If you could watch your HR team in action through a one way glass while they interview possible candidates for a position, you might well be shocked at what you see. Some interviewers tend to assume a bored façade, and treat candidates with disdain and have a condescending attitude toward them. It could be one reason why your company is unable to attract top talent and move forward in the industry as a leader because every company is only as good as the people who work for it.
The HR is quite like the door which candidates have to face before they can enter your company. If the door itself doesn’t budge and has an unwelcoming outlook, they’re obviously going to turn elsewhere. Why is this happening? You need to sit down with your HR team and discuss the different possibilities as well as its reasons before you determine what can be done about it.
Most often, HR managers themselves are not well trained. So, start at the root when you search out the reasons why your company is not getting good talent. Here are some of the reasons why the interviewers behave badly and what you could possibly do about it:
- Poor training – As suggested, some HR managers themselves are not properly trained when dealing with candidates. Often, companies are so shortchanged for HR people that they put them on the job without really checking to see their suitability and attitude. It’s important to train HR managers adequately in the art of interviewing candidates because it is indeed an art.
- Face of the company – To the candidates appearing for an interview, the HR managers are the face of the company and they represent what it stands for. So you have to make sure that they know this aspect. Even if the person attending the candidate is probably someone of no consequence, you wouldn’t want them to go back with an unfavorable impression of your company do you?
- Etiquette lessons – It’s no harm to make sure that your HR managers and hiring team have a basic lesson in etiquette which would show them how to behave courteously with candidates and to let them down easily if they do not make it.
- Reasons – It’s also a good idea if you can delve for the reasons and see why your hiring team is behaving so abominably with interviewees. The reasons could also be that their team is small and not able to withstand the pressures put on them. Probably they don’t have enough people at their disposal and hence the pressure to maintain the tight schedule results in rude behavior? Of course this is no valid excuse and you need to clear up the problem at its very root.
- Not caring enough – Often, some people tend to use HR as a stepping stone in their career, so they can inveigle themselves in the company in a position that suits them later on. Usually, such people might not be really bothered about their own behavior towards other candidates.
The reasons could be plenty but it’s something important to consider when you realize that your interviewers are repelling away all the top talent instead of attracting them to the company.
