China Recruiting Blog

Knowing Enough About Candidates

Knowing enough about candidates is an important issue before hiring. How much is enough?

Is a resume enough? Might a 15 minute interview be enough? Or is a 1 hour interview enough?

Your goal is to work over 1800 hours in the next year with this person, and they will be responsible for important work for your company. Can you control what candidates tell you on their resume and in the interview?

These pieces of data are completely controlled by the candidate. You can ask questions to dig, but candidates can always choose what to share.

The imbalance over what they control and what you control is lost in almost all recruiting. Most companies therefore rely on luck. Some describe bad hiring as unlucky.

Is that how you describe the quality of your product of service? I hope not. You know well enough that hiring is important to the success of your work in APAC.

SHI Group sees the resume and interview as important as tell us what the candidate wants to say. We do our best to get them to say more. We interview for an hour or more. At SHI Group, we get details of what and how they worked and learned.  However, at the end of this, we only know what they wanted to tell us.

That is far less than is needed to know if I want this guy responsible for part of my business for the next 1800 hours. Fortunately, in SHI Group’s work, we used the interview to set up the background check. Details are checkable. We draw out many. Then we check them.

Knowing Enough About Candidate Takes More

Can you see how a real background check gets at facts the candidates cannot control? If they give you a name to call, and you call, that is still not in your control. Can you see how we succeed in getting the right hires time and again?

We work to get data that is outside of the candidates control, and that is also objective data. That takes us into a land where most people are unfamiliar. This is a place where our proper interview shines as we compare candidate data with objective data and learn very important information on the comparison. We never learn that the candidate worked longer at said company. We never learn that he sold more or accomplished more. Imagine that. You would think we get data above and below but humans are not like that. The data matches for those candidates who are gold.

Under the pressure of trying to get a job, they said the truth. The person you liked in the interview who still looks the same after this check is someone special. Most people are found to be liars who have less experience or success than they said. If you just consider how much you lost with the new data, you likely would walk away.

Enough Data Makes For Great Hiring and “No Bad Luck”

However, you now know whenever that person feels pressure or greed, they are going to do then same when working for you. They learned that it works to lie and benefitted them with a job. Therefore, they will do so more. The person who we helped get a job because they told the truth under pressure knows they got a job because they told the truth and will do so when working for you. That is exactly what you need and is enough to give you the hiring you need.  Now, you know enough about candidates. SHI Group is glad to take you there and now in APAC. See also Digging Deeper to do the Best Recruiting.