Sourcing Sins of Inexperienced Interviewers—and How to Avoid Them

Most HR pros would agree that interviewing and hiring the best “talent” for your organization is probably your most important task. And yet, time after time, there’s that sinking feeling after a new person’s first few days on the job—bad choice.

Want to avoid that? Avoid these three sourcing sins. Fortunately, it’s not that hard.

Sourcing Sin #1—Failure to Prepare

Before you start recruiting you need to do two things: Clarify what you are looking for, and decide how you will determine whether a candidate has it.

“I want to start interviewing yesterday!”

Managers are always in a hurry to fill their empty spots, so there’s always pressure to get going. And with today’s technology you can start reviewing candidates within hours. But as they say, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

If you don’t know where you’re going …

If you jump into the recruiting process with planning, sue you can get hundreds (or thousands) of candidates, but will they be any good?

If you haven’t thought through what you are looking for:

• Good people won’t be attracted to apply—they’ll read your vague announcement and avoid your organization.

• On the other end of the spectrum, unqualified people, attracted by your vague announcement, won’t self-select out, so you’ll have to deal with hordes of them.

• Most important, when you haven’t clearly defined what you are looking for, you’ll have no meaningful basis on which to judge the candidates.

Before launching a hiring campaign, take some time to determine exactly what you need. What abilities, skills, credentials, and knowledge are required? Talk to incumbents, talk to the people who work with the position, review the job description.

Caveat: Be sure to focus on the job and its requirements, not the person who previously held the job. That individual may have had some lauded skills not needed for the job, or some ignored shortcomings.

When you’re clear on what you are looking for, craft a concise statement of qualifications for posting and advertising, and to give it to agencies and other sources of candidates. Make the job and the organization appealing–it’s not a job description, it’s an ad.

How Will You Know a Candidate Is Qualified?

The other step in preparation if figuring out how you’ll know if candidates have what you If you don’t do this planning before you interview, you will:

1. Spend your interview time thinking up questions instead of listening to what the candidate is saying
2. Leave out critical questions (like salary expectations, willingness to relocate, possession of a required degree or certificate)
3. Fall into the conversation trap of discussing sports and the weather, or worse—family issues and other topics that could spell legal trouble
4. Lose consistency. When you go to compare candidates, you’ll have nothing to go on because they’ll have answered different questions. If you focused on technical issues with one, and management issues with the other, how will you compare the two?

Sourcing Sin #2—Committing Unintentional Discrimination

Especially when you don’t yhave a good interviewing plan, you can easily end up discriminating, even when you didn’t intend to. Here are the common discrimination traps:

Playing favorites (“I hire people I like.”). With no good selection strategy, you tend to end up with someone you “feel good about”— probably someone who is just like you. This has the obvious effect of keeping out people who aren’t like you—in other words, discriminating.

Stereotyping (“X’s can’t X.”). When you don’t have a good system for measuring candidates, it’s easy to fall back on stereotypes. For example:

“Xs aren’t _________ enough to do this job.” 
“Xs don’t work out well in this job.”
“X’s aren’t good at X.”

Patronizing/paternalizing/maternalizing (“X’s shouldn’t X.”). This is a special form of stereotyping that seems well-intentioned, but is, in general, discriminatory.  For example:

“Terry is a city person, and won’t want to relocate.”
“Parents with young children shouldn’t travel.”
“Women shouldn’t travel alone.”
“Pregnant women can’t be subjected to pressure.”

De facto (“Gee, I just never seem to hire X’s”). One of the more subtle forms of discrimination is called “de facto.”  In these situations, there is never an intention to not hire or promote certain types of people—it just never seems to happen. 

For example, a hiring manager says he’s eager to hire women in a certain job, but, although many qualified women have applied, of the last 50 hires, all 50 were men.

In tomorrow’s Advisor, the interviewer’s mantra—drill deeper, plus an introduction to BLR’s HR Playbook Employee Retention and Satisfaction: How to Attract, Retain, and Engage the Best Talent at Your Organization.