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Data Watch
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“The interview is not only a crucial assessment touch point in the recruiting process, it’s an important marketing and branding opportunity,” says Neal Bruce, vice president of alliances at Monster. “Amidst today’s war for talent, successful interviewers will quickly determine the marketing messages that resonate with each individual candidate and reinforce those messages.”
Interviewer Behavior Affects Job Seeker Decision-Making
A new study has found that an interviewer’s behavior can bear considerably, and negatively, on a job seeker’s decision-making process. Furthermore, large discrepancies exist between job seekers’ and staffing directors’ expectations and wants.
According to The Selection Forecast 2006-2007, a study by Development Dimensions International (DDI) and Monster, the interviewer influences two-thirds of job seekers’ decision to accept a position. DDI’s press release states that respondents to the DDI–Monster survey comprised 628 staffing directors, 1,250 hiring managers and 3,725 job seekers who revealed that despite the fact that companies are increasingly desperate for talent, many are becoming their own worst obstacles when interviewing qualified candidates.
A number of interviewer behaviors adversely affect job seekers’ willingness to work at the company in question. For instance, 70% of interviewees rank “acting like has no time to talk to me” as a common—and annoying—behavior of hiring managers and staffing directors. In addition, staffing directors and hiring managers often struggle to identify what job seekers want in a new job and misunderstand the elements that are most important to potential employees. For example, 67% of job seekers identify a “compatible work group/team” as a significant factor in their job hunt, but only 37% of staffing directors ascribe a similar importance to this aspect.
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Some of these findings suggest that job seekers have trouble trusting potential employers whose interviewers behave badly. But additional discrepancies between employers’ and job seekers’ mindsets show that employers might be just as leery of job seekers. For instance, while 31% of hiring managers claim job seekers misrepresent their education, only 3% of potential employees agree, and although only 15% of job seekers admit to using a non-work friend as a reference, 40% of hiring managers say they do. Exacerbating this atmosphere of distrust, a slight majority of job seekers in the survey has worked for two or three employers over the last five years.
The takeaway is clear. Employers and job seekers, despite a favorable hiring climate, distrust and harbor animosity toward each other. They just don’t seem to share goals. Recruiters might go a long way in improving their own earnings by reconciling employers’ expectations with candidates, and vice versa.