I spent nearly 20 minutes preparing for the interview, the candidate was 12 minutes late; he then took a phone call during the meeting and waffled nonsense for 83 minutes. He failed to show any suitable skills or characteristics which would deem him suitable for the job. Furthermore, it took me several minutes to see him off site and since then he called me for a chat! I couldn’t tell you what about….to thank me for my time maybe!

Ok, so not all interviews are that bad maybe, but I only need a few dodgy ones to have wasted half a day.

Whose fault is it though?

Should I blame the agency?  They didn’t vet the candidates properly but, come to think of it, did I brief the agency adequately?

My colleague must be to blame. He looked at the CV & said the guy was worth meeting; apparently, the candidate worked for a rival company & was one of the best sales guys they had.

The truth is, it was my fault; I could have done a phone interview but I just didn’t have the time.

Do you need help planning, preparing, and conducting interviews? Visit our interview  advice page.

For some positions, the recruitment process can go on and on and just as I’m about to meet the right candidate, the boss puts the position on hold! Months wasted. If only I had been more thorough at the start of the process, I could have had a new sales manager actually working for me by now; he’d probably be making loads of deals & over-achieving!

So what could I have done differently? Well apart from briefing the agency more thoroughly or simply ignoring my colleague’s recommendation, I don’t really know.

Shocked by the whole episode, I went to see the HR Director; he is awful at recruitment and  I thought that perhaps I would feel better once we had spoken and shared our terrible recruitment experiences.

The HR Director told me I shouldn’t be interviewing candidates without his knowledge. We don’t get on and we haven’t actually spoken since the last time I was recruiting and he was put off by the fact that a sales guy was too hungry for success!

Mike, the HR Director, told me that things have changed. The company now uses an Applicant Tracking System which enables him to advertise jobs across all of the leading job boards. He told me that he works with a job board reseller which means they get significant discounts on their job adverts and they’re able to reach a much wider audience.

Apparently, the CVs fly into the system and some line managers (who aren’t down with today’s technology) receive them in yesterday’s technology and have them emailed instead.

He went on to tell me that, we shortlist the best candidates and talent pool candidates who are surplus to requirements on our ATS.

Learn more about the benefits and features of Applicant Tracking Systems by reading Centralising Recruitment With ATS.

With so much choice, we do social media research and he showed me how to research a prospective candidate’s online profiles, enabling us to investigate a person’s social profiles from one platform. It all sounded a bit nosey to me, but Mike reminded me that we are targeting 5 excellent candidates at this stage, rather than 5 maybes.

Before our candidates are invited for interviews we now get them to do a video interview (read How To Conduct A Remote Interview). It’s simple to use, provides insight on the candidates and you can bet if they’ve taken the time to record the video they are genuinely interested in the job and will turn up for their interview and probably be on time too!

Whilst this chain of events is an example of what can happen, the truth is that it’s not always straightforward; but by embracing new technology and utilising those tools that are readily available to you, you can significantly increase your chances of finding suitable candidates (and finding them much more quickly) resulting in both you and your company hitting your sales targets.