Why You Need to Default to No in Your Recruiting Process

Why You Need to Default to No in Your Recruiting ProcessAvoid false positives by defaulting to no in your recruiting JoeFindsTalentClick To TweetJosh TolanMy name is Josh Tolan and Im the CEO of Spark Hire, the leading video bewerbungsbewerberinterviewing platform used by thousands of organizations around the world.And this is The Recruiting Reel, a video series in which we discuss real recruiting challenges with prominent recruiting experts to provide you with actionable tips you can apply to your own recruiting.Today, I have the pleakoranvers of welcome Joe Burridge to the show. Joe is a Senior Recruiter at the video game company, Electronic Arts, and is quickly ascending in his recruiting career. He has worked as an agency and corporate recruiter and been part of some extremely fast-paced recruiting efforts.Joe has some great insight from his experience on how to make mora confident hiring decisions and improve trust with hiring managers by defaulting to no in your recruiting pro cess.Ill let Joe take it from hereJoe Burridge My name is Joe Burridge. Im one of the senior recruiters at Electronic Arts, which is an American video game company with about 13,000 employees across the globe. Today, what I want to talk about is defaulting to No when recruiting. Thats going to be a mindset thats really going to help you when making those tough decisions on candidates.To start, Im going to give you some examples from my earlier career when I was definitely defaulting to Yes. When I was working for recruitment agencies, Id often hear the phrase, If in doubt, send them out. What that means is when you have a candidate who youre not quite sure is a fit for the position, theyve got some positives but also have a lot of things that youre not too sure about or negatives, but you know what, send them out because you never know, the might be the one who actually gets the job.Or, an example from working in-house. Perhaps you interview a candidate who looks fantastic on paper and have all the skills and experience they need for the role but in your last interview with them you think theyre not really a cultural fit. But you reisepass them on to the next stage of the interview anyway in the hope that they get the job and it all works out okay. In both of those examples, youre defaulting to Yes and you really want to avoid that in recruiting as it can ultimately lead to lowering your talent bar and making bad hires.What you really want is to avoid false positives. What I mean by that is a bad hire and its much better to miss out on a bunch of false negatives, as in to miss out on a whole bunch of good people for the role. The reason for that is, sure, youve missed out on some exceptional people but if you have a good candidate process anyway, hopefully, youll be able to reach back out to them. But, is the devastating effect of making a bad hire is they could be toxic for the culture, they could do a really poor job and increase time and cost, and lowering quality, and worse case scenario they ruin your company.Theres a whole bunch of positives to defaulting to No that may not sound like the most positive things. First of all, it will help you become a better recruiter. If youre constantly thinking that there will be someone out there saying no to this candidate no to either moving them forward in the process or to the hiring decision, it makes you build a better argument for them. Youve also got to be thinking, Okay, Ive got to justify my reason for saying Yes to this candidate.Secondly, going back to that idea of time, cost, and quality. If youre assessing candidates better, youre going to save time. As in, youre going to pass through candidates to the next stage of the interview that should be better meaning less time spent on interviews for the rest of the interviewers in the process. Because of that, youre going to reduce costs because those other interviewers can be spending their paid time in a much better way, and much more ef fectively. Ultimately, this will improve quality. It will improve the quality of the candidates youre sending through, which should mean, in an ideal scenario, that the hiring manager has a whole bunch of highly qualified and fantastic people to choose from to make that hiring decision.And last, youre going to improve that trust with your hiring managers. Its always better to send through a really small group of candidates but making sure that every single one is perfect for the position. Rather than sending through a lot of candidates who sort of hit near the mark. It is really easy to do that, especially when youve got a position that is hard to fill and the hiring managers are just asking for candidates. Its really easy to just send some candidates through just to keep them happy. But its always better to just wait and stick to your Nos and make sure you put through high-quality candidates.I want to end on three easy steps you can implement to make sure that you can actually star t practicing this and improve your recruiting. First of all, and its a really obvious one, but make sure you know the role. This is the best way to avoid defaulting to Yes. If you truly know the role, youve spent the time at the beginning of the hiring process learning the position, getting to know the team, working well with the hiring manager and know what the position is, then youre less likely to come across a time where youre not too sure whether to pass the candidate through or not.Secondly, making sure that you understand who the others are in the interviewing process and making sure they are fully prepared and equipped to do a true assessment of your candidates. So, do they understand what the role is, do they understand their purpose in the interview process, as in, is there a particular part of the goal that theyre assessing, and why are they a part of the interview process in the first place. And lastly, are they actually set up to assess the candidates. Have they been th rough interview training and have they interviewed candidates before?Last, encourage transparency and feedback. You make work in a company that discourages interviewers from sharing that feedback to avoid bias, which is fine, but make sure that you encourage that they are really analytical with that feedback and provide that to you and the hiring manager. Its a great opportunity to learn from the candidates coming through the process to constantly iterate and improve every time.So, thats it from me. I hope youve enjoyed it and best of luck with your recruitingJosh TolanNow that is experience folks. You just heard some real-world advice from someone who is living and breathing recruiting every single day.This is a tough thing for a lot of recruiters to overcome especially if one of your key performance indicators is the number of interviews that youre booking.Dont get it twisted though. Joe isnt telling you to be so strict that you eliminate good candidates. Hes saying that you need to be better at identifying who is a good candidate and be confident in your assessment. And this takes work. A lot of work.You need to get with the hiring manager and even meet with people who are already doing the role if it already exists in your organization. Find out what success looks like and then youll be able to look for this in your initial screenings.When you have a crystal clear picture of what youre looking for, you should be able to build a solid case for why youre moving forward with a candidate. If you cant, well, that tells you all you need to know.You should document the reasons why youre moving forward with someone, not just why you reject them. This will allow you to review these notes with a hiring manager so they can give you feedback which will help you improve going forward.I want to thank Joe Burridge for coming on the show today. Go hereto learn more about career opportunities at Joes current company. Connect with Joe on LinkedIn here. Also, follow him on T witter JoeFindsTalent.Thanks so much for watching The Recruiting Reel and stay tuned for more episodes. For additional HR and recruiting content, head over to hr.sparkhire.com and subscribe. Also, follow us on Twitter. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to know about the newest episodes of The Recruiting Reel.Thanks again for watching and happy recruiting