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Maximising Your Chances of Getting the Job AFTER the Interview

You’ve just finished your job interview. Time to relax and mind yourself with other business until you get a response, right? Well, this is definitely everybody’s first reaction, but it is not the right one.  Given today’s competitive job market, you must keep in mind that you should also do a follow-up; otherwise you may risk losing the position to other candidates. You also have to be careful not to look desperate, but rather look persistent and prove your willingness to land the job.

There is no certain way to know if you got the job until you receive an actual offer. Don’t forget, they may genuinely think you were absolutely fantastic, but someone else could end up being better. Generally, there is more than one strong candidate for a job position, especially in the current marketplace.

These are a few tips that could prove valuable to you after the interview, in order to maximise your chances of getting the job:

 

  1. Follow the instructions given – After the interview, the recruiter may tell you to contact them by email. If so, do not contact them by phone. Listen to their instructions precisely and act accordingly. If you somehow forgot to ask during the interview what the next steps are, write an email asking for clarification. It shows that you care about the job and that you are ready for the next phase
  2. Provide documentation to prove your job abilities – If possible, when you do a follow-up by email, also include documents that show just how good you are at your job. Of course, these documents have to be non-confidential samples, press mentions or some public statistics in order to prove your worth. It’s an excellent way to show your professionalism and work ethic.
  3. Don’t become a stalker – It is quite understandable that you are nervous and anxious about the outcome of the interview. However, try not to bother the employer too much. After following their exact instructions, you have to wait. If you haven’t heard from them in a couple of days, it is probably time to move on. Also, don’t go out sending LinkedIn invites to the people who have interviewed you before the hiring process ends. It comes off as being a bit desperate. Try and remain calm.
  4. Start preparing for the next set of interviews – Life can surprise you and you never know when you can receive an email announcing you about another upcoming interview, or if you’re asked to come in for a second interview. It’s absolutely vital that you be prepared at a moment’s notice, Also, if you wish to set yourself apart from other candidates, (and I assume you do) try and find interesting facts and/or figures about the company where you applied for the job. It could be anything ranging from an award they have just won to a recent environmental initiative they have started. It’s best when you introduce this information naturally into the conversation at the interview and it will definitely leave a good impression with the recruiters and it will also increase your chances of landing the job.
  5. Analyse your interview performance – After an interview it’s also important that you relax for a couple of hours. Once you managed to distance yourself from the subject, analyse your performance. Think about what you said and how the interviewer reacted, what you could have said better and keep that in mind if you get called in for a second interview. Furthermore, pay attention to the recruiter and what he says, it is possible that of the things he or she said to have annoyed you one way or another. This helps you determine whether this company suits your principles and values.

Last but not least, try to make good use of the experience of the interview. Regardless of how it went, you’ve still won something: if it went well, you’ve got the job, if not, you’ve gained the experience necessary to land the next one.

 

Sources:

http://www.forbes.com

http://www.businessinsider.com

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Overcoming the Recruitment Biases

Do you or anyone you know have a sixth sense when it comes to recruitment? Is that “sense” completely unbiased and effective? If you answered “yes”, then you are definitely lying to yourselves.

While it is, indeed, true that some people have much more success in recruitment then others,  this happens, most of the times, due to their abilities slowly developed over the course of time and multiple errors.

How do you make up your mind when confronted with a decision? Well, people tend to prefer one of the two following approaches:

One of these approaches is using the “gut feeling”, that has been proven to be successful for them over the years. The main problem with this approach is that it can never be reliable enough. No matter how many times it helped you make the right decision, it will still be just a game of dice next time you use it. And, on top of that, have you ever considered what exactly is this gut feeling and how does it work? Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, defined it as “the subconscious integration of all experiences, conditioning, and knowledge of a lifetime, including the cultural and emotional biases of that lifetime.” This doesn’t sound very professional when it comes to recruitment, does it?

The second approach that people use when facing a decision is what they imagine to be the rational analysis. This approach consists of trying to methodically examine all the available information and data in order to reach a conclusion. This may sound as unbiased as it can get, but is it?

In most cases, even while HR managers and CEOs adopt and implement programs that they believe to be free of bias, they still fall short of addressing unconscious biases. Dr. Banaji, a social psychologist at Harvard University, explains that “discrimination is veiled, not explicit, but rather more implicit, unconscious, because we ourselves are unaware of it”.

In his book, Everyday Bias, noted diversity consultant Howard J. Ross points to many studies indicating that these sorts of blindspots are ubiquitous in our lives.  “Virtually every important decision we make in life is influenced by these biases, and the more they remain in the unconscious, the less likely we are to make the best decisions we are able to make.”

Some of these biases include:

Confirmation bias: The tendency for people to seek out information that conforms to their preexisting views, and ignore information that goes against their views. For example, when an interviewer forms a distinct opinion about a candidate based on a minute piece of information such as the college they attended, before the actual interview, he or she is succumbing to confirmation bias. Great candidates may not make it to the interview or be perceived as less competent than others because of these assumptions. Organizations may decrease their chances of hiring great candidates due to interviewing confirmation bias.

Ingroup bias: The tendency to favor members of your own group (or those that you have more in common with). This bias can result in making poor hiring decisions by choosing a candidate entirely based on subjective criteria such as shared interests, hobbies, education, age, professional background or even similarities of appearance or name.

Selective perception: The process of cherry picking the information that we do like to perceive, while ignoring the ones that would contradict our beliefs. This goes hand in hand with the ingroup bias. When we find a candidate that matches our initial preferences, we tend to notice only his or hers positive features, while unconsciously filtering out all the data that would contravene our viewpoint.

Status quo bias: The fact that we would almost every time prefer the familiar things – the ones that we are already comfortable with. This bias prevents diverse hiring by making us prone to selecting the same type of employees that we have chosen in the past.

All of these could interfere with our reasoning, so what can we do in order to overcome all of these biases and use an objective judgment when recruiting candidates?

Anonymizing candidate selection is definitely helpful, but it’s far from enough. Consider using one of these methods to ensure that your organization’s hiring process is bias-free:

One way would be what Dan Hill, an internationally recognized expert on reading emotions based on facial micro expressions and the CEO of Sensory Logic, told us about at the Great People Inside Conference: The New World of Work in Romania (you can see the whole video by clicking here). “People don’t think their feelings; they feel them. So at Sensory Logic we bypass self-reported, cognitively filtered input by going straight to how people most naturally reflect and communicate their emotions: the face.”

For 16 years now, they’ve been both the pioneer and the most careful commercial  practitioner of applying facial coding as a research tool to help clients lower risks and optimize marketing, products and other business solutions. Facial coding enables them to scientifically yet non-invasively capture, quantify and analyze the emotions shown.

Another great way to make the best decisions would be to use exclusively the assessment systems in order to narrow down the number of possible candidates to only a few before you involve any human judgment. Afterwards, you can make the final decision by consulting with the HR managers that you trust the most.

Great People Inside provides easy-to-use tools and processes to attract, assess, match, select, onboard, manage, develop, benchmark and maintain workforces anywhere in the world.

Finding the right talent, the best fit for the job and your organisation, can be a very challenging task. It requires deep knowledge of your own organisation’s culture and keen understanding of the candidate’s personality, strengths, interests, work style and other characteristics. Our technology and solutions will do the work for you, helping you find employees who can flourish and reach the highest performance required to constantly bring your company forward.

Request a free demo:

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Sources:

Mlodinow, L., “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior”

www.wepow.com

www.forbes.com

www.sensorylogic.com/