I:CreativeRecruit - 3: Being Creative About Knowledge

I have referred to creative recruitment design serving the ongoing recruitment process and not just the interview. The following is an example of an intervention that occurred early in the recruitment process and at the stage where prospects were being called and generally assessed. For this particular job each round brought different strategies to assess knowledge. Some were very straight forward, some more indirect. This is an example of an early intervention strategy that spoke to two of the key traits/skills that the research director was looking for.

A research facility has a sub-team of 12 researchers and scientists. They require an additional scientist come manager who also, they hope, may have some PR capabilities. In the process of communicating with early prospects, the recruiter asked some key scientific questions to do with the field of research the team were working in. It was important not to give away details about their projects that were not already public so the idea was more to ascertain the ability to respond to core field questions quickly and competently and to also do so in fairly plain English. The recruiter had, of course, been equipped with the Q&A set.

A few of the candidates found it difficult to describe or respond to several of the questions simply and they were ranked lower at this point than those who did the opposite. The Director decided to automatically place one candidate into the final round of three because when asked if they would be willing to answer some questions, this person asked if the questioner wanted scientific language or laypersons.

These approaches are really quite straightforward however it is the development of staged interventions that becomes more of an art.

I have also taken candidates in one field into a room, asked them to have a good look around, taken them outside and asked them to tell me any OH&S issues they observed whilst inside. You can prep candidates for this sort of task if you like however I find many businesses prefer dividing the acutely observant candidates from those who are not.