Day: 23 January 2017

What does your interview experience say about you?

First impressions count.

When interviewing talent for your senior positions, it is easy to forget that you and your company are also being interviewed.

Candidates can get a long way into the recruitment process before they come into contact with all stakeholders at the company they might be joining. But when they do, they form impressions fast.

Securing senior executives is a totally different ball park from selecting and recruiting junior staff – something which can be easy to forget. Often the people you are looking to attract to the senior roles are thin on the ground, are rarely actively looking to move and have a range of options available to them if they are.

These highly sought-after people need to be wooed. They need to buy into the role you are selling – and the interview process is the beginning of the relationship. It is the employer’s chance to promote itself just as much as the candidate’s.

The interview will be remembered long after you extend your offer to the preferred candidate. By going the extra mile throughout the entire process, even if you don’t end up hiring them for this role, you will be expanding your network for the future.

You need to get this right. There is no second chance at a first impression.

Here’s how to get the interview experience spot on:

1. Greeting – 

What image do your office premises convey? If it’s an operational site – is it well marked out or does it scream health and safety incompetence? Does a receptionist welcome visitors with a smile and a drink or do they look like they would rather be anywhere than at work? If a prospective senior manager is to be tempted away from their current employer they want to feel they are moving somewhere that cares about its staff.

2. Preparation – 

Employers expect candidates to have researched their company and so they should expect the same of themselves. I know candidates who have been called by the wrong name at interview. Understandably, this really doesn’t go down well. Be on time, have a CV to hand and make sure you spend some time reading it beforehand. There is a certain amount that Google and LinkedIn will tell you about someone but a good executive search firm will give you a detailed candidate assessment report that includes strengths, possible weaknesses and areas of interest, allowing you to probe for the information you need and to sell the job effectively.

3. Process and format – 

Decide in advance what you really want to test, and tailor the process accordingly. Don’t throw everything at a candidate over a long, drawn-out process as you’ll just put good people off as well as wasting your own resources.

Three separate interview stages is the maximum I would recommend, and if you are requiring presentations and case studies, give people reasonable time to prepare them – or say you’ll reveal the topic on the day so they don’t have to prepare.

Try to personalise interviews, showing your specific interest in the candidate, rather than only asking six standard competency based questions to all.

More than anything, remember that a key part of a senior role is going to be the ability to build rapport with staff, clients, partners, suppliers and others in a work setting. So allow yourself to test this critical competency by having an open, personalised discussion at one stage of the process. Avoid large panel interviews with many people firing standard questions across a table.

4. Questions to avoid – 

There are certain areas that employers are wise to steer clear of. The first thing is not to leave yourself open to possible discrimination claims by wading unchecked into questions touching on marriage, age, sexual orientation or other characteristics protected by the Equalities Act.

Beyond this, I would advise employers trying to secure senior talent to avoid asking oddball questions such as what kind of tree they would be, or how many piano tuners are there in the world*. Find more suitable ways of getting to the information you are trying to ascertain.

5. Closing the loop – 

Two questions that you actually should ask every candidate are whether they have anything they would like to get across in their favour, and whether they have any questions themselves. These allow people to tell you useful details that you’ve missed or to find out whether your role offers them the magic ingredients you have not thought to mention; and to walk away satisfied with their experience.

This last point is especially important and needs to be nurtured through timely post-interview contact and good feedback for unsuccessful candidates. Often employers are afraid to give feedback for fear of challenge but it is critical to building a positive employer brand. The key is to tell people what they did well and to point out where the chosen candidate demonstrated more experience or skill. Remember even those that haven’t made the final cut could be useful contacts down the line – or will almost certainly know others who could be.

*This was an actual Google “brain teaser” interview question that was only recently banned internally within their company on the grounds it was silly and unhelpful.
**This blog post is the fifth of seven based on Newsom Consulting’s ebook The Ultimate Guide to Hiring Senior Managers in Transport and Infrastructure***

To get your free copy of the e-book of “The Ultimate Guide to Hiring Senior Managers in Transport & Infrastructure” please click HERE

Author: Jim Newsom

Jim Newsom

Managing Director

5 Secrets to turning your workforce into talent hunters

“The way of the world is meeting people through other people.” – Robert Kerrigan


Just imagine you employed a large network of recruiters, all with industry knowledge and phonebooks crammed full of experienced and dynamic performers from across the sector. Wouldn’t that make finding the very best talent easier?

Well the good news is that you do – you just need to make better use of it.

The transport and infrastructure sector can be relatively close-knit and the organisations within it regularly hire from each other. Your staff will know people from other companies either through working with them directly, in collaboration, from industry events or even from university.

So a great way of bringing in good candidates for your role is through a well-thought out internal referral scheme, where existing staff are rewarded for putting forward someone outside the firm who might be right for a role.

The benefits of this approach are threefold:

  1. The costs are minimal compared with recruiting the job externally via headhunting firms or advertising and conducting a lengthy search process.
  2. There is a better chance of getting a good candidate who fits your company if they have been referred by an existing employee who has worked with them and knows how they behave in a real working environment.
  3. The target candidate may well be easier to persuade to join your organisation if their friend or former colleague is already with you and saying positive things.

However, you can’t just set up an internal referral scheme and think the strong, enthusiastic candidates will turn up at your door. There are a few rules to making the system a success:

1. Develop a positive working environment and culture.

To stand a chance of employees recommending your role to their friends, family and former colleagues, you have to make sure the staff themselves have a positive view of working for you.

As discussed in the previous blog post on employer branding, this boils down to treating staff fairly and giving them opportunities to develop.

2. Give staff an incentive to use the scheme.

People are busy with their day jobs and their outside lives and they won’t go to extra effort for nothing. Think about the benefits of getting the right person for the job and offer rewards accordingly.

3. Be proactive.

Tell people it exists, advertise it in the staff kitchen and put it in the newsletter. Get someone from your HR or recruitment team to go to team meetings and run through the latest vacancies. Remind people at every opportunity of the roles you are looking to fill and why they should help you out. Remember that as well as any direct rewards, the benefits include working with someone they already know and like.

4. Don’t just focus on current vacancies.

One of the best techniques I’ve seen, is from large companies with internal recruitment teams who actively visit new hires at their desks to check how they are settling in – and to ask who they rate from their old firm. This allows recruiters to build up databases of highly thought of staff at their competitors, preferably with contact numbers, for future use.

5. Treat referrals properly.

If someone is recommended to you by an existing employee and then feels messed about by the interview process or isn’t given constructive feedback about why they weren’t chosen, they will let the employee know and this could damage their own morale. Word could get around and it could put staff off using the referral scheme in the future.

However, research shows that if a referral is successful, the employee that put the candidate forward tends to feel engaged and will stay at the company longer.

The benefits of a successful referral scheme are so huge that you might be wondering why everyone doesn’t take advantage of the internal employee network at their disposal.

There are of course reasons why referral schemes might fail. Sometimes companies are not comfortable directly approaching their competitors’ staff, and often senior managers have clauses in their exit deals that prevent them from persuading colleagues to go with them. Recruiting managers can also become nervous that they are not seeing enough of the market if they only interview a direct referral.

One of the biggest concerns of a referral scheme is a lack of diversity as employees are more likely to recommend a person with similar characteristics to themselves, particularly in terms of background and age, which can lead to ‘cloning’.

One way of overcoming issues such as this is to use an independent executive search specialist such as ourselves. As an independent advisor, we are far enough removed from the situation to make those network approaches with competitors without the company’s reputation suffering, whilst still giving you a broad perspective on the market as a whole.

**This blog post is the fourth of seven based on Newsom Consulting’s eBook The Ultimate Guide to Hiring Senior Managers in Transport and Infrastructure***

To get your free copy of the e-book of “The Ultimate Guide to Hiring Senior Managers in Transport & Infrastructure” please click HERE

Author: Jim Newsom

Jim Newsom

Managing Director