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Recruiting Strategies: Avoid a Mismatch by Filling the Gaps in the Interview

No candidate is a perfect fit for any job. There are always gaps between the requirements of a job and the capabilities of even the best person hired to fill it. But an enlightened company will not wait until that person is on board to discover - and be caught unaware - by those gaps. In order to avoid a mismatch of a new hire with the job responsibilities, be sure to design your interviewing process to result in effective hiring. This will help you determine:

• Where the strong fits are between a candidate and a job.
• If there are gaps between the company's needs and a candidate's capabilities.
• If there are gaps, what, if anything, the company can do to bridge the gaps or compensate for them (i.e. have the candidate take a computer course, or perhaps spend a short amount of time with another employee who can provide training for the new hire).

Don't make the mistake of engaging in wishful thinking that a candidate will magically work out, when it is clear they come with recognizable gaps. Often, hiring authorities believe that when the person begins working, he or she will adapt just by becoming acquainted with the organization's culture. But unfortunately, that rarely happens, and the company ends up shaking its finger at the new employee, when it should have examined this potential pitfall before the hire was ever made.

Even in a tight labor market, a company is setting someone up for failure by hiring him when it knows of serious gaps between the candidate's personality or skills and what the job requires.

To finish up our previous discussion about legal issues, even when you do find a candidate that is a great match, be sure to avoid making excessive assurances in the interview about job security. Avoid statements that employment will continue as long as the employee does a good job. For example, suppose that an applicant is told, "If you do a good job, there's no reason why you can't work here for the rest of your career." What if the applicant accepts the job and six months later is laid off due to personnel cutbacks? This could lead to a breach of contract claim where the employee asserts that he or she can't be terminated unless it's proven that he or she didn't do a "good job". Courts have on occasion held that such promises made during interviews created contracts of employment.