This is How You Identify the Right Candidate

Ask any manager, founder, or CEO, and chances are almost all of them will tell you that getting the right team is the most important key to success as a company. The best people make all the difference. But how do you locate, identify, and select the best talent for your team? At Kazi, we dedicate ourselves to developing better and more effective ways to find the best candidates, and we want to help you put them to use for yourself!

Getting the Description Right

Sometimes, it’s best to start with the most straightforward, and back-to-basics part of the process: the job description. This can sound rudimentary, but there’s a reason it’s the foundation of the right candidate. Getting the job description first of all makes sure that you and your team get your heads around the role properly. You can’t hire for a position that you yourself are unclear about it. This kind of planning and thinking clarifies your needs, and helps telegraph to potential candidates that the position is meaningful, and with a team that knows what it’s doing. Real professionals recognize and respect that. When your description is on-point, both you and your applicants are starting from a stronger foundation.

Innovative Candidate Assessment

Once you’ve put your job description out there and gotten your first batch of applicants narrowed down, you need to start separating the “wheat from the chaff,” as it were. In the past, some companies and organizations have tried multi-directional and highly expansive tests – like Google – where others look for much more specific job-knowledge skills – like government agencies. But in the fast-moving corporate environment that dominates the experience of many younger and tech-focused companies, the nature of the job itself can often be subject to change from month to month, or even day to day. For that, you need to get more of a sense of how the candidate functions in different situations and with what kind of work focus. This is at the core of why we developed our Kazi Expectations Scan for potential candidates. Rather than focus just on personality or job knowledge, it mixes both to provide a more rounded understanding of the candidate’s best ability and work style

Get out of the Interview Room

We’ve all heard the metaphor that dating can be like an interview? Well, it works both ways! Interviewing can be like going out on a first date. And few situations are more constructed and artificial as a first date – or interview – atmosphere. Most of a company’s time spent with an employee is in a more natural, working situation, not a highly rigid question-and-answer session. Often times, people function very differently in each of these, and being able to shine in an interview might not be a reliable indicator of someone’s work style. Kazi’s Expectations Scan incorporates knowledge about how your candidates like to get down to business, but it’s always a good idea to deploy this knowledge quickly. Try to incorporate job tasks, or a day in the office, along with your interview work, to get a sense of how the candidate behaves at work. The results could be surprising!

Broaden the Interviewer Pool

Everyone on a team has a unique and valuable insight into the workings of the company and the nature of the projects. And yet, often, the only people who assess whether a candidate is right for the team are those within the HR department. Consider integrating the input of people on the target team about their new potential candidates. You can even combine this techniques to get the candidates out of the interview room and collaborating with the target team. By broadening the the scope of internal team members who can weigh in on a candidate, you develop a much richer and deeper understanding of what your candidates are really like. The Kazi Expectations Scan can help you design the proper kinds of tasks and work projects to get the information you need, and your team can help answer your questions. Don’t underestimate the value of diverse input!

Getting the right candidate for the job is a perpetual challenge, but one that, at Kazi, we’re determined to help you overcome! By deploying the right kinds of assessment techniques, and expanding your definition of what constitutes useful information to understand your candidates, you can dramatically improve your ability to attract and hire the best job applicants to your company. Drop us a line today to see how Kazi can help you!