HR can find excellent talents by asking questions like this

In this era, it would be a bit exaggerated to say that most people have been in love three or four times; it is normal to say that most people have had three or four work experiences.

Recall that during a job interview, what questions would the HR person sitting opposite you usually ask?

Does this scene look familiar? Familiar indeed. Because this is how most HR interview employees.

From the perspective of a job seeker, these questions are all familiar to me and I have experienced them before. I can just answer them directly without any difficulty. Think about it from an HR perspective, will this kind of interview get the talent the company needs? The answer is no. Even if there is, it is only by chance.

Rose is the company’s recruitment specialist, but she is not a human resources professional. At the beginning, Rose thought it was not difficult to recruit people. She just needed to ask about basic information, work experience, and just check their aptitude. During an interview, when Rose asked these questions about car wheels, the other person directly replied to her that these questions were already on her resume and there was no need to repeat them. This made Rose very embarrassed. And as time went by, the boss became dissatisfied with Rose, saying that she had been unable to recruit suitable candidates.

Recruitment may seem simple, but in fact it is very critical. The human resources specialist responsible for recruitment is like a bridge. It is a good thing to achieve success by allowing suitable job seekers and companies to join hands on this bridge. How to quickly master recruitment skills and find suitable candidates for your boss? A team of experts from DeVry Consulting worked together to create a book called "Talent Portraits" - doubling the accuracy of recruitment.

DeRui Consulting is a management consulting company that focuses on the field of human resources management and provides management consulting, training and talent assessment services. Providing systematic management consulting services to more than 500 high-growth companies. Li Zubin, the main author of this book, is the founder and chairman of the company, a leading expert on the expert committee of "Human Resources" magazine, and a part-time graduate tutor at Nanjing University.

The book "Talent Portraits" can help companies solve three major recruitment problems: What to do if there is no one to choose from? What should I do if I can’t choose the right person? How to identify what is under the iceberg, that is, how to find out through interviews the values, qualities, potential, motivations and other factors hidden behind job seekers.

In the above case, the problems faced by recruitment specialist Rose mainly lie in two aspects. First, the standards for required talents are vague; second, the questions are imprecise and it is impossible to judge whether job seekers have relevant abilities, whether they fit in with the company's culture, and whether they can contribute to the company's development.

Regarding talent standards, the famous American psychologist McClelland proposed a model representing competency in 1973 - the iceberg model. The above-mentioned qualities are knowledge and skills, which are also some rigid conditions put forward by the company when recruiting, such as education, age, work experience, image and temperament, etc. The comprehensive capabilities, values ??and motivations below sea level are the elements that the company focuses on. There is a real case of a female job applicant whose external conditions fully met the company's requirements when applying, that is, her knowledge and professional skills were fully up to standard. She was quickly hired. However, she became pregnant not long after joining the job and began to take a break. Resigning after taking maternity leave is equivalent to the company spending money to hire an employee who barely works. Obviously, there is a problem with this employee's motivation to apply for a job. However, because there were no complete employment standards for the position when she joined the company, and her motivation for the job was not identified, the employer could only swallow the pain.

To establish accurate talent portraits that meet job requirements, the book mentions an eight-step creative weaving method for creating talent portraits.

In the first step, the company's HR team or direct superior convenes an expert group with 6-8 members. The expert group conducts a seminar on job talents.

In the second step, the superior of the position will explain the position background, including rank, responsibilities and requirements. Then work with a team of experts to think about the first draft of the talent portrait from two dimensions. The two dimensions are what qualities do outstanding employees in this position have now; what qualities and abilities do they need to follow the company's development in the future?

In the third step, participants began to brainstorm and list all the qualities and ability requirements they thought of.

The fourth step is to vote.

The fifth step is positive and negative verification. After the first four steps are completed, the first draft of the talent portrait for the position has been completed. The next step is verification. Use the existing outstanding employees and employees with mediocre performance to verify the practicality of the first draft of the portrait.

Step six, final confirmation.

The seventh step is to give this discussion a sense of ritual. The host will ask three times in a row: Are there any other opinions? If confirmed three times that there are no other opinions, it will be approved by applause.

The last step is to continuously iteratively improve and optimize the application.

Comparing Rose's recruitment work, it is obvious that there is no talent profiling step. Perhaps the boss cannot accurately describe what qualities this person needs to have to help him complete his job better. In fact, many bosses of small and medium-sized companies do not have this awareness.

If you think it is too difficult to determine a job portrait in this way, the cost of time and energy will be high. Chapter 4 of the book "Talent Portraits" gives talent portrait cards for some key positions, such as financial managers, marketing managers, sales managers, etc.

HR can directly use these talent portrait cards for recruitment work.

As you can see from the talent portrait card above, the knowledge and skills on the applicant's iceberg are easy to identify. This is also a question that Rose repeatedly asked during the interview. These questions can be clearly seen through the resume. The key is how to dig out the qualities under the iceberg through a short interview session?

Questioning is a must-have for HR interviews, but how can you identify the qualities of job seekers under the iceberg? "Talent Portraits" says:

Each talent portrait card given in the book has precise questioning skills behind each quality item. Questions based on quality items generally use structured behavioral questioning methods. Many large units use structured interviews when conducting internal competitions. For example, a state-owned enterprise needs a team leader position in a production team. The company has a clear talent profile for this position, and then passes some iceberg conditions screening, such as a bachelor's degree or above, three years of working at the grassroots level, etc., qualified talents are like Just like entering the funnel, those who can come out of the funnel will participate in a structured interview. The interviewer will dig out and compare the quality of the interviewer under the iceberg through questioning.

Structured interviews seem simple on the surface. The same questions are asked to different interviewers and different scores are given in the end. In fact, if the questions of structured interviews are not scientifically designed, the interviews will be almost ineffective. A bank's internal competition uses structured interviews to select suitable talents. The interviews lasted all morning. Both the interviewers and the candidates were very tired. However, when the final results came out, the bank's leaders were not satisfied because the scoring results were inconsistent with some people. There is a big gap in daily work performance. The leaders of the company believed that the interviews were unscientific and did not adequately interview the candidates’ comprehensive qualities and growth motivations.

Regarding structured interview questions, "Talent Portraits" gives an OBER rule. O means open, ask more open questions and less closed questions; B means behavior, ask more behavioral example questions and less hypothetical questions; E means easy, the questions should be concise, clear and easy to understand; R means Refers to related, related, the question should be related to the quality item. Let’s focus on B-behavior.

Commonly used sentence patterns for behavioral questions are "Please give an example that reflects..." and "You have successfully handled... (work situation), please give a specific example." Candidates should answer this Questions like this need to be answered with a real case that happened in the past. A person's behavior pattern is relatively stable and will not change in a short period of time. Especially when encountering similar situations, people's behavioral reactions tend to repeat the way they have been in the past. By observing the applicant's description of the past, the interviewer can more accurately judge his future behavioral reactions.

If you use a hypothetical sentence pattern when asking: "If you..., how would you deal with it?", you will only get a general and vague answer, which can test the applicant's cognition. and ideas, and cannot see what the applicant really does. For example, there is an interview question like this: Your boss assigned you a job, which you originally planned to complete in five days, but now suddenly requires you to complete it three days in advance. What should you do? This is a hypothetical question, and many candidates answered it very well, in terms of work attitude, planning, and communication. If you judge only based on this answer, it is very likely that the people selected are giants in words and dwarfs in actions.

Going back to the structured interview case of the bank’s internal competition, judging from the scoring results, the scores of employees who usually talk loudly and only make thunder but no rain are actually higher than those of employees who are down-to-earth and work hard without complaining. . The reason is that the questions asked are designed to be hypothetical questions rather than behavioral questions. No wonder the bank leaders are dissatisfied.

Regarding behavioral questions, "Talent Portraits" provides ten scene dimensions and question methods for the interviewer's reference.

An enterprise's selection of talents is like a farmer selecting high-quality seeds for planting. Only by selecting the right talents can the company develop. Make a good talent portrait of the position and use precise questions to find the right talent. The book "Talent Portraits" is an essential reference book for HR.