What is Trending in Interviews for 2014?

As part of an international 22 associate retail and technology enterprise search team, I have the unique position of participating, hearing, leading, learning, sharing, and being exposed to literally hundreds of interviews a year. My clients will conduct 245 interviews with various candidates, and our firm will average over 4,000 interviews conducted per year! That my friend is a lot of interviews to be “enlightened” with in the course of the year.

So with all that data, what trends do we see clients implementing to vet the best talent in a growing and more competitive career market in 2014?

1. Cultural Ambassadors - A cultural ambassador is someone that is less concerned with the candidate’s professional qualifications, but wants to learn about his or her personally. We have cultural ambassadors in place for every role we hire within The Millard Group because we want to make sure the right people are coming through our doors. If you are being interviewed take this as a compliment that the company cares enough to have the right fit for you if hired. If you’re an employer, add that one additional person to your process to potentially eliminate those personality “surprises” after the candidate starts.

2. Presentations - As one of the final steps in the interview process, many companies are turning to presentations to really see candidates’ skills. These offer insights into the role, the client’s product, and the company gets to learn more about the potential employee’s thought process. Easy to implement, presentations have been more revealing than most other interview techniques. Plus companies can many times get perspectives on how other perceive their product or market message.

3. The Interview as a non-unilateral event- it means providing the candidates respect and an honest dialogue throughout the recruitment lifecycle, especially when it comes to the interview. Why do all the work to build your brand, great talent networks, and engagement through social media, only to muck up everything by providing a hazy, lazy, or counter-intuitive interview process? Are you trying to show dominance and control, or can you provide the beginnings of a mutually respected workplace?

4. (Smart) Video - personally I was hoping this wasn’t going to be in this list of trends yet, but if you see what is happening to our personal technology you will find more video

interviewing is going to be taking place. I have used with success in recruiting sales roles a technology whereby the candidate takes a video “selfie” of himself answering 2 client questions. A link is emailed to the client for future review. This process is becoming adopted by companies such as Facebook, and Staples.

5. Clout Score – add it up anyway you wish, but look at how many times your name shows up on Google, how many connections do you have on LinkedIn, followers on Twitter, my favorite is placing interview tips on YouTube (Kirk’s Career Minute – 800+ views). Salesforce.com recommends a score of no less than 35. Plus this score goes both ways. What is your firm’s Clout Score? Anything less than 300 follows on your company Facebook page means you are not connecting with the times and you could be losing credibility with a candidate.

An early adopter of technology, Kirk Sears is an 18 year tenured executive recruiter with successful searches on an international basis.