Interview Skills You Should Brush Up On to Succeed!

As companies move forward during The Great Resignation, they need to hire the right employees. This requires effective interview skills.

It takes a significant amount of time for a hiring manager and HR to discuss the job requirements, source and screen candidates, and conduct interviews. It also takes time to conduct background checks, finalize the candidate selections, and wait for candidates to accept offers and begin working.

As a result, hiring managers should participate in training now to refresh their interview skills. This helps build candidate pipelines for current and future hiring needs.

Discover some benefits of hiring managers brushing up on their interview skills and topics to discuss during training.

Advantages of Refreshing Interview Skills

Proving a refresher for hiring managers’ interview skills training lets them practice in a safe environment. Because these managers may not have conducted interviews for a significant time, a mini session would be advantageous.

Refresher training ensures hiring managers and HR are on the same page regarding interviewing. This increases success in hiring the best candidates.

Topics to Discuss When Refreshing Interview Skills

Intake meeting: Talk about the meeting between the hiring manager and HR to discuss the job requirements and sourcing strategy. For instance, emphasize the importance of the candidate experience throughout the hiring process. Also, discuss specific ways to show commitment to diversity and inclusion so candidates feel they are welcome and can be themselves at work.

Discussing the intake meeting ensures the hiring manager and HR are following the same policies and procedures for interviewing. This speeds up the hiring process, increasing the likelihood of hiring top candidates.

Interview questions: Emphasize the importance of asking effective, compliant behavioral interview questions. These questions provide insight into a candidate’s experience.

You may want to use the STAR method to create interview questions. This involves asking a candidate about a situation they encountered, the task they needed to accomplish, the action they took, and the results they attained.

Ensure the hiring manager asks follow-up questions to gather enough detail for a complete picture of the situation, task, action, and result. This helps provide the necessary information to make a hiring decision.

Candidate selection: Remind hiring managers to look past their unconscious biases when choosing the best candidate. This can be accomplished through an online training program that may be included in your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Need Help with Hiring?

Refreshing hiring managers’ interview skills ensures managers and HR are on the same page throughout the hiring process. Sharing details about the intake meeting, interview questions, and the candidate selection process increases the likelihood of hiring the most qualified candidates.

For additional help with hiring, partner with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. Get started today.

What Employers Can Do to Better Support Their Working Parents

Employers always are looking for ways to support their employees. This improves productivity, performance, and retention.

One key area of support is for working parents. Because most employees have families, they make up a significant part of the workforce.

Working parents often deal with issues that affect their professional performance. Examples include taking time off to care for a sick child and needing to finish work early to handle family responsibilities.

As a result, employers who provide accommodations for working parents are more attractive to employees and job seekers. Taking small steps can result in a substantial impact on your organization with little impact on the bottom line.

Choose among these methods to provide support for your working parents.

Talk About Working Parents’ Needs

Find out more about what your working parents want help with most. You may want to begin with a survey to understand their issues, concerns, and suggestions for help. Then, you can use this information to begin discussions between working parents and management about methods to increase support.

You may want to identify a specific issue that many working parents face. Then, you could encourage managers to speak with their employees for more details. The managers could meet with HR and leadership to share feedback and discuss implementation methods.

Create a Parents’ Network

Encourage working parents to share ideas, provide support, and organize family-friendly activities. This may include creating an email chain for parents to swap out gently used children’s clothing. Or, parents might provide tips to ease the stress of raising children while working full-time.

Having this network helps fill working parents’ wants and needs by connecting them with the right individuals at the right time. You may want to create a dedicated intranet page or Slack channel to encourage working parents to join the network.

Provide Flexibility

Offer employees a flexible schedule and options for how they work. Examples include working remotely, hybrid, flextime, part-time, or having a compressed workweek.

You may want to make accommodations for when working parents’ children start school or change their childcare routines. This reduces the stress of fitting in work around childcare. It also increases productivity and retention.

Looking for Additional Advice?

Working parents appreciate help supporting their personal and professional needs. Talking about and accommodating working parents’ needs, creating a working parents’ network, and providing flexibility are effective methods to provide this support. This increases employee engagement, productivity, and performance. It also increases employee attraction and retention.

For additional advice to better support your team’s working parents, reach out to the professionals at Casey Accounting & Finance Resources. Contact us today.

 

Are the Economy and Inflation Hampering Recruiting?

We’ve all heard the news reports on how unusual the economy is right now. Interest rates are rising – great for our bank accounts, terrible for loans and mortgages. Wages are up. Unemployment is down. Consumers are feeling the pinch at the gas pumps and grocery stores. And while employees may be earning more money, it isn’t covering the increased costs of goods and services. While the Federal Reserve hasn’t declared a recession, everyone from the CEO to the receptionist certainly is wary that our country is headed in that direction. How can you keep your eye on the potential impact all this may have on finding and retaining employees in an already competitive talent war?

Lack of Engagement

There has been a strong recovery in the lost jobs since the pandemic started – faster than seen when jobs went away during previous recessions. Labor Economist Andrew Flowers commented, “In the previous recession that started in 2007, it took 76 months for job openings to return to the level at the start of the downturn. But in the recent COVID recession, it took only 12 months for job openings to recover to the February 2020 level, and by November 2021, openings had risen 50% above that.” However, Flowers notes that “there remain 5.6 million people who say they want a job but are not actively searching for one.” Even with the lure of more money and better job benefits, there are many potential job candidates out there who just aren’t interested. Have we hit a plateau in labor market participation? Perhaps. Are we in a transition? Maybe. Either way, we need strategies to recruit and retain the best.

Tips to Weather the Storm

With the labor market so tight, many companies have settled for the best available candidate versus the best candidate. Part of the challenge is the disconnect between what companies will pay and what candidates will accept. Currently, candidates are in a position of power.

Whether you are still struggling to fill positions or you’re in preparation mode for a recession, or both, there are some ways to improve recruitment strategies.

A recent article on SHRM’s website offered the following suggestion: review all open positions, why it exists, and what value does it bring to the company – drive business, contribute to employee engagement, or serve the customer. “Every role and position must have a purpose, a defined expectation for achievement of specific metrics, clarity in the purpose of the organization’s business strategy and how their position plays into that strategy. Just because you thought you needed a senior leadership role in the past does not mean you need that same position today,” commented Melanie French, managing principal at DLP Capital.

Review your job advertisements. In the old days, it was acceptable to simply list the skills requirements and other necessary credentials, and candidates would apply. Now, job seekers are looking for the WIIFM on job posts. Consider attracting candidates with a picture of what it looks like to them if they were offered that job. Companies are also waiving some of the education requirements if there are other assets and skills a candidate offers that bring value to the company.

Trent Cotton, Senior Global Director of Talent Acquisition and Retention at HatchWorks, offers these three strategies:

  • Identify top talent and show the love
  • Stop being cheap – you get what you pay for
  • Develop and nurture your pipeline

He also notes:

  • Workers are plentiful, but they have a higher price point than most companies are willing to pay.
  • Large employers are changing requirements, pay, and benefits to compete for the workforce.
  • We still have a huge number of long-term unemployed workers who are not entering the market.

Summary

The combination of economic conditions may be souring the mood of employers and employees, but it’s not all bad news, and there are opportunities in front of us.

A recession is bound to happen at some point, but we aren’t in one right now. Balancing your needs to fill positions right now with the odd economic conditions will be key. “Employers are probably keeping in mind that they went quickly from letting people go to hiring them, and they had a hard time rehiring people,” commented Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed.

How can we help? Casey Accounting and Finance Resources is here for all your sourcing and outsourcing needs. We can prepare recruiting strategies that offer the flexibility you require to manage the ups and downs of the labor market. Call us today!