  a job seeker. You’ve spent a couple of hours preparing for an interview. You arrive at the interview and are greeted at the door (yes, this should be part of HR’s plan) by someone that is expecting you. Throughout the interview process, all the actors know who you are, everyone has a consistent message and  they are clearly prepared to spend time with you. Whether you loved the content of the job or not,  your impression would be that this company has its act together and they took the process seriously. More importantly, they took you seriously. That goes a long way. The bottom line is that HR and recruiting teams must build the message and everyone that touches the recruiting process  from beginning to end. Error to the side of being a control freak.

Personal Note: While I haven’t been a job seeker in a long time, I do visit lots of businesses that are interested in our applicant tracking software. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a company and stood around looking for someone to help me find the person that I am supposed to meet.  My first thought: is this what happens when people come in for interviews? Probably.

As our service economy has evolved, recruiting isn’t just about processing people anymore. To attract the quality of hire necessary for modern businesses to grow, we must build relationships with candidates just as we would with potential customers. As HR professionals and recruiters, our marketing responsibilities now include creating an experience for our candidates that mimics how we treat our customers.

Professional candidates spend countless unpaid hours preparing for interviews. They research our companies on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.  They build up expectations. Unfortunately, all too often, they are met with an experience that is disappointing at best. Many candidates are still subjected to disorganized, disjointed, uncommunicative and even adversarial recruiting experiences.

By creating a recruiting process that provides candidates with a great experience – a customer experience,  you put your company in a position to make the decision as to whether you want to hire the candidate or not. Some would refer to this as being in the driver’s seat. Think of it this way,  it’s a lot easier to hire applicants when they want to come work for your organization.  Furthermore, if your recruiting process is disjointed, inconsistent, unfriendly or all of the above, you’ll not only lose the opportunity to hire top talent,  you’ll lose other hugely important hiring by-products  like employee referrals,  repeat candidates, word-of-mouth candidates, etc.

There is no better time for HR and recruiting professionals to build and refine marketing communication programs to support the initiatives that we own – like hiring the best people. Find time, no matter how painful that sounds, to take a step back and reflect on how your organization communicates with candidates. Examine your interview processes and find out what’s being said and how candidates are being treated. Ask yourself if you’d be excited about the opportunities being presented by your firm. I’ll bet you’ll find some things that surprise you and that you’ll want to adjust. And, I guarantee that even small changes will make a difference and allow you to be in the driver’s seat more often.