Hiring the right person into any role is challenging for the most experienced interviewers. For hiring managers who may only make a few hires per year, it can be especially difficult. Often, selection accuracy can be increased for even the most inexperienced managers by getting some of the basics right.

Here are five strategies that will help increase your chances of making the best hire for your organization.

Conduct a Screening Interview

A great rule of thumb is to always have a qualifying interview before committing to the full interview process. In this interview, ask only the most relevant questions to determine the candidate’s qualifications for the role. For example, if the position requires 35% travel, ask how the candidate would be able to handle being out of town 35% of the time. Or, if the role requires specific skills (writing, lifting, computer skills, software, etc.), ask if they possess those skills and ask for a self-rating of expertise. Qualifying interviews are effective because they provide a quick glimpse into people’s basic skill sets and experience and help eliminate candidates who are not a fit right at the outset of the process. Remember that part of a good selection process is knowing which candidates to eliminate as early in the process as possible.

Make candidates feel comfortable

Ideally, this should happen at the onset of an interview. Start the conversation by getting to know candidates as people before you delve into your skills questions. Interviews can be a little uncomfortable at first, with candidates and interviewers alike often feeling anxious and unsure. Keeping the conversation light for the first few minutes provides a transition from the awkwardness to a more easy and open discussion.

This should also continue throughout the interview as well. As you start asking questions, you might have to probe and coax some details out of the interviewee. Let them know it’s okay to pause to think of a response or reassure them that you can revisit a question later in the interview if necessary. The more comfortable a candidate feels, the more open they will be.

Ask the Right Questions

Experienced interviewers know how to ask open-ended questions at the outset and use yes or no questions to drill down on details. A good tip to open up the conversation is to ask questions that encourage candidates to tell a story. Behavioral style interview questions start at the beginning and lead candidates into telling the middle and end of the story. For example, prompts like “Tell me about a time that you…” illicit detailed responses that may be lacking when you ask more general questions.

Dig Deeper

Candidates may lose focus during an answer and begin rambling, unsure of how to close their response. Step in with a gentle redirection. You must have a keen ear and good instincts to know when and how to subtly guide the candidate in the right direction. Try rephrasing the question but take care not to hint toward a specific answer. Also, when a candidate starts generalizing by saying “we” instead of “I,” as in “We worked very hard to get that project completed on time,” it is perfectly fine to ask the candidate to differentiate between “We” and “Me.” Ask them what role they played in the “We” part of the project and drill down to detail until you understand their specific contribution.

Recognize Intentionally Vague Responses

Candidates who have a difficult time answering questions may simply be nervous or unfortunately unprepared. On the other hand, their answers may be purposeful, designed to distract you or deflect from a topic that a candidate wants to avoid. When you see this happening, politely insist that the candidate be more specific. Or, re-word the question to solicit the specificity you are seeking.

Interviewing techniques continue to evolve, especially during this global pandemic. Many COVID-era interviews are now exclusively conducted via video, which means you may have to do things a little differently to get a good read on candidates. Be prepared by practicing these five steps and get ready to increase your interviewing IQ!

In Part One of this blog article, we looked at how changes in Talent Acquisition practices caused by the COVID-19 pandemic can remain part of the new normal after the crisis has passed. In addition to recruit-from-anywhere models, an increased reliance on video interviews, and a shift from sourcing to selection focus, here are three additional changes that will likely become part of the TA landscape once the COVID-19 crisis passes.

Sourcing Will Finally Be Separate from Recruiting

Although the unemployment rate is still above 8%, it doesn’t mean candidates with the skill set you need are actively looking for a job. Not every recruiter understands how to proactively research and source passive candidates. This is a skill set unto itself that helps create an interested and engaged slate. Today’s recruiters have spent the majority of their time visually screening resumes and conducting interviews. When you separate the two stages, you will need to identify someone who is specialized in candidate research and market intelligence combined with an understanding of successful talent recruitment.

Managers and Interviewers Will Need Upskilling in Selection Interviewing

At many organizations, TA practices for selection have changed dramatically in an off-site mode. Organizations that previously held multiple interviews, large-panel interviews, and longer interview cycles have changed their approaches to make the online process more efficient. Most significantly, interviews that used to happen in person are now moved to virtual platforms and video format. Managers will need to be reskilled in assessment and selection practices on these new platforms, as the tried and true methods of in-person assessment may or may not translate into online formats. For example, non-verbal cues, such as eye contact and attentive behaviors, are much harder to maintain over a virtual interview. Also, assessing a candidate’s physical space and background can lead to false positives or false negatives that have nothing to do with a candidate’s job qualifications. Recruiters and managers will need to be trained in new practices to ensure they are making good decisions based on the right criteria.

Increase in Technology Sophistication for Recruiters

Tools such as CRM software, social media platforms, and other online resources enable companies to reach a larger and/or more targeted candidate pool faster. These tools and their capabilities are changing rapidly.

While most recruiters already use some sort of digital platform to connect with candidates, their knowledge and utilization of these tools will need to be scaled up as these tools become the operational backbone of working remotely. Companies should consider investing in recruiters who have specialized experience in some or all of these platforms. Recruiters will need to become experts in a variety of technology tools and keep pace with changes and upgrades. Smart organizations are acting now to get their TA team trained to handle the full technology bundle that will be the backbone of their day-to-day work.

With all the upheaval in TA brought by COVID-19, we have watched our clients make significant changes amazingly fast to handle the sudden move to remote recruiting. Moving forward, organizations should start now to plan for the post-COVID world, as many of the changes they have made temporarily will become permanent, and new changes will emerge as they move through this current crisis.

Every crisis creates both immediate and longer-term, permanent changes. We are seeing the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic play out in isolation procedures, quarantines, distance learning, mass testing, and contact tracing. When the crisis passes, however, these changes will give way to long-term changes that may be harder to see right now but will nonetheless become part of the new way of working.

For Talent Acquisition, we are already experiencing significant changes that, for many companies, represent radical departures from their pre-pandemic ways of working. Remote recruiting staffs, online interviews, electronic background checks, virtual orientations, and new hires starting work remotely have been adapted nearly instantaneously by employers.

But after this pandemic passes, how many of these changes will remain permanent? What long-term impacts will the COVID-19 crisis have on TA? This is Part One of a two-part series that examines how TA will be impacted long-term by the COVID-19 crisis so that TA functions can begin to build a function that is not only effective now, but also ready to be effective in the future.

COVID-19 Shows That We Can Recruit from Anywhere

Before COVID-19, many organizations required recruiters to work on-site most or all of the week. With the crisis forcing all recruiters to work from home, organizations have learned something that’s been true for many years: recruiting can be done from anywhere. All you need is a good internet connection and a reliable cell signal.

Recruiters working from home will remain a permanent feature for most organizations. This will require recruiters and hiring managers to develop some new skill sets. Recruiters will need to develop different relationship-building skills as they deal with candidates and hiring managers in completely remote ways. Hiring managers will need to be retooled in not only the mechanics of conducting interviews via online platforms, but also in interview skills and assessment techniques, which present different challenges online compared to face-to-face.

Increased Reliance on Zoom-Style Interviews for First-Level Vetting

Some of the new communication channels businesses will become accustomed to post-COVID will be video platforms such as Zoom. Video interviews will become the new standard for how organizations initially connect with and screen candidates, replacing traditional phone interviews. This requires training recruiters and managers on how to conduct initial screening interviews via video platforms effectively and legally.

Sourcing Problems Shift to Selection Problems

Before the pandemic, unemployment was hovering at 50-year lows. As a result, the biggest problem facing recruiting functions in nearly all industries was finding enough qualified candidates to fill interviewing slates.

Now, with over 38 million people filing for unemployment since March, the main recruiting challenge has shifted for many companies from sourcing enough candidates to selecting the right candidates from suddenly swollen pools. Shifting from a sourcing-centric function to a selection-centric one may require simple changes such as retooling recruiting team members in selection skills. Or, it could require more significant changes, such as restructuring the function or even hiring recruiters with different skill sets.

These are a few of the changes we see on the horizon. For more, read Part Two of this article.

Many US Hospitals were facing significant staffing challenges before COVID-19 hit. Now, the surge in COVID-19 infected patients is overwhelming hospitals in ‘hot spot’ urban centers.  

Compounding the staffing problem is the high infection rate among clinical workers. In the hardest-hit areas, as many as 20-30% of clinical staff and frontline healthcare workers are becoming infected with coronavirus, taking them off-line for 14 days and creating a hole in the care delivery system that cannot easily be filled.

Not all hospitals face this problem today. But they surely will over the next few weeks. 

A number of smart solutions are already being implemented to help alleviate the severe staffing shortages our healthcare systems now face. Accelerating graduations for nurses and medical students, importing talent from other states/regions, moving retirees back into service, and allowing nurses to practice at the highest levels of their licensures are remedies that are making a difference.

Even with these measures, many hospitals will still not have enough clinical staff to handle the surge in patients they are or will be experiencing. 

To match the surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals need to surge their staffing. Traditional staffing processes have hospitals filling RN openings in 20-60 days and MD openings in 3-6 months. These cycles need to be reduced to less than a week. To accomplish this, hospitals will need to immediately develop different staffing approaches using accelerated processes. 

Here’s what’s required to accelerate staffing processes:

1. Create a central staffing control center that has clear visibility into all hiring requirements, all internal candidates, and all external market sources so that talent demand and supply can be assessed and resources deployed as critical needs develop.
2. The biggest time-waster in any staffing process is the back-and-forth between HR and hiring managers for application review, interview set-up, conducting interviews, etc. In a crisis, the clinical delivery staff will not have time to devote to the massive, urgent interviewing required to fill positions quickly. The Staffing Center should be staffed with interviewers who can make clinical evaluations on behalf of the entire hospital in real-time. This single step will cut days and even weeks from traditional hiring processes.
3. Give the Staffing Center the power to make hiring decisions quickly. This may involve relaxing standard hiring process requirements like background checks and reference-checking by allowing people to start working before these processes are completed. It may also require the ability to make on-the-spot offers and accelerate start dates to nearly immediately.
4. Create a COVID-19 Staffing Portal for your Career Website, especially for per-diem workers. Require only essential information from candidates during the application process. Make it easy for the candidate to apply and provide responses to all applications within 24 hours. Compress onboarding time as much as possible.
5. Move candidates from resume/application review straight into interviews using Skype or Zoom (or other video tools). Set high-volume interview schedules and interviewing staff in advance, and populate those schedules based on the strength of the resume/application review. There will be no time for additional screening steps.
6. Open the gates to hire Diploma Nurses and LPNs. All trained clinical specialists will be needed to get through the surge in caseloads.
7. Target clinicians who work outside of hospitals. In any market, only 50-60% of all licensed RNs work in acute care hospitals. It’s time to target the other 40+%.
8. To accomplish all of the above, overstaff the Staffing Center, not only with recruiters but with clinical screeners, administrators, and on-boarders. You will need more staff than you think to accomplish the new speed objectives.

Accelerating staffing cycles is not easy, especially in healthcare where credentialing and quality considerations have always driven process decisions. And please don’t misunderstand relaxing some of the hiring process rules to gain speed with lowering the quality of hiring standards—they are not at all the same and making quality hires should still be paramount for all process decisions. 

Hiring in a crisis requires a highly accelerated process, and rational trade-offs will need to be made in order to meet surging demands for trained workers. If you haven’t started changing your processes today, you are probably already behind.