Lately I read an article about lack of selling expertise at job interview which triggered me to write this article. Most of these articles are designed to teach unemployed people about how to be at job interviews and you can find very less materials about how to conduct an interview process and find the right expert for the job.
The majority of HR departments and hiring agents in both North America and Europe find it challenging to come across the perfect candidate to fill a vacant position.
With this in mind, you may stumble upon a job as long as you know how to go about it. In most cases, the problem lies more with how the interview is handled rather than how the candidates look on paper and present themselves. Unfortunately interview coaching and strategies that are said to be handy all over are not necessarily effective.
Cliché advice which many people on Linkedin give in their articles:
– Be the solution
– Show your intelligence
– Learn to sell your expertise at job interview
– Demonstrate your willingness
– Show off your portfolio
– Prepare to talk about your resume
Candidates have various ways of explaining how they can be a part of the solution when they attend at a job interview. They are not there to talk about their weaknesses. They are at job interviews to talk about how they can solve a company’s problem. We are talking about experts with higher educational backgrounds ( masters degree and PhD) and work experience. They know how to handle these interviews.
Most of these candidates are intelligent people and this is why they are called in at these job interviews. When it comes to self-selling at a job interview, many of these people who coach candidates imply that candidates do not know how to sell their expertise. Selling yourself at job interview is very different from selling a product or service to a prospect. Self-selling your expertise is a whole different ball game and the strategies are different from country to country.
The problem isn’t the lack of self-selling expertise at job interviews. The majority of expert candidates know how to present themselves. Thanks to search engines, people do their homework before attending at a job interview.
Why these tips are not effective anymore?
Today hiring agents and HR personnel use old interview strategies. Since this is the case, they will end up with hiring the wrong individual for the job. The only way a company can circumvent this, is by using the right HR professionals and interview strategy in order to recognize the talented experts or the right individual. So how is this done? There are different methods for different locations.
For an interview to be done well, employers should seriously consider hiring real experts while focusing on talent acquisition. In order to effectively recognize talented prospects, the CEO or who is in charge of the company/ the key member should take part in the interview process and hiring sessions. The CEOs are the people who know better the current position challenges of the company and where it needs to grow. A middle man will not have the capacity to knowing whether the person they are interviewing will meet the required standards of that company unless s/he is part of the firm.
Things such as candidates’ accents and their origin should not be a cause for concern when it comes to hiring the right people. The most important fact is finding someone who will handle the job the way it should be done. The right person is one who adds value to the company while ensuring that the end result is what the company had in mind. By hiring such an individual, the company will be able to realize their dreams and goals thus making their shareholders happy.
For example when hiring SEO experts for online marketing task, it is advisable to let an SEO expert who knows the company’s challenges and issues to handle the job interview and not the ones who pretend to know SEO. These are two different things. Many companies hire some young people with semi knowledge in SEO who outsource their projects to providers like me. They are not experts. These companies are wasting their money. Another example can be at IT department. If a company wishes to hire a software engineer, then a software engineer should take over the job interview. This way he or she can spot the right candidate for the job.
Why today’s job interviews are not effective?
– Looking for reasons to reject
– The contrast effect
– Personalities come across differently
– Too perfect performance
– Fit assessment issues
– Language, cultural, and gender issues
– The interviews have become like a game
– Employers and hiring agents should stand by what they want.
Employers should not change their minds during job application process and deadline simply because of having many qualified candidates.
Sometimes it seems like hiring agents don’t know what they want. The questions are vague, hiring managers and/or employers are cynical. There is no way to measure a person’s fit assessment in 45 minutes or less job interview. This is not an acting audition.
Let’s increase awareness of how to interview candidates accurately and strategically in order to land the right employee.
Companies spend thousands of dollars of their annual budgets on hiring people who are not right for the job. Many software companies lack of having the right experts, media and search marketing companies spend their money, time and resources on hiring process and yet cannot find the right experts. At the end of the day, you see the same job applications all over again.
Instead of asking the cliché questions such as: why did you apply for this job? What is your weakness? Why should we hire you?
Questions should be intelligently designed to land you the right experts for the job. Anybody can memorize all those cliché questions and convince interviewers that they are right for the job, but this will never help you to hire the right people.
Lastly having a job interview is not a game. So let’s adopt to 24th century’s paradigm and improve the job interview processes so that companies will be able to save time and money.