To evaluate a candidate, you must first determine what qualities you seek in an employee. You can evaluate interns, employees, and independent contractors in the same way that we discussed them. The precise qualifiers could be something like:
Dependents:
Employees receiving intern-like benefits and relying heavily on management to guide and supervise them through their work. The majority of newcomers fall into this category and require training before working in the mainstream.
Experienced:
Employees who require governance but have enough experience and autonomy to work within simple guidelines. These requirements are met by the majority of employees and non-management personnel.
Independents:
Employees who exhibit independent contractor characteristics and have sufficient drive and skills to conduct work autonomously. Managers and various job profiles such as sales - BD, marketers, HR, and so on require these traits for effective candidate hiring.
How Should Candidates Be Judged?
With your own underlying principles about hiring for a task clear, you can identify them with the right mix of the above traits and personality as per the job and team requires. Here are some things you can do to evaluate and hire candidates:
Examining a Resume:
glance at the resume cautiously, if the content is more theoretical with less emphasis on experience and more on skills, then they are probably dependents. The personality shifts toward independence as the emphasis on experience and results increases.
Optional group discussions:
In a candidate pool, independents will take a more targeted, critical (such as addressing flaws with alternatives or backing arguments with data) approach to engagement. Dependents, on the other hand, will either be quiet or speak excessively. Experienced will bring up valid points, comprehensive arguments, and matured engagement.
Interviews:
Ensure to interview candidates in at least two phases: HR and technical. Ask unusual questions, either similar to the common ones or something entirely different.
- Independent candidates begin with illustrations and move on to investigate those instances, whereas experienced candidates will provide blended answers with types of situations (or examples) and remedies, and dependents will provide more theoretical by-the-book answers or examples they have studied.
- Also, independents frequently engage the interviewer while solving theoretical problems or seeking additional data for them; this demonstrates an individual's leadership abilities.
- Independents will appear unprepared and will respond to questions on the fly in basic HR rounds, whereas experienced candidates will be prepared but will never give bookish responses.
Workday Activities (Optional):
As previously stated, inviting candidates to work for a day can be a great way to have them interact with teams and receive a more refined assessment. Independents will approach the situation with an exploratory and problem-solving mindset, whereas experienced will provide standard solutions and an understanding approach. I believe we all know what dependents will be doing: attempting to understand work and simply carrying out tasks as directed.
Written Exams:
Unless you can analyze handwriting, you won't be able to deduce many personality traits from it. However, the better the content structuring, the more experienced one is, unless you're interviewing for a writer, where independents will be preferred. Furthermore, people with higher IQs will create complex compositions using regular words, whereas dependents may use unconventional words in simple expressions.
Summary:
Our 3 kinds of candidates will exhibit characteristics that will be evident in every aspect of their interaction during the recruiting process. It is also important to consider how these characteristics may affect a team.
- Curiosity, excitement, immaturity, obedience, theoretical approach, excessive preparedness, lack of confidence, and so on are major positive and negative traits for dependents. These are excellent for developing professionals in a flexible manner while also teaching other team members mentorship, leadership, and management. Because they are in the learning phase, their unique contribution is the flexibility in workflow they can create as a node point.
- In their behavior, the experienced demonstrate an inquiring nature, composure, maturity, practicality, a calculative approach, preparedness, confidence, well learned, conservatism, and so on. Their inclusion in teams aids in the effective management of their work-time and the identification of issues in organizational structures by establishing new baseline performance and work ethics standards. The most important contribution they can make is to the overall stability and dependability of the workflow they generate.
- Independents' competence is based on their inquisitive nature, assertiveness, creativity, radicalism, analytical approach, on-the-spot readiness, energy, analytics, and so on. They contribute to the creation of a competitive environment in which ideas and innovations flow, but they can also cause disruption in general workflow. Their biggest benefit, however, is the fast-paced and analytical model of working that, with the right support, can add significantly to any entity.
It is critical to understand that no single person can be completely classified in one head. As a result, hiring candidates will have a distinct and frequently combined preference for one or more of them. What matters is that when you hire candidates, make sure they have the characteristics that the current organization needs to improve its outputs. If you can come close to that, you've made a good hire. For your convenience, here is a free downloadable summary of the article.
The task of creating an environment and policies to retain these new hires, as well as other productive employees, then begins. But that's another story for another time.