You’ve reviewed a few resumes and made some notes, picked a few good candidates, and cleared the decks for ample time to talk with a quiet place to concentrate and be an effective communicator. Now it’s time to get this person on the phone.

OMG! What the heck is going to happen?! What to expect? How to be sure this effort is going to be effective and not waste time - for you and the candidate? And as the first person to make contact with these candidates, are you reasonably confident that you can recognize, record, and rank the “best of the best” during the phone screening process?

The most important thing to remember is that each phone screen is your opportunity to confirm that a candidate possesses the key attributes you discovered during the resume review process. Hopefully you have been able to develop a list of the most important attributes this new person will need to perform their tasks. For the sake of discussion, without getting career-specific, let me propose the most likely top ten key attributes related to team work that are required for any team to be successful:

• Promoting
• Collaborating
• Innovating
• Producing
• Leading
• Organizing
• Mentoring
• Inspecting
• Correcting
• Maintaining

These are in addition to, and sometimes more important than, any career-specific attributes required to get the job done.

It is unrealistic to expect any candidate possesses all ten wrapped up with a pretty bow. However, for a team to be successful, each one of these attributes must be present - regardless of the tasks needing to be accomplished. And more importantly, none of these attributes are specific to any one career field, such as software engineering or genetic research. These key attributes are important in sales, marketing, support, shipping, or field work.

When people are working together toward a common goal, these attributes are important. Sometimes, depending on the project or task at hand, only a few are being utilized at any one time. Your job prior to the phone screening process is to assess whether or not all ten are present in your current team. If not, ensure that the gap can be filled immediately by the candidate under review. And you need to stay on point and focused during the phone screen to successfully fill the gap - or worse, gaps!

But, how many times during a phone screen do you find yourself … wandering off … discussing more pleasant subjects not at all germane to your primary objective: fill that attribute gap? Countless tools provide an opportunity to guide the phone screener using questions tailored for a specific career or technology choice. However, very few are targeting these ten key attributes we have listed above. Well, except in the case where you are spending tons of cash and lots of time making the tool you bought work the way you want! Shouldn’t this just work outta the box?!

The tool you use may provide feedback on our list of attributes, and maybe even more than these ten, yet how laborious was it to get through the whole questionnaire? Do you sense any immediate benefit once you’ve completed the phone screen? Do you have to build the questionnaire content yourself to ensure you stay on track and on message? Wouldn’t it be nice if the tool you used to review someone’s resume proceeded directly to the phone screening process? Wouldn’t it be nice if the tool kept it simple, objective, high level (with just enough specificity), and provided clear transitions between candidate workflow check points - all the while supporting accountability?

I keep tellin’ ya, stay with me here, Staff IT Right© really does know your pain …

I’ve been a hiring manager since the late eighties. My first attempt at hiring was relatively messy. I realized my notes were bad and I had a hard time deciding between one candidate or another. The second time around, I decided to create a spreadsheet with the most pertinent info in the first tab and background notes with observations on subsequent tabs. Over the last several years I developed quite a, dashboard of sorts, whereby I’ve been able to help my sourcers and recruiters deliver to me the best candidates on the market. The debut version of the Staff IT Right© product implements the first layer of a multi-layered spreadsheet that was my, candidate dashboard.

In our first installment of Hiring Needs Objectivity, we discussed the resume review process. It’s quite simple to just write a few notes on each resume and then sort each one into the “Call” or “Dunno” pile - oh, then there is the “No Way” pile. But, once you have made all those notes, are you able to communicate those results to your recruiter? Are you able to provide clear and objective analysis? How can you best capture those attributes that aren’t obvious on the resume and communicate that back to the recruiter? Other than keywords and the basic vetting done by your recruiter or HR team, what are the most important hidden attributes in your next candidate? And finally, can you compare and contrast your candidate pool fairly and objectively?

I just stumbled upon a great post by a gentleman in reference to finding the best programmer. He has provided a list of very basic attributes that can be grouped into positive and negative indicators. I’ll share Daniel’s bulletized summary that truly speaks to anyone interested in this subject:

Positive indicators:
- Passionate about technology
- Programs as a hobby
- Will talk your ear off on a technical subject if encouraged
- Significant (and often numerous) personal side-projects over the years
- Learns new technologies on his/her own
- Opinionated about which technologies are better for various usages
- Very uncomfortable about the idea of working with a technology he doesn’t believe to be “right”
- Clearly smart, can have great conversations on a variety of topics
- Started programming long before university/work
- Has some hidden “icebergs”, large personal projects under the CV radar
- Knowledge of a large variety of unrelated technologies (may not be on CV)

Negative indicators:
- Programming is a day job
- Don’t really want to “talk shop”, even when encouraged to
- Learns new technologies in company-sponsored courses
- Happy to work with whatever technology you’ve picked, “all technologies are good”
- Doesn’t seem too smart
- Started programming at university
- All programming experience is on the CV
- Focused mainly on one or two technology stacks (e.g. everything to do with developing a java application), with no experience outside of it

I’ll grant that this is far from scientific. However, how much science can truly promise you a great candidate? As long as you are objective and use the same criteria, scientific just sounds, silly …

Being objective is the key to securing great candidates for your company. The above attributes, which Daniel spells out quite eloquently, can be quantified to provide you a very powerful way to compare any candidate pool appropriately. The best part: these soft attributes become objective assessments that see beyond age, title, role, and formal instruction.

Unbelievable segue here — we’ll move on to the phone screen phase next … oooh … stay with us here at Staff IT Right© … we’ve got your “six”!

It’s the first week in the new year so we wanted to provide you all a quick update on what we are working on right now. A new web application front end is being developed, as well as follow-on articles in our Hiring Needs Objectivity series. Both of these projects, as well as the Holiday Break, and some California History project(s) for my daughter’s 4th Grade class homework, we’re pretty swamped!

Just to give you a small bread crumb on our objective hiring series, phone screens are a very important part of the hiring process. When we attempt to be fair as we decide to compare and contrast before bringing someone in for a physical (onsite) interview, how do you go about remaining, objective? Do you remember every nuance and answer during the phone screen? Can you honestly say, when phone screens are spaced out over a week or two, you remember how each candidate stacks up one by one, each to their own merit equally?

We know we can help here at Staff IT Right©, stay with me on this …