Recruiting Framework Step 4: Incorporate a Role-Related Scenario
This is Step 4 of a five-part series on building and managing your pragmatic recruiting framework. Click to read the overview of all five steps, Step 1: Build Your Talent Pipeline, Step 2: Narrow Your Funnel with Phone Interviews, or Step 3: Master Onsite Interviews.
Step 4: Incorporate a Role-Related Scenario
Why Use Aptitude Assessments to Hire the Right Talent?
Step 4 of the pragmatic Recruiting Framework is often missed or dismissed but can be the most insightful strategy for evaluating candidates.
Many rapid growth organizations are lean teams by nature. As a result, you often do not have existing expertise in the area you are hiring. Or with limited resources, you may only have one or two employees who are capable of adequately vetting a candidate for niche or executive skill sets. This challenge is one of the many reasons assigning a role-related task during the interview process is a highly effective strategy to hire the right talent.
Case study interviews and aptitude assignments have been commonly leveraged by professional service firms and consultancies for many years. But as the recruiting and onboarding process becomes more competitive and costly, incorporating a role-related scenario during the interview is becoming a best practice for any critical hire across industries.
When you make the short-term time and energy investment upfront to appropriately assess the candidate’s capabilities, your result is improved, long-term success for both the new employee and employer.
Who Should Be Involved in Crafting the Challenge and Reviewing the Results?
Similar to the team mix for onsite interviews, your review board should include a variety of experts across the organization. The ideal group consists of two to five of your team members, depending on the nature of the assignment and your organizational structure.
First, the hiring manager should be included in every step of the process. This person will likely be managing the new employee and in many cases is the most qualified person to evaluate the candidate’s work product. Hiring managers can expect to glean tremendous insight into how a candidate thinks on the job through a carefully crafted scenario.
The second participant should be the hiring manager's executive. This individual is often two levels above the open job role. If your organizational chart doesn’t have this depth or if the open role is an executive placement, instead, the second participant should be the executive within the organization who will most often engage with the new employee.
The third participant should be your organization’s HR or talent representative. This team member should also be involved as the communication liaison throughout every step of the recruitment, interview, and onboarding process.
Should You Include a Lateral Contributor in the Review Process?
Before you bring a lateral contributor into the conversation, ask yourself these important questions:
Is this team member supportive of hiring for the new role?
Does this new role present any threat to the team member?
Does the team member feel this role should go to them instead of a new hire?
Would this team member consider the company growth goals before their own?
There are pros and cons to including future peers in the evaluation of new talent, and every company and organization is different. Lateral contributors can offer very valuable insight and perspective on a candidate given they likely will interact with this person/functional area often. Their buy-in is important in building a high-performing team and culture. On the other hand, if the individual is not fully committed to the hiring objective for any reason, it could lead to unnecessary and distracting complications during the interview process.
When Should You Bring in an Outside Expert?
What circumstances justify an outside source? If you are hiring for a C-level executive or another critical role that could set standards for operations moving forward, you should consider resourcing an expert within the desired network to evaluate the candidate’s competencies.
For example, if you are hiring a lead developer, but none of your employees can read a lick of code, you should rely on an external, skilled developer to evaluate the candidate’s work.
The Bottom Line: If you do not have an internal resource who is qualified to gauge the quality of the role-related scenario, there really is no purpose in assigning the task.
What Skills, Competencies, or Traits Are You Trying to Evaluate through the Role-Related Scenario?
We are careful to call this a role-related scenario, not homework or a skills test. This step of the process is not intended to be a burden to the candidate but to provide an opportunity to showcase their critical thinking, skills, and personality.
SUPER IMPORTANT: Just like you Mr. or Ms. Hiring Manager, candidates have lives, jobs, and in general … a lot of things to do. Your open job may be one of many positions the candidate will interview for, and it’s important to ensure this assignment is a reasonable “ask” for the candidate to ensure a positive experience regardless of the outcome. More on this later.
What Should the “Ask” Be?
The appropriate ask depends on the role and the level of experience you are seeking. Regardless of the scenario, all candidates who have progressed to Step 4 need to be assigned the same exact assessment. One more time … the same exact assessment.
You should determine a company philosophy for crafting the ask criteria. A formal philosophy will support standardization and fairness of the process.
In our experience, a general best practice you can adopt into your company philosophy is the size of the “ask.” Some scenarios may be in-person, in-the-moment case studies, or challenges. But if you are requesting the candidate spend their extracurricular time on the assessment, the request should be reasonable and achievable within the candidate’s personal and professional life.
We have found that a good project tends to require about 5 to 10 hours to complete at a senior level, while an individual contributor averages 0.5 to 5 hours to complete a task.
What Are Some Example Role-Related Scenarios the Candidate May Face on the Job?
The Role-Related Scenario should be similar to an authentic client request or business challenge that the candidate would handle day-to-day in the new role. Here are a few sample aptitude assessments by role to get you started:
Sales
Mock Demo/Pitch a Relevant Product or Service of Choice
Sample Format: 20-minute presentation, 10-minute Q&A
Trait Evaluation: Public speaking, presentation skills, organizational skills, PowerPoint or other software skills and experience, written communication skills, ability to handle difficult customer question and situations
Finance
Analysis of Potential M&A Target or Market Growth Opportunity
Sample Format: Candidate assigned a “brief” outlining the context and asked to make a business recommendation with supporting data and analysis
Trait Evaluation: Corporate strategy and strategic thinking skills, presentation and communication skills, financial and data analysis experience, data visualization and storytelling skills, Microsoft Excel skills
Product Development
Technical Project/Coding Challenge
Format: Candidate is given a predetermined coding or relevant technical project to complete and return with code via Github or other open-source tools
Trait Evaluation: Critical thinking and problem-solving skills, code organization, programming style, preferred languages and technical depth, written communication and presentation skills
How Should You Prepare the Candidate for What to Expect?
This is your opportunity to learn how the candidate would approach the skill set outside of a 1:1 interview, but what does the candidate need to know?
Keep it simple. What is the role-related scenario? When is it due? Who will be reviewing the work? How will the candidate be evaluated?
Who Do You Invite to Participate in a Role-Related Scenario?
First, you should only invite a candidate to participate in a role-related scenario after they have completed and progressed beyond the phone interview and onsite interview. You should be down to a shortlist of candidates who you are serious about hiring. You have vetted each individual, and any of the players left in the pool is a viable option.
This is also a good point for the candidate to self-select out. If a few hours is too much to ask, then they don’t really desire the role. A best-fit candidate understands the requirements, wants to fulfill the need, and is capable of achieving the goal.
When Do You Introduce the Role-Related Scenario to the Candidate?
Whoever is the candidate’s main point of contact, either the recruiter or hiring manager, is responsible for setting the expectations from the beginning of the interview process. Early on, the contact should be transparent with the candidate regarding what is expected of them and how they will be evaluated. When you first engage with the candidate, outline each step of the process—phone interview, onsite interview, role-related scenario, etc—and continually reinforce where they stand and what to expect next in the process.
We have seen employers ask candidates to complete the role-related scenario or assessment before they even meet in person. We do not recommend this approach. This sets the tone for a poor candidate experience and therefore negatively affects your employer brand. We believe the role-related scenario should be the final pitch of the candidate’s competencies at the end of the pragmatic recruiting framework process.
In Conclusion
Yes, incorporating Step 4 into your pragmatic Recruiting Framework is going to require more thought and time. However, the outcome of this Step is confidence in your candidate’s true aptitude and potential value for your organization.
