Beyond Experience: How to best present top candidates to hiring managers

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Yves Lermusi, CEO, Checkster

By Yves Lermusi

Last week I was with a talent acquisition leader from a well known brand, and his main initiative is to seek candidates based on criteria other than that used by most organizations, which mainly focus on one’s experience. From his view, in this economy, previous experience isn’t a good indicator of a top candidate. We cannot agree more.

Indeed you could have been a marketing manager for 15 years, a programmer for 10 years, or even a financial advisor for 20 years, but you may just have been a mediocre marketing manager, programmer or financial advisor. Research proves that, as outlined in our book (Reference Check 2.0), that the correlation between experience and future performance is among the lowest. Note we do not say that experience does not matter; it does, but it is just not a criterion you can rely on to provide good candidates.

So what is the solution this leader seeks?

The solution is to be able to recognize exceptional capabilities beyond simple work experience.

But, then, the main question becomes: how can you recognize capabilities easily before presenting the candidate to the hiring manager? That is the science and art of recruiting.

There is no secret here, but the simplest and most powerful answer for us is to be transparent on how you validated the candidate’s capabilities claims.

When you present a candidate to a hiring manager or to the other people to show how great they are, there are two types of claims: The one they can prove on the spot and the one that will need some degree of verification. For instance, if someone claims to be able to speak Spanish, as a recruiter you can easily have this checked by a Spanish speaker. To the same extent, any specific technical verifiable capability can be assessed during a technical interview or test.

The difficulty arises when you try to assess some level of performance that cannot be verified on the spot. And most of the time we rely on what we feel and what we read, but that can be a source of you failing to deliver great candidates. An example of this can be a candidate that claims to have been able to always overachieve on her sales quota, to have an incredible team spirit, or the ability to make timely decisions. There is only one best way to assess these.

Indeed, how do you know that this individual always outperformed her quota? There are no agencies certifying the achievements of sales people like there are good credit agencies.

How do you know this individual is not an egocentric individualist pain to work with? There is no assessment that will be as telling as personal anecdotes for how such characteristics express themselves in work situations. You get the picture.

The only way to assess these type of elements are through past behaviors and achievements. Past behaviors and achievements with no agency certifying them or time machine for you to be able to guarantee them are only accessible through other people who were there. In other words, through references.

But references have 2 big negatives: they often lack useful data due to the legal fears and they are very time consuming. New technologies solve those issues and make references migrate from a 1.0 version to what we can call Reference Check 2.0.

For the time being, as you prepare to deliver candidates to hiring managers, make sure you distinguish between these two claims and how you have validated them. But most importantly, show how you validate them. Here is the format we recommend presenting to the hiring manager using an example of a Bilingual District Sales Manager requisition:

In short, the only way to present candidates to hiring managers in a way they will value your work beyond simply being a researcher is to be transparent on what you did to assess their capabilities. You will not always be able to assess it all, but it will give the hiring manager a level of detail they never had before in order to start the next level of selection and make their decision. This is the future of what we can call transparent recruiting.