Case Study: Sean Gilligan Executive International Recruitment
Running an international company as an owner manager puts additional pressure on my time. If I’m not careful I can end up working not only European time zones but also American time zones. Clearly this is unsustainable and so smarter ways of working need to be sought.
In business process engineering, there are value added steps and steps which do not add any value. Trying to schedule telephone interviews is bad enough in the UK as you have to come to an amenable time, which is appropriate for both the candidate and for the recruiter. More often than not these telephone interviews happen early on a morning or later on during the evening after working hours. This is anti sociable for both the candidate and the recruiter especially if they have young families. If you add international time zones to this as a dimension scheduling telephone interviews becomes even more complex.
This is why I have approached telephone interviews in a different way. If you do away with the need for a set date and time you can create both a better customer experience for the candidate and greater flexibility to you as the hiring manager. Probably about 1 year ago I started using voice messages as a means to recruit talent.
Reading a CV can give clues and guidelines as to whether a candidate is a good fit for your business in terms of their skills and experience. Turning that CV into an audio profile gives you further insights to a person’s proficiency in oral communication. Of course, your audio can be played back and shared with other managers within your organisation which means you don’t have to repeat yourself on a person’s credentials.
Below are five simple steps on how I use voice messaging and audio profiles to filter through my talent pipelines. By using such a technique you can speed up your time to hire and Sound Branch will improve the quality of hires within your organisation.
Step 1 – Thank the candidate for applying and ask them to download the Sound Branch app and to send you a voice note by searching for your name.
Step 2 – You receive notifications via the Sound Branch app from prospective candidates.
Step 3 – You listen to the voice messages and elevator pitches and the best candidates are invited to create an audio profile.
Step 4 – You listen to the audio profile and the best candidates are shared with other managers involved in the hiring decision making process.
Step 5 – Once all hiring managers have fed back their thoughts you can then schedule either a Skype interview or indeed a face to face interview.
So why does this approach work? Firstly, voice messaging makes interviews time independent rather than dependent. Furthermore, the recruitment process instead of being a quick telephone interview is spread out over a number of days or perhaps even weeks giving more time to both the candidate and the recruiter. This means you can look at how quickly people get back to you, and their tone and inflection can be measured. All of this can be played back so no details go missing. Afterall bad hiring can cost a business more than not hiring at all! By eliminating the telephone interview this is a more productive way to filter your talent pipeline whilst keeping a work life balance in check.