The perils of purple squirrels

On average, employers take 5 weeks and 6 days to recruit a new employee, and even longer for senior or specialist roles.  This is nearly twice as long as the average time taken to recruit in 2008.

High unemployment has led to a candidate-heavy job market.  With so many jobseekers out there eager for work, why are organisations taking such a long time to fill their vacancies?  

Even seeing lots of excellent candidates doesn't help employers to make a decision, as it encourages them to believe there’s someone even better out there.

So why are there delays?

Recruiting can be an expensive business, and the costs of hiring the wrong person are extremely high.  Although the economy appears to be picking up, not for profit organisations still fear that there may be further turmoil ahead and remain cautious about hiring.

With the glut of candidates to choose from, employers feel they can wait to find their perfect candidate; one who has all of the ‘desired’ points on the job description, as well as those ‘required’.  Even interviewing lots of excellent candidates can encourage employers to wait, as they believe there must be someone even better out there.

Red tape and overly complicated processes can also delay an organisation’s hiring process and the saving on overheads made by not recruiting can feel like an incentive to keep a vacancy unfilled.

But keeping a job open for months on end or spending extra effort recruiting doesn't actually address the core reasons why it is so hard to find the perfect candidate.  One of those reasons is that perfect candidates are too rare to bank on – they are ‘purple squirrels’.

What is a purple squirrel?

A purple squirrel is a term recruiters and hiring managers use to define an ultra-rare candidate who is perfect for the role, down to the last detail.  A purple squirrel will have all the skills and experience required, fit perfectly into your organisation’s culture, live in the right area and, crucially, will work for the salary offered.

These candidates do come along occasionally, but too rarely to build a recruitment strategy on.  Purple squirrels are not a product of successful recruiting, but more often simply due to luck.

The impact of delays on recruitment

Maintaining the momentum of your recruitment process is important to keep candidates motivated about the role, and delaying could be a crucial factor if they are deciding between two jobs.  Even though the market is candidate-heavy, the best candidates are still in high demand, and they won’t hang around while you wait to see if someone even better turns up.  They will go to more decisive organisations, and their negative recruitment experience could reflect badly on your employer brand.

A recruitment campaign only lasts so long.  If your possible candidates have found jobs elsewhere, you may have to start the process again from scratch - using up your valuable time and wasting money.  As the economy starts to recover and hiring increases, the demand for good candidates is just going to increase even more.

Positions left unfilled for a long time also become less attractive to potential candidates, like houses that remain unsold – everyone thinks there must be something wrong with the role.  In fact, Britons believe that job vacancies that remain unfilled for more than 72 days are roles that nobody wants.  This means that the longer you wait, the less likely you are to find a really good employee to fill the role.

And the impact on your organisation

Obviously, organisations cannot function without employees.  Unless you reorganise to absorb duties elsewhere, you are eventually going to have to fill a vacancy.  While a job is not being done, productivity in that department drops, and the longer you leave it, the harder it is to build up momentum again.

Taking a long time to recruit also puts unfair amounts of pressure on your other employees, who will have to cover the essential duties of that role.  This may affect productivity and ultimately retention, as overworked and disgruntled employees are less likely to remain loyal and motivated.

Remember the perfect candidate may not be the best one

In the long term, it is more important to find a candidate who fits the culture of your organisation.  When recruiting, you should prioritise ‘hard to learn’ requirements like people skills over specific skills that can be learnt on the job.  Employees who are trained up to do a role have more incentive to succeed and tend to stay longer in a role.  Rather than waiting to find the perfect candidate, why not invest that time in training up a good one to become perfect in the role.

Another area to consider is the opportunities for flexible working.  Again, this can lead to a more loyal and motivated employee.  Being flexible in one area may also mean that you can negotiate with the salary offered.

The ‘perfect’ candidate that an organisation is looking for can often be one that is exactly like the hiring manager or the departed employee.  While they may be able to pick up the ropes quickly, a candidate like this will not bring in new ideas or fresh viewpoints to your organisation.  It is generally accepted that a more diverse workforce is a more effective and resilient workforce.

The view from TPP

At TPP, we’ve represented our share of purple squirrel candidates, and we know how very rare and in demand these employees are.  When we work with you to fill a vacancy, we use a combination of job advertising, social media, our own database of contacts and search and selection to find both active and passive candidates we might be suitable.  We then interview them, face-to-face wherever possible, before sending over their details, to go through their CV and to check how well their personality will mesh with your organisation’s culture.  We will only put a candidate forward for a role if we are confident that they can develop into your perfect employee.

If you're not sure...

If you are undecided about whether to hire a candidate you've interviewed right now, or to wait and see if there is a better candidate out there, why not consider offering the position as a temporary or contract assignment?  This allows you to save on overheads, gives you some coverage for the role until you hire permanently, and lets you try out candidates in a real working environment.  Based on their performance, you can then offer them the role on a permanent basis, or keep recruiting.  But bear in mind that your temporary employee may also continue to look elsewhere!

Ultimately, if you are adamant you need a candidate that fulfils every requirement, you are going to have to wait for them to appear and it is highly likely that you will have to increase your offered salary to secure them.  We believe that it is more cost-effective to concentrate on the best person you find for the job, rather than the best person out there.

Using behavioural interviewing to look behind the mask

What is behavioural interviewing?

Behavioural interviewing is an increasingly popular type of job interview, where an interviewee is asked to provide examples from their past employment of specific situations and go through how they behaved in those circumstances.  The logic is that past performance is predictive of future performance, ie how you behaved in the past will forecast how you will behave in the future.

Why use behavioural interviewing?

Behavioural interviewing is said to be the most accurate predictor of a candidate’s future performance.  Rather than simply taking a candidate's word for it that they have the skills and capabilities required for the role, this method of interviewing allows them to prove their worth.

Traditional interviewing, using open questions like “tell me about your past work experience”, often doesn’t give you enough data to accurately evaluate a candidate.  As each candidate can choose to answer these questions in a completely different way, it also makes it hard to compare candidates in an objective way.  Ultimately, a traditional interview tends to mostly judge candidates on how well they interview, rather than how well they will do the job.

Situational interviews are better, as they ask the candidate to describe how they might handle a certain situation.  However, this does allow the interviewee to talk about what they might do, rather than stick to what they did do.

By focussing purely on actual examples, behavioural interviewing makes it easier for an interviewer to objectively judge how a candidate will perform in the role.  Each question can be followed up by further questions to get more detail and depth on specific behaviours, such as “what factors did you consider when you made that decision?” or “what were you thinking at that point?”.  This makes it very difficult for interviewees to exaggerate or ‘fudge’ their answers to give you the responses they think you want to hear.

Behavioural interviews are also a really good way to discover new talent and avoid age discrimination, as they do not require the candidate to have a great deal of direct work experience, but concentrate more on transferrable skills and competencies.  Answers do not necessarily need to come from the workplace but could use examples from volunteer experience, extra-curricular activities or even family life.

Preparing your questions

Before you start putting together your list of questions for the interview, you need to establish exactly what behaviours are necessary for the role.  Use your job description and person specification to put together a list of the key responsibilities for the role and then determine how an employee would be judged successful in those responsibilities.

You’ll then need to think about the characteristics and traits necessary in an employee to deliver those successful outcomes.  Look at current successful employees in similar roles, and the qualities and skills they possess, to form a picture of your ideal candidate.  You should also consider your organisation's culture and whether you want your new employee's personality to be similar or complementary. A typical profile would include competencies like interpersonal skills, decision-making skills, creativity, flexibility, enthusiasm, time management etc.  Stick to the most important skills or you could be interviewing all day!

Once you’ve got a list of your ideal behavioural traits, you can start to make up a list of questions to judge interviewees against.  Make sure you use the same questions, in the same order, for every interview so it’s easy to compare candidates.

Typical behavioural interview questions

Behavioural interview questions are generally more specific and more probing than traditional interview questions.  Each question should be designed to elicit an example of performance from past experience and should be followed up with further tailored questions to get to the key behaviour shown.

Typical questions include:

• Give an example of an occasion when you used logic to solve a problem.
• Give an example of a goal you reached and tell me how you achieved it.
• Describe a decision you made that was unpopular and how you handled implementing it.
• Have you gone above and beyond the call of duty? If so, how?
• What do you do when your schedule is interrupted? Give an example of how you handle it.
• Have you had to convince a team to work on a project they weren't thrilled about?
  How did you do it?
• Have you handled a difficult situation with a co-worker? How?
• Tell me about how you worked effectively under pressure.

You should be asking two-three behavioural questions for each competency to give you enough information to make an accurate assessment of the candidate’s ability.

STAR statements

When answering a behavioural interview question, candidates are expected to use the STAR method to shape their responses.  When all candidates answer the question in a similar way, it makes it much easier to compare them afterwards.

STAR is an acronym for the four parts of an answer to a typical behavioural question:

Situation – the background to the example.  The situation the candidate was in or the problem that faced them. 

Task – the ultimate goal or what the candidate needed to achieve.

Action – what the candidate did and the reasons why they made this decision.  If the action was a team initiative, it is important for the candidate to focus on their role only.

Result – what did the action achieve and was the goal accomplished?  It’s not necessary for all examples to have positive results, as long as a candidate can justify their actions and show that they learnt from the results.

Assessing interviewees

Once all the interviews have been completed, use your interview notes to rate each candidate on the answers they have given.  One of the benefits of using behavioural interviews is that it helps avoid bias in interviewing, so stick to a scoring system.

For each question, identify the key behaviours that would separate an excellent candidate from a poor one.  The interviewee can then be scored against each competency.

A typical rating scale would be 1-5 where 4 or 5 was an excellent demonstration of that competency, 2 or 3 was adequate and 1 was extremely poor.

Things to consider

• Make sure your list of desired behaviours is actually reflected in the job description and person specification that you use to advertise the role, or you will end up with unsuitable candidates for interview.

•  Make sure candidates know it will be a behavioural interview when they are invited, giving them a chance to prepare their answers.  Giving a candidate the chance to prepare will get you better interview answers and should help you judge their responses more easily.

• Taking very detailed notes is an essential part of the behavioural interview process, so that you can score a candidate’s performance accurately.
   
• If you are using a recruitment agency like TPP Not for Profit, they should be able to help you put your list of desirable competencies together and help you construct behavioural interview questions.

Useful Links

Lists of behavioural competencies:
http://questionsininterview.com/list-of-core-behavioral-competencies
www.nielsongroup.com/articles/list_of_competencies.pdf
www.hr-guide.com/data/A302.htm

Top Ten Behavioral Interview Questions

75 Behavioural Interview Questions To Select The Best Candidate

TPP’s guide for candidates to competency-based interviews

Recruiting for hard-to-fill roles

At TPP Not for Profit, we recognise that some roles within the not for profit sector are notoriously hard to fill. These traditionally include charity fundraising or marketing and communications vacancies , as well as roles for qualified healthcare professionals such as specialist nurses. Particularly for smaller organisations, filling these roles with the right calibre of candidate can be extremely difficult. Obviously using a recruitment consultancy with specialist experience of recruiting these candidates will help, but here are some further tips on ways to fill your difficult vacancies.

Why are some roles hard to fill?

There are several reasons why your organisation might be finding it difficult to recruit a suitable new employee.

• The most common reason is that the job requires skills which are in short supply, such as major donor fundraising 
• Your organisation is in a location where there is a shortage of labour and attracting employees to the area is difficult
• The salary you are able to offer is below market average and you are unable to compete with other organisations
• The benefits package offered is not as attractive as those offered by others
• The organisation has recently gone through a well-publicized restructuring or series of layoffs, or received negative publicity, which can put potential candidates off

Define your search criteria

If you are struggling to find candidates that exactly match your person specification, one of the most obvious places to start is by revisiting the qualifications required. Many skills gaps reported by not for profit organisations are related to job specific and technical skills, rather than soft skills such as team working. When it comes to recruiting the perfect new employee, TPP believes that cultural fit is at least as important as qualifications. Hard skills can be taught, but soft skills are generally much harder to learn.

Go through all of the skills and competencies mentioned in your person specification and decide which are easy to find, hard to find, easy to learn and hard to learn. Classifying the qualifications of a role in this way allows you to rank them in order of importance, and judge candidates accordingly. For example, if a candidate lacks skills that are hard to find but easy to learn, you may wish to rank them higher than a candidate who has those skills but lacks other, harder to learn characteristics.

Working with a recruitment partner, such as TPP Not for Profit, will give you an impartial point of view on whether your candidate expectations are realistic.

Widen your pool of candidates

Now you have considered which qualifications are essential, and which you might compromise on, you can look at bringing in different kinds of candidates in different ways.

One of the most obvious ways to give yourself a broader pool of candidates to choose from is to consider employing someone from outside the not for profit sector. As long as the candidate is still passionate about your organisation’s cause and has transferrable skills, a lack of sector experience may not necessarily be a stumbling block. In fact, having fresh blood with no preconceptions may provide your organisation with a valuable new point of view and ensure you have a diverse workforce.  Considering candidates from different industry backgrounds can really open up your options.

If the skills required for the role are relatively easy to learn, you could also consider taking on a less experienced employee at a lower pay rate and training them up on the job. This is a cost effective way of filling your role and although it will take at least a few months for your new employee to get up to speed, you should end up with a highly qualified and motivated member of staff.

Use Interim staff

If you simply haven’t got the time to train up a new member of staff, or you don’t have other employees with those competencies to do the training, consider hiring an interim or contract employee. There are three main ways to use interim staff to recruit for hard to fill roles:

• Use the contract period as an extended job interview, to give you a low-risk way of testing how effective a new employee is in the role
• Use an interim employee to give you breathing space to find your ideal permanent member of staff. This will take the pressure off and make you less likely to have to settle for a less than ideal candidate
• Hire a highly skilled interim with the specific remit of training up new or existing members of staff so that they can take over the role in the future

Change the role

If you are still struggling to find candidates, especially if they are not in a traditionally hard-to-find niche, this may be a clear signal that the role needs to be redesigned.

Often job descriptions are based on the responsibilities undertaken by a previous incumbent, but it may well be that the role evolved over time to suit that particular individual and finding a straight replacement is making your candidate search harder than necessary.

Take apart the job description and consider each set of responsibilities individually. Could certain duties be undertaken by other existing members of staff, leaving the remaining responsibilities as part of a more consistent role? Or should you actually be recruiting for two members of staff instead of one (usually a senior and a junior employee)?


Review your offering

If you are struggling with other organisations for candidates, remember that competing isn’t necessarily about offering more money. You could offer better benefits, work-life balance or simply have a cause that resonates more strongly with the candidate.

Flexible working is one of the prime attractions for candidates working in the not for profit sector, and increasing the opportunities for this will almost always help to attract more or higher quality candidates. Consider whether the position could be suitable for a part-time employee or job share. Ensuring opportunities for working from home are advertised in the job description will also help widen your pool of candidates, particularly for organisations in less central locations.

TPP Not for Profit have great deal of knowledge on salary and benefits benchmarks within your sector, and will be able to advise you on putting together a realistic package that will ensure you get the calibre of candidates you require.

Finally, a word of warning…

When interviewing candidates for hard-to-fill roles, be particularly careful to leave them with a positive view of your organisation, whatever the outcome of the interview. Employees in these niche communities are often closely networked and a negative interview experience could damage your employer brand image.


TPP Not for Profit are experts in the recruitment to the not for profit sector, and are often asked to help fill difficult vacancies. We can manage your interview process to ensure all candidates take away a positive image of your brand.