Sourcing and Screening: Building Relationships As You Recruit

Introduction

In a previous article I discussed the recruitment process and why a relationship building led approach will pay dividends and why the industry too often does not follow this practice. Great. That was the theory. Now for the real work. Starting at the start of the recruitment journey with the sourcing of high calibre candidates and screening them effectively.

Plan for success

As a hiring manager or hiring team member, how do you actually execute a relationship building-based recruitment process? To me this is subjective, personal, more art than science – a professional skill. As with all such skills though you can apply techniques, processes and tactics to deliver results. But … how do you actually do it and build authentic relationships that endure without being overwhelmed by the effort and time required – given the number of candidates you are actually going to have to meet?

As with most things, it starts with a belief that it is important and then baking in the right approach from the start to end of the process.

Belief that it is important is two-pronged:

• your organisation gets this and leadership encourage and support this way of working – it is an approach that reflects your culture
• the hiring manager, team and support (including 3rd parties where used) understand the long-lasting benefits of working this way.

If the team sees the value, then it is just (😅) a case of baking the approach into every step in the process – from the moment you reach out to a cold candidate to the onboarding of the successful candidate (it doesn’t really stop there either but you mentally shift to ‘recruitment’ to ‘management’). So … where to start?

Mindset – you are selling your company, team and role

Your company is great. Your engineering team is great. You only want great candidates. Of course you do. But remember, whatever the state of the market, great candidates will always have choices. At the start of a recruitment process you still don´t know the level of the candidate´s experience.

Always assume they are going to be great.

Even if you have sourced a deeply passive candidate, they have a choice… the choice to stay exactly where they are. Inertia and risk aversion, which are intrinsic to many deeply passive candidates, need to be overcome. You overcome this by your role being clearly more attractive than the status quo, sufficiently safe to take the risk and with as little uncertainty as possible (i.e. the worry that everything they are being told is BS, that the job is not as attractive as it sounds, that the downsides are being hidden).

The building of a strong relationship allows you, as the hiring manager, to work on these doubts.

This is how great sales people work – especially when selling innovative, complex products. Understand the customer and their needs, what pain can the product take away? Can the salesperson explain why buying your product is the natural and right decision for a customer? This is where people in the recruitment industry often start thinking of the candidate as the product – and how that candidate can be sold to an organisation.

Turn it round – just as a mental exercise to see the world differently.

Think of your open position as the product. Think of the candidate as a customer you believe might value your open position. Software engineers are very guarded about marketing messages about jobs – especially early in the process – and rightly so. Great developers are always in demand – even when the job market is soft. Therefore, you have to work to understand the needs of the candidate, why their role might be a great fit, what pains or anxieties the job might take away and whether a hire is likely.

Step 1: The cold introductory reach-out to the passive candidate

As discussed above, from your first interaction, think of the candidate as the client. Be candid about who you are and what you are doing. I’ve not found ‘mystery’ to be a helpful tactic. It is disrespectful of the candidate’s time. You may think your opportunity is amazing but the candidate knows nothing about you and will pass on your outreach. They will not feel intrigued by mysterious temptation – unless you are lucky enough to be a big name in the industry.

Also – keep it brief. They will probably not read a job description or a company profile at this stage either. Assume they get multiple of these unsolicited marketing messages every week. So… think objectively about what is attractive about your company and role and let them know. By all means, link to your company careers page but write a good, content-full headline that actually gives information and allows the candidate to make that first filtering decision. I work a lot with purpose-led businesses and the purpose is often the key differentiator so I tend to lead with that.

Step 2: Request for more information

The next step is when someone comes back to you and wants to know more. This is where preparation is important. Build a realistic job profile … describe what your company is really like to work for and what the job will actually be like.

Do you have a careers page that does a good job of explaining what it is like to work at your company – tech stack, tools, processes, team structure, working practices, culture? Does it have an area that talks about the recruitment and onboarding process, interview and evaluation steps, timeframe, decision process?

At Castelo Green, if our client does not yet have complete information on their careers page, we like to work with them to create a separate document that clearly describes the company, what it’s really like to work there and what to expect in the interview process. This is shared with prospective candidates.

Make sure the job description is well-rounded – yes, skills required, tasks to be performed – but what about wider responsibilities, how the role may evolve? Include compensation bands if your organisation allows – it will save lots of wasted time later when expectation mismatches blow up in your face.

Be authentic.

We all know what ‘good’ looks like but what is it really like to work at your place? Don’t create a utopian fiction. Share challenges as well as strengths. A wise candidate will be deeply suspicious of something that sounds too good (to be true). Consider including ‘day in the life’ blog posts from current engineers to try to bring your team to life.

At this stage you want the candidate to start to visualize how they might feel, working in your organisation. The hope is that inappropriate candidates filter themselves out at this stage and great candidates start selling your role to themselves.

Step 3: The screening meeting

This is a very important step and one I feel is particularly susceptible to being viewed more as a cost than a benefit by the hiring team – a slog to have to go through to find some candidates that might be worth getting to know. If that is your experience, then the first thing I’d be looking at is the sourcing strategy – why are you getting so many poor quality candidates to filter out? This is where a search based strategy can pay dividends, seeking well-suited passive candidates rather than having to wade through whoever responds to your job ads.

The screening interview is commonly 15-20 minutes long. This is one of the ways our company, Castelo Green, breaks with standard practice. We undertake a more thorough 30-40 minute screening interview divided into two stages, that, as well as the standard basic qualification questions, includes a technical appraisal of the candidate guided by the needs of the hiring team and an initial culture fit evaluation. The rationale for our heavy investment early in the process is two-fold:

• We want to take as much cost away from the hiring team as we are able
• We want to increase the chances of good quality candidates buying into our process (this includes potentially avoiding the need for an automated test or take home test stage on the process … a step that is a real turn-off for high calibre candidates – see step 4 below)

The environment

The screening interview should always be a video call. Do not be tempted to go for audio only. There is just too much signal lost. If the candidate does not want to meet via video call I would consider that a red flag.

Encourage the candidate to take the call from their normal home working environment. Most will naturally do this anyway but you can learn a lot from seeing someone’s working set up. How professional is it? Is it an obviously dedicated workspace? What of their personality or home life do they have on show? Also, if they apply a background filter, what is it? Have they simply blurred their background or signalled something about their personality in their choice?

Screening basics

The first thing I do is make sure I’m pronouncing the candidate’s name right. Just ask them. Also check that this is the name they want to use – some go straight to an informal name. Don’t underestimate the importance of this step. It is super embarrassing to have to ask (or worse, be told) at a third meeting that. you’ve been saying someone’s name wrong or using their family name by mistake. Yes, I’ve been there.

I talk to candidates from all cultures, all over the world. I do a little homework before a call. Do I know where they live? How close to a major city I may know? Have I visited the country or know people from there? What do I know about the language or cuisine?

Breaking the ice

With that research in the back of my head, I am now properly in ice-breaking territory. Another technique I like to use is to look around the room behind them (which is why filters can be problematic) and ask about something that catches your eye – but not too personal – not ‘is that a picture of your partner or kid that I see’ but maybe ‘hey, is that a picture of your dog’. I’m not a big fan of inspecting the bookshelf behind someone and quizzing them about their choices … but it might work for you. Maybe you can see out of the window and the view looks good… Say so.

What I am doing here is taking an interest in the candidate as a person. We’ve all had this done to us in an insincere way by an inexperienced sales person so if you aren’t sincere I suggest it is best not to try (or engage someone that has this expertise). However, if genuine, it is a step towards that stronger relationship that will pay dividends later.

An equal information share

Much more can be said about approaches to the screening interview but that can be the subject of another post all of its own. From a relationship building perspective, once you’ve got the conversation started, think of it as an equal information share. You both give an equivalent amount of information with the explicitly stated intent of both parties is the gathering of more information to see if this is something they want to pursue. Not a grilling by the recruiter but equally, a candidate that is unable to openly share is unlikely to proceed to the next stage.

At Castelo Green, we see this as the most critical step in many ways. Screening done well by a third party such as us can massively reduce the time burden on the recruiting team – both in terms of fewer interviews with poor candidates and a greater chance that your preferred candidate will accept an offer and actually join you.

Questions and feedback

Always finish a screening meeting by giving the candidate an opportunity to ask clarifying questions and check that they have received sufficient information to make an informed decision to invest their time in a formal process.The job description should include a salary range. Confirm that this is within the candidate’s expectations. There is no point continuing if this is unknown or unclear – and again, is a signal of the candid way that your company goes about its business.

I tend to give the candidate 24 hours to sleep on what they have heard before committing to subsequent stages. Others would push for that commitment in the call. This is not a problem but my personal style is to signal that this is an important decision and I respect the candidate’s need to think. Plus, it gives me a little time too and opens an opportunity for another quick interaction (probably by email) – within 24 hours.

Step 4: screening through technical tests

The next step requires a decision. Do you ask the candidate to do an automated skills evaluation or take-home test before meeting with engineers in the hiring team in person? This is a judgement call. There is a large and vocal industry of assessment tool providers who will tell you this step is essential and to ignore it risks squandering precious engineer resources on no-hope candidates.

After all, there’s no marketing money being spent on persuading you that this step is unnecessary.

I’ll be controversial though and say this is not an iron-clad law especially if you set up the screening assessment correctly. Yes, automated assessments will weed out candidates that aren’t right for you but there is a hidden cost to including this step.

The cost: one of my most commonly heard complaints from candidates is the amount of time expected in pre-interview assessments. Strong candidates will respect you for not taxing them with some busy work – helping you to build that relationship that will result in a better chance of closing later in the process.

Less experienced engineers are more tolerant of these assessment tasks and indeed, assessments are much better signal generators for more junior positions. Perhaps this is the way to square this particular circle If you are hiring juniors, include a technical assessment stage prior to interview. If hiring seniors, rely on the background, the CV and a more solid screening interview with someone who knows how to gauge a candidate. If you aren’t certain, be prepared to add a technical test step prior to hiring team interviews.

Screening successful, next steps

So far, so good. You’ve set the tone for how your organisation operates – candour, respect, friendliness. You have hopefully shifted a candidate from guarded suspicion of whether you are wasting their time to intrigued and wanting to hear more. You have successfully screened out candidates that are not the right fit. Now you get to the meat of the process – interviews. Be candid about the fact that this is where the technical evaluation really begins – and that this is taken very seriously as you only want great engineers (or great potential). All candidates expect this and great ones would be suspicious of any hiring team not grilling them at some point. This is the subject of my next instalment.

For more ideas and discussion, follow Castelo Green on LinkedIn.