The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
Recruiting is a world not many understand. Everything about the recruiting process looks opaque to an outsider. At the same time, if you grasp a few fundamental truths, you can begin building a relationship with the recruiter, solve their pain points and make every discussion a win-win conversation.
1) Elimination vs. Selection Interviews:
In most companies, every role has hundreds of applicants. This competition is not only in entry-level roles where the competition is immense but also for senior positions. For example, in a prestigious big tech company I know of, there were 310 applicants for a Vice President position, out of which none were ultimately found suitable.
After many rounds of recruiter shortlisting, approximately 15-20 candidates are interviewed for every open position. Any selection process with more than three candidates for an open position becomes an “elimination process.” An elimination process, true to its name, tries to eliminate candidates for little or no reason. This mode of interviewing is the opposite of a “selection process,” where the recruiter is more tolerant of mistakes and gives every candidate more chances to prove themselves.
Hence, elimination rounds focus on weaknesses, and selection rounds play to your strengths. If you face an elimination process, you must avoid making any mistakes. Whether confidence, body language, tone, or grooming, everything has to be pitch-perfect.
2) Recruiters are biased and judgemental:
Most interviewers make snap judgments about candidates in the first 1-2 minutes and sometimes even within 10-15 seconds. While these snap calls may seem unfair, this is how the real world works. Most of us are quick to judge each other all the time. While we hate to be judged ourselves, we rush to judge others.
Some recruiters also bring their biases and prejudices to the table, even though it may be counterproductive to some applicants. The goal of an interview is to whittle down the applicant pool from 20 to 1. Nobody will notice if a recruiter makes mistakes in whittling the list of applicants and rejects good candidates. However fair or foul the system is, 19 out of 20 applicants would undergo rejection anyway.
3) Extraneous factors that can impress recruiters:
You have at most five minutes to make a good impression. If you don’t impress the recruiter with a great answer to the first interview question, the recruiter will lose interest in you and mentally relegate you to the reject heap. Hence, answering the introduction question successfully will determine whether the recruiter will continue listening to you.
You can create a good impression can also be cultivated by the following steps:
4) STAR answers:
I have seen MBA students at Stanford and Wharton claiming that they have saved a hundred million dollars working in their companies before the MBA program. While this is outlandish and stretches the truth, even if they have accomplished a fraction of this number, the student is an excellent find. Hence do not hesitate to polish your answers and make them look fantastic.
A bit of embellishment is fine, but do not risk telling outright lies. Recruiters can easily pick the liars. One common way is to keep digging deeper into a specific answer. If you have not done the work, your answers will stop after some probing. It is just not possible to invent stuff on the spot. Also, some of the interviewers may have worked in that same role or company and may know precisely what you are talking about. Therefore, don’t underestimate the interviewer’s capability and experience.
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