Group exercises are a good way to assess someone's personality
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Finding ways to make candidates truly reveal themselves in interviews can be difficult. Barbara Cassani has years of experience, and plenty of tricks up her sleeve to make sure the right person gets the job
One of the things I’ve learnt over the years is that when you recruit people you need to spend as much time as it takes to find the right people. Never, ever feel that you’re desperate and that you must hire someone tomorrow. You also need to follow your instincts, if your gut tells you someone isn’t right listen to it. Make sure you’re organised about what a person’s will be doing – be very clear about job descriptions, and look for a suitable personality as well. If someone is basically intelligent and on the ball they can learn almost any job, but do they have the right attitude? Do they want to work with other people, do they have an openness to new ideas and, if it’s a customer-facing job, do they like people? These are basic questions that you need to know, but you won’t necessarily be able to find out by just asking. Everyone has learned all of the standard interview techniques now and are all ‘Of course I do, I love children and puppies’, so it’s more a question of finding techniques to allow people to reveal who they really are.
One of the things we’ve done over the years is to use experiential and group exercises, so we give a group of potential recruits a really mundane exercise to do together. At Go we had cabin crew work collectively to put together a marketing poster, it was obviously not their skillset or what they were being hired to do, but we’d give them a stack of magazines, a glue stick, a pair of scissors and a big piece of cardboard. They had no idea about what we were doing, and were all very stressed because they wanted to come across well. But basically what it would show was who automatically took up leadership roles, who the followers were, who grabbed the gluestick i.e. the control freaks, who’s bossy, who are the people who encourage others to put their ideas in, and so on. We were observing how they coped in a quite stressful situation where they couldn’t control the behaviour of other people, which is more like the real life, especially for cabin crew. We used lots of techniques to enable people to show who they really are because I think personality is one of the key things to look for.
Developing your workforce
When you’re hiring the team of people to work for you it’s about finding complementary skills and personalities – you don’t want everyone to be an extrovert, and similarly if everyone is an introvert there won’t be much conversation! I find the most effective teams are those with a blend of personalities and experience, some old, some young, some men, some women, some people who are new to the industry, some who have been there a long time. It takes a brave leader to hire people who are smarter than them, people that are different from them. I find managers that are insecure try to hire replicas of themselves, but all you do when you do that is replicate your own flaws. So I’ve learned over the years that it’s a lot more fun when people are different, you get wisdom with freshness and you never quite know what’s going to pop up during a meeting. You get debate, discussion, you don’t have agreement all the time and that’s much healthier.
Often it’s also useful to do personality tests with your team, the feedback can be very revealing and it allows you to have a conversation with colleagues, it gives them permission to talk about what you do that makes it hard for them to do their job, or what they do that makes it hard for you to do your job, in a non-threatening way. As a manager the more you can talk about what I call the “undisscusables” the better, the big white elephant sitting in the room that everyone wants to know about but nobody dares ask. Because I’m not English, when I talk about the elephants everyone kind of goes, ‘Oh she is American isn’t she’, but secretly they’re very glad that elephant is out. I just take people as they come, one at a time. I’m currently working with Middle Eastern investors and I’ve never worked with people from that country before, so I’m just trying to be respectful and listen. I want to understand and adjust my way of communicating to the way they communicate, but essentially we’re all people and if we all took one another one at a time, one encounter at a time, not reading too much in, keeping our ears open and listening, I think there would be a lot fewer problems than there are.
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We assigne staff to work full time under our clients, with the client giving them specific work instructions and supervising the work quality. If the performance of any staff is found unsatisfactory, the client is free to terminate that person’s services and we will find a new person without any extra charge.
web staffing service
Internet marketing ebook
2010 03 31
Marketing is the multifaceted, systematic approach to selling goods, adopted by every business and not for-profit agency and group with a message. It attempts to optimize an organization’s ability to make a profit. Internet marketing ebook
square peg web
2010 06 17
This is exactly what i was looking for..To find promising employees, you must first determine what you want them to do..square peg web
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