As a hiring manager, it can be tedious and time-consuming work to sift through mountains of resumes and job applications whenever you are adding a new person to your team. Depending on the role you are hiring for, you may end up with hundreds of resumes and applications to evaluate, knowing that only a few will actually make it to the interview stage. However, there are some recruiting “hacks” you can use to identify the best job candidates a bit more easily.
Check out these tactics to make your hiring process a bit more streamlined and hopefully more successful in identifying great candidates.
Make a competition to solve problems
One great way to help pre-qualify candidates is to provide a small project or challenge that they need to solve. Making a contest where participants compete to find a solution to a challenging issue in order to win a prize is a fantastic method to find talented individuals. For instance, top computer businesses offer rewards to people who spot security flaws. This strategy can be used to create a contest where you ask a group of potential candidates to work on a project in exchange for a prize. This will support your efforts to find and recruit top talent.
While this approach may be more easily implemented in certain roles, like programming or IT, you can get creative and leverage a similar strategy when hiring for all sorts of roles. The key is to make the project relevant to the job they will be taking on. So, for a marketer or content creator, you could have them take on a writing or editing assignment.
How candidates perform this task will be a great tool for evaluating which people make sense to take to the next step in the process.
Focus on Identifying Key Skillsets
For many Human Resources and recruiting team members, the first approach to tackling a pile of 350 resumes is to look for ways to disqualify candidates from the pool. This is a logical approach to help trim down that massive list of candidates to a smaller group that merits deeper evaluation.
However, this strategy also trains you to look for the wrong qualifications, rather than the right ones. What can make more sense is identifying certain key requirements for the job and then looking for candidates who have them. What you should end up with is a list of qualified candidates for further consideration, rather than a list of resumes that weren’t immediately disqualified. It’s a bit of a semantic difference but the mindset of focusing on what you are actually looking for is likely to lead to more easily identifying quality candidates.
Work with job seekers on a project
This doesn’t help narrow down a huge candidate list, but once you have a smaller list, another tactic can be engaging with finalists on some actual projects. This doesn’t work in every industry or job role, but there may be an opportunity to engage with candidates as contractors on a finite project that will allow you both to evaluate whether there is a match.
Be prepared to pay the candidate for a project like this, as it may come across as a bit predatory and drive off quality candidates, if you expect them to do actual work without compensation.
Everyone can look fantastic on paper, but it’s preferable to experience it firsthand.
