Meet the New Elevator Pitch. Managers Love the Speed Interview

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Time Management for Managers

If you are a seasonal industry or someone who is mass hiring in large volume, you have a deadline, a boss, and not a moment to waste.  Managers are juggling, multi-tasking, and losing ground.  Good managers are hard to find.  In fact, they are invaluable members of your team.  A 2012 Stanford Study shows that having a boss who ranks in the top 10% is like having an additional member on your team.  They motivate others.  They manage time effectively, and they are always looking for more. 

Good managers are looking for ways to improve productivity and cram more hours for themselves into the day.  They rely on their gut or intuition as time is increasingly short or pressed at work.  This is especially true during the busy holiday shopping and staffing season, and one solution to manager proactivity could very well be the speed interview. 

When it comes to hiring faster, better, and more quickly, the solution just might be the speed interview.  Traditional face-to-face interviews range between thirty minutes to an hour and a half for one interview.  For a manager who is looking to hire a temporary workforce of 50 or more they just might interview more than 125-150 candidates. There are not enough hours in the day. 

How to Find the Best Candidate for the Job with Speed Interview

Speed interviews provide a quick, personal, and private alternative for a hiring manager who is looking to qualify candidates quickly, easily, and most important quickly.  Lasting just sixty seconds these are fast paced conversations where the manager assesses whether the candidate moves on to the next interview round.  Hiring managers use resume and job applications in this fashion spending an average of 6 seconds scanning a candidate’s resume.  Yes, you read correctly 6 seconds. 

Speed interviews can happen in a variety of different ways:

• ·      Video Introduction.  This is recorded video introduction or pitch that the job seeker provides a hiring manager.  It is difficult from a video interview in that the job seeker quickly articulates their job qualifications and special skills while working hard to make a professional and personal impression without a series of interview questions. 

• ·      A Formal Event.  Candidates and employers meet in a speed dating style format.  The employer organizes quick sixty-second meetings with a hiring manager and job seeker either in a formally.  This works best at an event like a career fair, open house, or networking events. 

• ·      Telephone Interview.  A common practice among recruiters is to quickly qualify job seekers over the phone.  These interactions are not planned  like a traditional formal interview that is scheduled and lasts 5-15 minutes so job seekers must be prepared.  Recruiters can quickly ask a candidate about their availability or for an explanation as to any red flag that may have surfaced on their application.

Speed Interviewing Improves the Hiring Process

Speed interviews can be used a number of different ways.  For recruiters and hiring manager’s it is very important to be familiar with the job requisition qualifications before you meet with the candidate.  Plan your interactions and what qualities you are looking for saving you more time and effort throughout the hiring process.  

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

Photo Credit. 

Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

A refreshing short book by Peter Cappelli, Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources! This is a must read for any HR Professional, of course, but even more for anyone who is in a management position and has the power, or simply the will, to put an end the current "crippling employer-employee standoff." The purpose of Peter Cappelli's book is to get "America's job engine revved up again."

We are all familiar with the litany of complaints: Companies can't find skilled workers, schools are not providing the right kind of training, the government doesn't let in enough highly skilled immigrants, prospective employees don't want jobs at the wages that are offered, etc. If perception and scattered research might give some weight to such complaints, Cappelli demonstrates that they don't add up when looked at holistically, and that they come across as urban myths.

Are we a nation of un-qualified people? In a market with a lot of job applicants, companies tend to look for purple squirrels or unicorns. Are job seekers unqualified for not fitting a paranormal job description? Does it allow us to jump to the conclusion that "there is a skills gap" when the hardest-to-fill jobs appear to be those that often require the least skills? In reality, lots of job seekers are overqualified: "When applicants far outnumber job openings, the overqualified bump out those only adequately qualified... And the proportion of overqualified has more than doubled over the past generation." Cappelli sees very little evidence of an actual supply problem and asks a valid question: Isn't it a paradox that the US would rank seven among 39 countries (survey performed by Manpower in 2011) in terms of employers' complaints about an inability to fill jobs, while in China, the new global rising power, these complaints are half as frequent? Does China have a larger pull of "qualified" people?  No — simply millions learn on the job and do so very quickly, just as generations of Americans have. In the end, the analysis shows that skills aren't the issue, but market-determined wages are...

Are your kids less intelligent that you were at their age? Nobody wants to believe this, but businesses are quick to assume that today's workforce is more flawed than 20 years ago. There is no evidence to support this "good old days bias" either. Cappelli indicates that US student performance has actually improved over the past decades. In addition, studies by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation (OCDE) do not show any absolute decline in US scores. Emerging countries are simply catching up — and they do not belittle their workforce nearly as much as we do. Another great point: the history of Russia "reminds us that an economy's success is not related to education in any simple fashion."

So what's wrong? Job seekers and employers talk at cross purposes. Is it reasonable to expect job seekers to have done the work before because companies don't want to train people? While it's certainly valid to fear that a newly trained employee might go to the competition, it's equally logical to wonder why a newly trained employee would leave... Maybe this was not the right hire in the first place... Maybe the very culture or a non-existent culture of the company is the problem. Is it reasonable to assume that filling a job vacancy is akin to replacing a part in a washing machine — what Peter Cappelli calls the "Home Depot Syndrome" — and assume that people are mere cogs in the industrial machine? This may not be the safest angle to increase a company's productivity or creativity, or to even motivate people to join a company.

Cappelli mentions two major problems: The first one is the automated software used to filter job seekers — it allegedly complies with the mandate of equal treatment of all candidates, yet ends up generating pervasive unfairness: people can't find jobs even though there are millions of open positions. How long will the legal requirements be an excuse for using antiquated software? The second one is the loss of power of the HR function: "Not coincidentally, the United States has the weakest human resources in the industrialized world." The ultimate call is certainly to re-empower human resources, and re-empower recruiters —give them a strategic role. Brain drain is the death of companies, and so is brain blindness: "Millions of unfilled jobs are costing the economy billions of dollars in lost business," reminds Cappelli.

This little book is a powerful eye-opener. As I was reading through it, it seemed to me that what is initially presented as a sort of standoff between job seekers and employers may not be that willingly created by employers, and may raise a broader question about the ability for established companies to realize that economic survival in a global economy is more about building and nurturing talent and less about "filling" positions. The vast majority of the people who look for the perfect match today would not be hired in their own company. They benefited from a system when trust in people and intra-entrepreneurship mattered, which is the deep history of this country: the US started the modern industrial revolution thanks to millions of "unqualified" people — and Cornelius Vanderbilt left school when he was 11.