North West Jobs

Effective interviews for North West Jobs

As any employer knows, it’s a hard task to find the right candidate for the right job. There are many pitfalls along the way, both obvious and not so obvious. In addition, many companies may not have a skilled interviewer to make the process any easier.

This leads a great number of companies to use local recruitment agencies to help them sort through candidates and find the right one. Not only does this result in a better match, but it also saves the company time. Possible recruits are efficiently interviewed, saving many hours. And once the right person is on board this saves the heartache of having to re-advertise the same job because the person chosen first time round wasn’t, after all, a good match. Recruitment agencies avoid this kind of scenario and get things right the first time.

As we all know, the interview is the crucial part in the hunt for someone to fill a vacancy. It’s not just a question of running through a check-list of skills being offered by the candidate and matching them with skills required by the company. Were that the case any AI program could sort through hundreds of candidates and come up with matches. Usually, by the time interview stage has been reached, candidates are only called when the matching has already taken place.

And matching itself is difficult enough; gone are the days when candidates worked at positions for years before moving on. Most employers will be looking at candidates who have worked at a good few positions and have acquired a range of skills that may be excellent and fit what’s being called for, but without appearing to do so. A skilled interviewer can spot such assets and also looks for potential just as much as he or she does for experience.

Perceiving potential is all-important. Employee and employer need to be well matched, and their styles of work also need to be fit together. Clear goals have to be established in the interviewer’s mind. Amateurish approaches won’t work. Nor will bad practices. Who has not been to an interview, where the interviewer is so obviously reading through the candidate’s CV while he or she is sitting across from them, waiting?

North West jobs covers a very large array of jobs in widely differing sectors which ranges from business development through to engineering, and from IT to sales and service-based jobs. And there are many, many more. Businesses also range in size from SMEs to multi-national corporations. All of this means that every job and every business is different; each brings its own challenge when looking for candidates. What links all of them is that good recruitment is required if the process of filling the vacancy is going to be satisfying to both employer and employee.

The interview process needs to be tailored with three considerations in mind: the company, the job on offer and the candidates who are applying. A fair amount of planning is necessary and all the background information has to be assimilated. On the most practical and obvious level, all the right questions have to be asked. And the interviewee has to know if the given answers are satisfactory.

The interviews have to be suitable for the job in hand and as stress-free as possible. Too often poorly thought-out interviews will have candidates going to unnecessary lengths to qualify for an interview such as having to produce a presentation, which may not even be relevant. Similarly, some interviewers may hone in on one area of the job and neglect the others. At other times they may come up with unusual or overly-complicated questions, all designed to make them look ‘professional’. All such procedures mean that the interview ends up being less than satisfactory and too many question marks remain. In the end, it becomes a matter of sheer luck who gets chosen. This does not help the company in any way.

A good interview procedure means that first of all the candidate is made to feel welcome. And as far as possible the interview should be relaxing. The candidate needs to know if the job is suitable for them, needs to feel free to ask questions and enter into a discussion. An unskillful interviewer will certainly not get the best out of any candidate if they cannot be free to answer the questions. And since the interviewer represents the company, the candidate may go away with a bad impression of what it would be like to actually get the job. In the worst-case scenario, a brilliant interviewee, who is exactly right for the job, may simply turn it down – all because of a poor interviewer.

The interviewer needs to be able to get the interviewee to relax and should think out in advance what questions need to be asked. He or she should also be able to succinctly answer the applicant’s questions and present the company information and be able to describe what it’s like to work for the company.

The CV itself should always have been carefully reviewed. This means that the applicant is already a potential candidate. It’s a waste of time to ask the applicant questions, to which the answers are already clearly stated in the CV.

Getting it right is a skill, one that recruitment agencies have learned to master in the most professional way – and for jobs in the north west, as for all jobs anywhere, the business of matching vacancies with the right candidates is of crucial importance.