Making Human Resources and Recruitment Human

Making Human Resources and Recruitment Human

From the perspective of a new graduate, and a newbie in the corporate world

As a student, I underwent countless interviews and applications and often felt disheartened at the lack of responses and care for applicants. From not even receiving a measly auto-rejection email from some of these companies, or receiving it months later, there was often a disregard for the stressors of job hunting that applicants experience. It’s no wonder why people take the numbers and quantity-over-quality approach, by mass applying to ill-fitting positions in a scramble to find something at the bare minimum.

It was only until I took a step back and thought about the interview process from the interviewer’s perspective that I began to excel in interviews and job applications. From sprucing up my resume to include relevant and tangible experiences, to having enticing answers prepared for every possible common interview question, I finally began to grasp what companies were looking for in a candidate, as well as how you can stand out against the mass number of applicants. 

So when the opportunity to be a part of the recruitment process for two roles at my current company - an account executive role and a digital marketing internship - came about, I jumped at the chance of being able to assess and select a good fitting candidate. Having been on the other side of the table (or in this case, a computer screen) repeatedly, I had the unique opportunity to conduct interviews and influence the hiring decision.

The account executive interviews were probably the most challenging - not only did every single one of the candidates have 5-10+ years of work experience over me, but I also didn’t possess the expertise or knowledge of sales hunting to ask non-surface level questions. Even though I felt underqualified, after the first 2-3 interviews of scrambling and nervously interviewing candidates, I began to get into the flow and began to notice little things that would influence my decision-making. Simple things like being punctual and personable at the start of the interview, to giving clear answers that gave me context, their actions, and a proper explanation as to what result those actions reaped, these interactions instantly gave me a gut feeling of whether they would be a good fit for our organization. There were candidates where I simply felt the need to end the interview five minutes in, and candidates that I felt like I could talk to for hours because they were genuinely just that great of a conversationalist.

Then came the digital marketing interviews - this was more my forte, an area where I had extensive experience, and knew the skills needed and the cultural fit requirements. But having this experience and knowledge meant I was much pickier, with an exact idea in mind as to the type of person I wanted to hire. 

Resume Design and Content

I’m pretty picky when it comes to design, as well as the conciseness of the resume content. I was looking for clean, minimalistic designs that weren’t too busy or too text-heavy, and had good spacing across the board. This minimalist approach should be accomplished by being concise with what you include in your resume and making sure it’s applicable to the job you’re applying for.

I don’t need to know about irrelevant experiences from years ago, nor is Microsoft Word a hard skill that you should be writing down. I want to see that a candidate has experience utilizing creation tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, social media tools like Hootsuite, or project management tools like AirTable, Asana, and Monday. I don’t want to just see what your day-to-day responsibilities were at your past job, and instead, I want to see tangible, measurable results you were able to achieve and what actions you took to do so.

Interview Questions & Answers

With the digital marketing interviews, I catered the questions towards organizational skills, reception of constructive criticisms, and overall cultural fit in our small team environment. Their answers to my questions had to be structured with enough context to understand the situation, action, and result, but straight-to-the-point with minimal tangents. 

One thing that absolutely blew my mind was the number of people who had no idea what our organization did - it felt like common sense to do some research of the company you’re applying for prior to the interview, and it felt like they were wasting my time if they didn’t even bother to do a simple Google search. One candidate even went as far as telling me that I should be telling them what the company does and that they’ll do research once they were hired. All these simple things that I assumed were standard and common sense for interviews were apparently not common knowledge to all. I was baffled and simply realized that these types of people were not worth my or my colleague's time, and therefore wasn't a good candidate for us to hire.

“Did you have any questions for us?”

I personally love it when candidates ask us good questions at the end; not only does it show genuine interest and preparedness, but it also exemplifies the idea of applicants simultaneously “interviewing” the company to see if it’s a good fit. Candidates should be getting a sense of whether the company culture fits their own values and priorities, especially with our organization where workplace culture is of high priority. Whenever an applicant had similar values and goals and expressed their ideal workplace in line with ours, it solidified my decision to have them carry on to the next round of interviews. 

Some questions I liked:

• What does the day-to-day look like in this role?
• How has your experience been at the company so far?
• How does the company support professional growth for its employees?
• How is the work-life balance, and what is the company culture like?

Reflection

All in all, it was a good experience, where I filtered through a pile of resumes, conducted over 25 interviews over the course of a week for both roles, and then discussed with the team who our top candidates were and what caught our attention in the 3 rounds of interviews. 

By the last few interviews, after dealing with a couple of candidates who clearly didn’t read the job description or search our company up, I was beginning to grow cynical. The patience I had at the start of the interview process, regardless of how bad the interview was, slowly started to fade, and I realized that I needed to value my time more. I began to cut interviews short if something significantly bad stood out and focused my time towards interviewing better-quality candidates.

Going through the recruitment process myself in the past, as well as conducting interviews and going over applications for the past two months within my current role has been a huge learning process. I've learned the types of mannerisms and indicators that make candidates an instant yes or no, the types of questions that really intrigue the interviewer and makes a candidate stand out, and how much simple kindness and warmth can do to make someone feel less nervous and more at ease during their interview. Especially in our internship interviews, it was exciting to judge a person’s potential and eagerness to learn and grow, rather than scrutinizing their existing skills and experiences. I love the idea of being able to teach, support, and enrich another employee’s growth and work experience, and am super excited to be a part of the onboarding process. I love connecting with new people, learning from and teaching others, and constantly being able to grow both professionally and in my personal life, and felt like this experience was invaluable to both.

I can't wait to see more companies take a more holistic approach to their hiring processes, as well as their employee retention efforts. Being able to assess and assist companies who are looking to improve in the people and culture space through The Canadian Workplace Culture Index, is going to be incredibly rewarding and exciting over the next few months as we grow our presence within Canada.