This is a guest post from our marketplace partner Weirdly

Congratulations! You’ve launched your sourcing campaign, and the candidates are flooding in. But how do you manage the flood? The answer is simple: candidate screening.

The screening step is all about reducing the initial volume of candidates down to something more manageable. You can quickly and efficiently establish which candidates are worth considering for a particular role. This way, you won’t waste time wading through resumes of applicants who are not the right fit for your role.

Recruiters all screen in different ways. It often starts in the initial application process with the collection of “deal breaker” data – things like eligibility to work or a specific qualification. But lots of recruiters are STILL manually filing through resumes at this stage. Thankfully, you can use a growing number of smart screening tools that will help you filter down to a shorter qualified candidate list. You can do less manual screening, and more actual recruiting!

Often, the screening approach you choose is determined by the size of your company or the type of role you’re filling. However, there are a few tricks recruiters could all be using – no matter who we’re recruiting for – to streamline the screening process and get us to the holy grail: A better quality shortlist in less time.

Want to get that better shortlist in less time? Here are three tricks you should know:

1. Screen for culture as well as skills.

Many recruiters make the mistake of limiting initial screening steps to just skills or an experience based assessment. Any consideration of culture or character is limited to what you can glean from a resume or (groan) a cover letter.

We at Weirdly believe that culture and fit are too important to leave to the hints candidates might drop in their resume. If you were faced with two candidates – Candidate A with 100% of the required skill set but no culture fit, or Candidate B with only 80% of the required skill set, but who will complement your culture perfectly, which would you pick? We know we would choose the 80% candidate with the perfect culture fit. That last 20% skills-gap can be taught, but a great fit can’t.

By adding a layer of culture assessment early in the recruitment process, you’re won’t eliminate those 80%-ers right at the beginning. You’re also sending a clear message to candidates that culture is important to your company. This often gives them the opportunity to self-eliminate if they realize the fit isn’t right for them.

2. Make sure your screening tools integrate with your ATS.

Integrations are a hot topic in the HR tech world these days (and getting hotter as every month passes it seems). Screening tools are no exception. Finding ways to screen candidates that integrate seamlessly into your ATS just makes sense. Collecting data in different places make your data a little less reliable, and you only have to interact with one dashboard.

As a recruiter, your time is your most precious commodity, so seeking out screening tools like Weirdly (which assesses culture fit) or HackerRank (which assesses technical skills) helps save you time. Not to mention the that an integration with an ATS like SmartRecruiters means you can take advantage of these clever new volume-screening approaches without having to leave your ATS dashboard. Results are automatically added to candidate profiles, and at a glance, you can see whether they’re a candidate worth pursuing for that role.

3. Be decisive.

This is perhaps the easiest, yet most often overlooked advice: effective screening is about being decisive. When candidates come into your ATS, decide quickly whether they’re worth sending through to the next step in the screening process and if not, hit pass immediately.

Then, everyone who is a “maybe” can move onto the next screening step – whether that’s a culture assessment, a skills test, or just a deeper probe into the candidate’s resume and social presences.

The key is not to make the mistake of opening a candidate’s application or profile over and over again before actioning. Open once, make a decision, and move on.

Making sure your screening phase includes these three steps will save you loads of time in the long run, as well as making each step more informed and streamlined.

When you’re hiring new employees to be your next generation of rockstars, talent assessments can be your most valuable tool in predicting success.

According to Aberdeen Group, best-in-class organizations consistently use assessments for screening and hiring, and they also see their importance in identifying and developing high potential talent. Modern psychometric tools (read: assessments) can accurately measure total human potential, enhance overall productivity, reduce attrition and reduce overall hiring costs significantly.  Additionally, well-designed and executed assessment programs can help cement HR practitioners and talent acquisition leaders as strategic contributors to the success of their organization.

So really, the question should not be “is it time to incorporate assessments into our hiring process?”, but rather, “why the heck haven’t we done this yet?!”

To help further illustrate the importance of assessments and talent measurement, the PAN team has compiled the Top 5 Reasons You Should Be Using Assessments Today:

1. Data Trumps Hunches, Always.

With the power of measurable data on your candidates at your fingertips, gone are the days of making a decision on a gut feeling or a hunch. Interviews – which are difficult to keep strictly standardized – can’t effectively be used alone in making hiring decisions.

2. You Can Measure the Whole Person.

Intelligence and prior work history are not the only factors you should consider! Assessments can provide a thorough understanding of the (4) important facets in seeking the right candidate for a particular role: Can Do, Will Do, Will Fit, and Can Lead.

3. Effective Talent Measurement Can Increase Legal Defensibility.

By using a more standardized, objective approach to hiring through the use of assessments, you can make a more fair apples-to-apples comparison between various candidates. Validation data can be used to make sure that the assessments you’re using are good predictors for success in a specific job.

4. Assessments Yield a “Prescription” for Development Programs.

If you don’t fully understand an employee’s strengths and weaknesses in the beginning, how can you build a meaningful development plan or identify high potential and leadership candidates? By using assessment data collected during hiring, you’ll be ready to engage your new employee in a tailored development program.

5. You Can’t Afford Not To.

It’s more than just the team’s morale that takes a blow when you hire or promote the wrong person. Studies show it could cost up to 150% of that person’s salary to replace them.

Ready to make candidate assessments an integral part of your hiring?

PAN is thrilled to partner to SmartRecruiters to build one of the deepest integrations we ever had with any Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Our partnership allows you to incorporate assessments from PAN directly into your hiring workflow, trigger them to candidates automatically, and see the test results right from the candidate profile page inside SmartRecruiters.

To learn more about building your own talent measurement program with assessments from PAN, access PAN’s profile in the SmartRecruiters Marketplace.

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This article was written by  Katherine Doe, Director of Marketing at PAN – Performance Assessment Network. She focuses on marketing strategy, specifically for lead and demand generation for PAN. Katherine began a career in marketing in 2004 and has worked in the human capital management industry since 2011. She enjoys the many analytical, strategic, and creative challenges provided by today’s business environment. Katherine is a graduate of SUNY Oswego where she studied marketing and public relations. She is a proud resident of the Charleston, SC area where she is involved with many charitable organizations and causes.

All images featured in this blog post are a courtesy of www.panpowered.com

Hiring developers is a challenge for recruiters. Resumes do a bad job conveying a developer’s actual coding skill. And if you need to hire a lot of developers, you need to wade through a lot of bad resume data. To hire without headaches, you need a system to understand how good developers are and to arrange piles of resumes into a useful order to start your interview process.

However, what is the best way to assess coding skills? The traditional way of asking developers to write code on a whiteboard is usually a bad idea. First, there’s a limitation on how complex you can go by writing on a whiteboard. Second, developers want to be assessed on their skills in a normal coding situation: they generally don’t like to be put into unusual social situations where they have to write code on a whiteboard, in a way that doesn’t match any normal coding process. Developers want to be assessed on their skills in a normal coding situation.

Now there is a smarter way of assessing coding skills. Thanks to the new partnership between SmartRecruiters and Codility, you can trigger online coding assessments to your candidates in seconds.

Enter Codility to solve your developer hiring headaches

Codility makes finding candidates and testing their’ coding skills and coding behavior simple. By using Codility before you go through the time consuming task of interviewing candidates you can:

• Avoid sending people who can’t code to your development team and wasting their time.
• Start your interview process from the best coders first, reducing your time-to-hire by up to 70%.

How Codility Works

Codility creates and maintains a curated library of programming tasks. You pick the tasks that match your recruitment needs and send them to your candidates to complete online. Codility then automatically assesses the resulting code to filter the candidates with the best coding skills.. You get a clear score back for each candidate and you can choose to start interviewing from those who score the best!

And it’s the best of both worlds – your candidates get to do what they love: to write a piece of software in a normal environment instead of being trapped, sweating at a whiteboard.

So far Codility has given well over 2 million code assessments and we help companies like Sony, PayPal, EA, Nokia, Samsung, MIT and Intel with their hiring

With Codility you test fundamental coding skills

A great technical hire is someone who is a good programmer at their core and can apply their skills to any problem or task. After all, you don’t want to end up with someone who can luckily pass your company specific test but then can’t code your next project.

Deploying Codility tests inside SmartRecruiters

Codility is excited to partner to SmartRecruiters. Our passion is narrow but deep: automated programming skills assessment to deliver a great experience to candidates and boost your productivity. SmartRecruiters shares the same passion: their TA platform delivers an unparalleled mobile and social candidate experience that engages hiring managers along the way, supercharging recruiter productivity.

Our partnership allows you to make Codility tests an integral part of your hiring process in SmartRecruiters, empowering recruiters to automatically trigger assessments and see the test results right from the candidate profile page inside SmartRecruiters. Easy, simple, no sweat required!

You can either send a candidate an assessment directly from the candidate’s profile page, or incorporate assessments into your workflow. Check below three easy steps to have Codility as part of your hiring process:

1. In the hiring process page, add “Skills Test” as a new step. Remember that Corporate plan customers have the convenience of creating a specific hiring process for combinations of org fields. In other words, you can specify a workflow with for the Engineering department in France if you’d like.

2. After adding the new step, click on the gear icon on the upper right part of the icon. A new page will open where you can choose you assessment vendor and test. Choose “Codility” and select the test you prefer to be added to your hiring step.

3.  After hitting “save”, Codility assessments will be automatically triggered to you candidates, without any headaches. You can follow up the status and results of the assessments in the lower right hand corner of your candidates’ profiles.

Like the idea but need some more insight?

Learn more about using Codility in SmartRecruiters here, and have a Codility expert contact you to run you through the system and/or put you in touch with other users to talk about good practices!

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This article was written by Stephen Croome at Codility, who helps tell the story of a company which helps you understand how good a developer really is.

The use of video interviewing within the recruiting ecosystem has seen dramatic changes of late. The prevalence of YouTube, Facebook and Skype has made video central to  people’s lives. Now, globalization and mobile technology have boosted the need for Talent Acquisition teams to use video interviews as a screening tool instead of old fashioned phone interviews.

According to a recent Video Interviewing Usage Study by Sarah White & Associates, more than half of companies phone-screen 4 to 9 candidates for each open position, while 35% of organizations take more than 30 minutes per candidate just to schedule a phone-screen. That means you can lose up to 4.5 hours of your day just to schedule phone interviews for one position. With an asynchronous video interview integrated to your Talent Acquisition Platform, you can schedule and screen your long list of candidates in mere minutes rather than hours. From an ROI perspective, it makes sense doesn’t it?

Well, the benefits don’t stop there! Integrating video interviews to your hiring process provides numerous benefits for recruiters, hiring managers and candidates:

1. Better quality talent pipeline: Video interviews allow a powerful and faster screening process, bringing  higher caliber candidates for later round face-to-face interviews.
2. Better candidate experience: It gives candidates the convenience to use mobile apps to record interviews, when they want.
3. Higher collaboration between hiring managers and recruiters: Teams can evaluate candidates together on their mobile devices or phones
4. Better hiring success metrics: Video interviewing reduces the cost and time-to-hire for every candidate.
5. Higher recruiter productivity: See video interviews seamlessly integrated to your Talent Acquisition Platform as a step in the hiring process, and eliminate scheduling and coordination hassles.

Interested to know how you can integrate video interviews to your hiring process? Check out Sonru in the SmartRecruiters Marketplace, and allow your candidates to complete their interview at a time and location that is convenient for them, while you can get the right applicants in front of hiring managers sooner than it would be possible with traditional methods alone.

Sonru and SmartRecruiters work harmoniously together, bringing the best features of asynchronous video interviewing to a seamlessly integrated platform. This SmartRecruiters Marketplace integration allows video interviews to be deployed in seconds, with just a click of a button! And you can browse a selection of 6 pre-defined strengths-based interview types tailored to evaluate candidates specifically for different job positions.

Video interviewing technology has come of age, giving TA teams a competitive advantage in the race to find top talent. Can you afford to come last?

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This article was written by Gillian Doyle. She has been with Sonru for over a year now and has been involved in many aspects of the organization. Beginning her Sonru journey as Business Developer for the Nordic Region she transitioned into her current role as Global Alliances Relationship Manager and has become a video-interviewing expert in the recruitment field. She strives to keep herself and her alliance partners well informed on all the latest Sonru buzz and she is passionate about educating the world about video interviewing!

Reach out to Gillian Doyle on LinkedIn: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/gilliandoylesonru

Link to Sonru Marketplace listing and Sonru website: www.sonru.com

5 Reasons to centralize recruitment services and vendors in one place

Talent acquisition professionals typically wrestle with an unwieldy variety of systems in their war for talent. Besides core recruitment systems (often an old-fashioned ATS), they deal with job boards, video interview tools, background check vendors and candidate assessments. Using this tech menagerie is inconvenient, as they aren’t easily integrated to the ATS, all of which translates into extra clicks and duplicate data entry.

Salesforce faced a similar problem in 2006 with sales and lead management processes, leading to the creation of their AppExchange. The idea was simple: offer sales professionals a Marketplace with a variety of apps that were seamlessly integrated to the core Salesforce platform. All of sudden, customers could deploy sales productivity apps in minutes. Well, AppExchange hit the mark of 3 million installs this past April. Now that’s a milestone!

Today, in an era when acquiring talent can be more complex and competitive than acquiring clients, it’s time for TA professionals to ditch their old-fashioned ATS for a Talent Acquisition Platform that also provides a centralized ecosystem of easily deployable vendors, without any integration pains. It’s time for them to have a Recruitment Marketplace.

5 Reasons Why

1. Multiple screens and logins are an efficiency killer.

Switching back and forth from your ATS to your other vendors’ windows, inserting different log-ins and retyping fields harms your productivity. It also becomes painful when you need to track when a candidate finished a video-interview to manually move him to the next step of the hiring process.

An ecosystem of vendors pre-integrated to your TA Platform saves that pain. For example, you can deploy different assessments with a click of a button, without leaving your current window, and automatically trigger the next step of the hiring process.

2. Avoid integration nightmares.

Working with a new recruitment service vendor can be very costly for your HRIT team. For example, changing a candidate assessment vendor might mean months of work to build an integration to a traditional ATS. This not only means more implementation costs, it also limits talent acquisition teams from easily switching vendors.

A Recruitment Marketplace eliminates those barriers. Everything is seamlessly integrated, which allows recruiters to switch vendors or try different services.

3. Track your spending and ROI.

Being more efficient is only provable if you can track your numbers, which a centralized vendor marketplace allows you to do. As all your spending is done inside the core Talent Acquisition Platform, you are able to effectively track your cost-per-hire by knowing exactly how much you spent on job board advertising, assessments, background checks and more.

4. Get the right data to optimize your strategy.

This is the holy grail of the Marketplace. As your core Talent Acquisition Platform gathers data from different vendors and jobs, it is able to give you insights through predictive analytics. For example, you can get answers on what job boards are recommended for a specific job, or what is the predicted number of applicants you can expect for each job board.

5. Access to cutting edge recruitment tools.

An Open API in the Marketplace allows developers to constantly build new apps on top of the Talent Acquisition Platform, enabling a pace of innovation never before seen in the industry.

If you are a talent acquisition professional looking for a mind-blowing Recruitment Marketplace, there is finally hope! The new SmartRecruiters Marketplace, built on top of the modern SmartRecruiters TA Platform, is the first integrated marketplace in the TA industry. It allows customers to find and deploy TA tools in a way that they never imagined before, and all at click of a button.
You can learn more about the SmartRecruiters Marketplace here. Let me know what you think.

With the current market thriving, it’s quite amazing that just a few years ago we were in the midst of the “Great Recession.” Termed the “worst global recession since World War II,” our economy was in the tank, with unemployment figures soaring from 5% to 10% in just a 1-year span. 

During this timeframe, nearly one in ten people in the United States was seeking employment. Even recruiters were looking for work. Companies weren’t hiring recruiters because there weren’t any open positions to recruit for.

Incredible how things change so quickly.

Now, just a short time after the “official” end to the great recession (late 2009), all of our clients tell us that getting help with talent acquisition is one of the top priorities for their business in 2015. Whether it’s hiring an outsourced recruiting company or in-house recruiters, it appears that the competition for talent is at its greatest peak since the Dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.

The market for recruiters has skyrocketed. A quick search on Recruiter.com shows over 35,000 posted positions with “Recruiter” in the title. In Illinois alone, Monster.com is advertising over 700 recruiter jobs.

Part of the reason demand for recruiters is so high is that when the economy went south, many recruiters were displaced into other industries and took occupations outside of recruiting. Recruiters left the industry in masses, which has now reduced the number of experienced recruiters available to hire.

So, what does it mean when there are fewer and fewer recruiters to help fill positions in staffing firms that need to find talent to grow? The answer for many companies is to start hiring and training fresh college graduates, or even hiring individuals from other industries just to get the recruiting headcount in house.

When you hire staff that you intend to keep, you create a downstream dilemma: How do you retain the best people who’ve invested in? Part of the challenge is the environment that you’ve created – making sure that your company has a great culture, rewards your recruiters fairly, and provides them with opportunity for growth. The other half is the feedback loop – making sure that you communicate regularly with them so that they understand where they fit, how they are performing, and where they can improve.

In our experience working with and consulting for IT Staffing companies, we find that many organizations miss the part about communication and the feedback loop. A new recruiter may be energized about their new job and works hard to meet goals and fit in, but many organizations don’t go the extra step to provide them regular feedback.

Or, if there is some kind of recruiter performance appraisal, it’s certainly not formal and is usually not very detailed. A recruiter performance appraisal like this typically results in vague future objectives like, “hire 10 more contractors this year to earn that next bonus level!” Unfortunately, these evaluations do more harm than good because recruiters aren’t given a direction for self-development.

In these scenarios, employees tend to leave because the grass is always greener on the other side: That other company where their friends took a new job is paying well, has better training, and gives more vacation time. You don’t want to be in a situation where your people are leaving and telling the rest of your staff how great it is elsewhere. This kind of turnover can leave a company scrambling to grow, always hiring to replace, instead of hiring to expand.

Because our goal at echogravity is to help staffing companies grow, we’ve pulled together our own version of the Recruiter Performance Appraisal. We’ve gathered information and spent time assessing the skills that recruiters should have in order to perform well in their roles.

This free download includes all the specifics needed to immediately print and use – details of the manager, long- and short-term goals, skill evaluation areas, and much more. Get your Recruiter Performance Appraisal copy here and be sure to let us know what you think.

This article was written by KEVIN O’BRIEN from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the hiring success platform to find and hire great people.

Attracting talent to your job at the right time – that’s recruiting. SmartRecruiters’ Data Scientist Kasia Senderowska conducted the ‘When to Hire’ study. Senderowska examined a randomized cross section of 60,000+ jobs in America and Canada within the SmartRecruiters system during 2014. The study focuses on six questions:

1. “What Days of the Week Do People Apply to Jobs?”
2. “What Days of the Week Do Companies Post Jobs?”
3. “What Time of the Day Do People Apply to Jobs?”
4. “What Time of the Day Do Companies Post Jobs?”
5. “How Quickly Do Candidates Apply?”
6. “What’s the Most Popular Day to Hire?”‘

Without further ado, let’s dig into the findings. During the job search, not all days are created equal. The beginning of the week has ambitious volume. Monday and Tuesday each have double the applicant volume of Saturday and Sunday.

Tuesday is the most popular day to post your job opening. Only 9% of jobs are posted on the weekend. Each weekday is within 17-19% of total job posting volume, which is not a large variation. But take a look at the graph above, Monday through Wednesday account for 53% of candidate volume. I would consider posting your job on Sunday night or Monday morning so that your first three days can reach the largest volume of job seekers.

Now, let’s dig further into the time of day. This graph is broken down by weekend, weekday, and overall average. Interestingly, on weekends job seeker volume steadily increases throughout the day, reaching a peak volume at 8:00 pm; whereas, during the week job seekers reach peak volume at 12:00 pm.

Companies on the other hand, post jobs in a manner that closely resembles traditional business hours. The vast majority of jobs are posted between 8:00 am to 6:00 pm Monday through Friday. It’s interesting that we see a dip in job postings during lunch time because it’s the peak time for receiving job applications. Hiring managers cover a vast majority of job titles, which means hiring too often is treated as an afterthought. Notice the sharp uptick in job postings from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm as hiring managers attempt to squeeze recruiting into the end of the workday.

Across all jobs, 70% of candidates apply within the first 11 days. People who hire know that recruiting is all about timing. Staffing and HR find and apply to jobs faster than any other industry. Also notice that High Tech candidates (an in-demand demographic) is slower to apply to jobs. With High Tech, companies often open more sourcing channels, such as recruitment firms and employee referrals.

But what is recruiting leading up to? Making that next hire. 96% of hires are made during the week. And Monday is the most popular day to make a hiring decision. This makes sense to me, as starting a new chapter is your career or creating a new role is much like starting a new week. Also note Friday, is the lowest weekday by a wide margin. Have you ever hired on a Friday? What’s your favorite day to hire?

What do these ‘When to Hire’ graphs teach you? Lets keep the conversation going. You are welcome to republish any of these graphs on your blog or website with proper accreditation. If you have any data requests, tweet @SmartRecruiters.

Lets make a timely and data informed world of recruiting.

“A superior leader is a person who can bring ordinary people together to achieve extraordinary results.” Many years ago, an entrepreneur told me that. He was right.

For most organizations, hiring the best talent is not a viable business strategy. The only way to get the best is to pay more than your competitors, and few companies are willing or able to do this.

A far better strategy is to hire decent, hardworking people and bring out the best in them. Here’s how to do it:

1. Recognize that each employee is unique: People are not machines; most of us don’t fit into neat little boxes. If you look around your team and see similar-looking and acting people, it probably means people have been forced into boxes that are limiting their performance.

Not everyone is motivated by money or power. Not every team member gets excited by hitting the monthly budget, or by closing another deal. To bring out the best in each employee, you have to acknowledge this reality. Most organizations don’t have the energy or initiative to do this, which is why they end up with barely ordinary performance levels.

2. Have a purpose beyond money: I’m a realist, and know that people primarily work to earn a living. But people work harder, longer and better when they see the purpose behind their work.

Every organization and group is different, so there are no pat answers… but there are lame ones to avoid at all costs. Don’t just paste a nice-sounding purpose onto the edge of your group, as in, “One cent from every order will be donated to feed whales.”

The purpose you employ should be woven into the fabric of your organization. It must be substantive and meaningful.

3. Turn down the volume: The loudest voices in an organization aren’t always the wisest ones. In fact, they sometimes lead companies right off the edge of a cliff. Make it possible for people to contribute in many ways: privately as well as publicly, in written form as well as speaking at a meeting.

In other words, magnify the quietest voices, and turn the loudest ones down a few notches.

4. Stop making people imitate their boss: Weak leaders want their subordinates to act like them; such leaders lack the imagination – or strength – to recognize that there are many paths to success.

If you run a sales team, everyone doesn’t have to sell like you do.

If you manage a group of consultants, each one doesn’t have to dress and talk like you do.

Give your people the freedom to be the best version of themselves, rather than a pale version of you.

5. Treat your people like adults: I occasionally participate in an organization that employs accomplished professionals as temporary part-time workers; the organization treats these professionals like children, and it always amazes me how quickly the professionals start acting that way. These are doctors, lawyers, and executives. Many manage multi-million dollar budgets. But they all get the message: “management” doesn’t trust us.

People rise – or sink – to meet your expectations, so raise your expectations, and always treat your team members with the ultimate respect.

6. Be loyal in good times and bad: There is no loyalty any more, some say. I say this is nonsense. The more loyalty you show your employees, the more they will show your organization. An employer holds the power, so an employer must take the first step to building a loyal relationship.

Most companies don’t understand loyalty, which is why those that do possess an unfair advantage.

7. Be clear and consistent: Many companies operate with the same techniques that scientists use to drive lab mice insane: they set impossibly contradictory goals. They ask for one sort of behavior, but reward another. They plea for excellence, but operate with sub-par tools and systems.

Put your compensation systems in synch with your goals. Give your employees the right tools, and give them the freedom to keep customers happy. Above all, don’t change your strategy every other quarter. Pick a strategy, and stick to it.

Bring out the best in each employee, and you will bring out the best in your company.

This article was written by Bruce Kasanoff (ghostwrites and edits articles for entrepreneurs) from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

Most new CEOs quickly come to realize that the recruitment of new team members is a time-consuming, albeit critically important, process. It can also be quite expensive, particularly if you find yourself continually hiring for challenging positions. Over time, companies learn how to recognize promising applicants, but it is nearly impossible to hold a perfect recruitment record. Those who come close, however, do so by assessing applicants against specific criteria, revising said criteria, and developing systems that suit their respective companies so that the process becomes repeatable and scalable. One practice that has worked well for my organization is focusing more on applicants who have the core skills rather than the experience on paper.

Why Recruiting for Core Skills Works

As we have entered multiple new markets, we have found that recruiting for specific attributes and skills, as opposed to just experience, is beneficial for several key reasons: 

1. Experience may not necessarily imply quality

Candidates with many years of experience can bring wonderful and rare abilities to the table, but so can those with a more brief work history. The reverse is also true—all candidates, whether they have worked in the industry for one year or 15 years, can potentially be poor performers. Simply put, “years worked” is an unreliable indicator of skill set and fit for a particular role. Of course, resumes generally focus on this exact information, so it is important to look past labels like, “14 years of teaching experience,” and avoid jumping to any conclusions based off that number.

2. Core skills are transferable

An applicant with five years of experience in building Widget A on paper may not look like the ideal choice to create Widget B for your business. However, a core skill like excellent communication skills or attention to detail applies to a wide variety of environments. Skills that we typically identify as “soft”—adaptability, willingness to learn, etc.—are more likely to transfer to any business or industry than specific technical capabilities, thus increasing the chances that your star candidate will become a star team member.

3. Recruiting for experience may limit your talent pool

When you strictly seek applicants who have a minimum or maximum threshold of experience, you risk screening out individuals who are otherwise strong candidates. A person with seven years of experience in a related field may possess the perfect complement of general knowledge, personality, and skills for your company – but the same might also be said of an undergraduate student who is two weeks away from graduation.  

How to Assess Core Skills 

As you review resumes or schedule in-person interviews, you will likely be faced with the challenge of ensuring your selection process reflects your true hiring objectives. How can you be certain that you will discover the best candidate, whether he is a recent college graduate or she is a seasoned professional with 20 years of experience? Consider these suggestions:

1. Emphasize potential

Ask yourself, “What will this candidate bring to the company?” His or her experience in past positions may not necessarily reflect the positive future impact that he or she could have on your business. Make sure to consider the upside that the candidate offers, as great on-the-job training can often morph an inexperienced hire into a rock star. If they have the raw skills but not the experience, their ability to greatly contribute to your company’s bottom line in the long-term may be higher than a more experienced professional with weaker raw skills. Asking yourself whether you need someone to contribute from day one or if you can afford to wait and develop a new team member is an important part of this process.

2. Focus on process

As you interview prospective team members, pay close attention to the “how,” not just the “what.” For instance, how did the candidate achieve his or her workplace goals? Were his or her successes due to an intrinsic skill, or were they supported by the company environment or good fortune?

3. Incorporate “real-world” applications

Allow each candidate to demonstrate his or her abilities, rather than simply talking about them. If you are seeking a software developer, include a coding challenge in the final interview. If you own a restaurant, ask your potential chefs to cook a small dish for you. You may be surprised by which candidate rises to the occasion, regardless of his or her specific amount of experience in the field.

Ultimately, you may strike gold or you may enter a disappointing relationship. This unpredictability is an inevitable aspect of the recruitment process, but you must move past it and do everything in your power to maximize the probability of hiring a great applicant. One effective way is concentrating your hiring efforts on evaluating core skills necessary for success, rather than experience alone.

This article was written by Varsity Tutors CEO Chuck Cohn from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.