A recruiter’s role is not only to find the right candidate for the job but is to support job seekers to put their best foot forward to the client and provide that candidate with all the tools they need to be more employable.
From helping them to develop a CV that will stand out, to giving them the confidence to excel in an interview, these are the areas you should be working on with your candidate before introducing them to the hiring manager.
Provide them with CV Format Pointers
A good candidate may be able to write down their experiences and responsibilities, but many will struggle to implement a format in their CV that brings the information to life and makes it much easier for the hiring manager to realize why they are the perfect candidate for the role. As the recruiter, when you have reviewed the candidate’s CV you should be providing suggestions and comments based on the readability of the CV and whether or not it engages the reader to want to know more.
Helping them to highlight the most important information first and work through the CV in a chronological order as this is an essential part of making that candidate more employable. You should be pinpointing the need for extra bullet points or headers to break up the text or to feature certain aspects that will be more desirable to that particular hiring manager.
Help them Find Quantifiable Achievements
If a candidate doesn’t have an achievement section on their CV, then as the recruiter you should be discussing with them what achievements they can be adding to make them more employable and more applicable to the role you are presenting them for.
Although a lot of candidates will document some of their previous successes from prior employment, they may lack specific detail or quantifiable information that makes their CV overall more credible. Therefore, if a candidate has mentioned a success that you feel is significant to the role then help aid them to add further depth, whether that be stats or examples to enhance that particular achievement to the client.
For example, when a candidate merely mentions they boosted productivity in a company, probe them to find out how they did this and what measurements were put in place to prove that this performance did increase. Did they improve productivity by 15% or 20% and was this due to a system implementation they developed or supported? This added detail will back up the candidate’s achievements and make it more reliable to the employer.
Boost their Confidence
Candidate nerves can hinder any recruitment process, so boosting the candidate’s confidence prior to the client interview will help them perform at their best. Meeting with them in person is a great opportunity to do this, praising them on the areas in which they excel and explaining to them the full reasons why you believe they match the client’s specification so well.
Most candidates struggle to sell their own skills as they aren’t quite aware what their strengths are, so talking with them to identify their abilities and what makes them hireable could definitely boost their confidence prior to meeting the client.
Give them Interview Coaching
Prior to an interview, you should be contacting the candidates not only to confirm the information for the interview but helping them to prepare correctly. This begins with updating them about the type of interview they will be participating in and notifying them of any documents they need to be bringing with them for the interview.
Furthermore, you should be supporting them with how they should introduce themselves in the interview and advising them about what skills or strengths they should be highlighting from their CV to best match that client’s requirements. Whether you conducted a pre-interview via phone or in person before submitting their application to the client, you should be giving them feedback from that interview to help them better perform during the next stage of the recruitment process. For example, if you felt in their first interview they came across slightly too rehearsed, spend time with that candidate to develop a more conversational interview style where their personality can come through.
Provide Honest Feedback
After every interview, you should be providing interview feedback to the candidates and this feedback should be detailed to allow those candidates to work on particular areas for their next interview. Once you have gathered the information from the hiring manager whether that be positive or negative, you should be passing all those comments to the candidates in a constructive way. Although, not the easiest thing to do, it is essential that the candidates are aware of what they potentially did wrong in the interview, especially any specific examples which will allow them to improve.
All feedback should preferably be verbal so that a conversation can be sparked by the information provided and can become a better learning tool for the candidate.
