How to find the best people

First of all let me clarify, I am not recruitment consultant or anything on that vein. So, this is not professional advice as such.

Sometimes is tricky during the interview process of how to keep the consistence. In large organisation people tend to rely on the established process which is more or less based on how to carry on an interview process to candidates by those who are taking the similar roles in the company. However, after being interviewee and interviewers for many years, here is the conclusion I have got so far, interview is only as good as the interviewer.

The reason why I say this is that believe it or not, if you are an interviewee, you need lots of luck to make the day yours. Many things could affect how the interviewer judge your performance of that day. Many organisations believe they can tell the quality of the people within a condensed period of time to poke every aspect of the individual. I think it is scientific sound. However, in reality, the chemistry between the interviewer and interviewee is all that matters. I might have exaggerate the effect of this. But I think only if we recognise how much our feeling can affect our decision on people, we could then be able to try to control the feeling from making the right decision.

Here are some simple rules I have learnt, and I am sure some of them your found familiar somewhere else, kudos to those presented the similar ideas:

People donot change that much

You will not change too

People are different

The best people tend to stick to the same type

How to tell if you are talking to someone who has the quality to be shine in your organisation? The assumption I made here is he or she at least doesnt fail miserably in any of the questions with binary answers. Most of the simple criteria I used are easy to tell.

1. He or she has something to gain from this organisation, what ever it is, money, job satisfaction, technology geek, challenge etc. On this topic, being a idealist myself, I never believed one can shine if all he wants is money. However, big bucks always helps!

2. He or she has something to contribute. If he or she feels useless or incompetent in the coming work, you might as well help yourself not to put other people in misery.

3. Is he or she different?

4. Has he or she been making decisions of his or her own?

5. Is there a spark in the eye? Superficial huh? If someone walks in and you feel he doesnt have confidence in his eye or he couldnot focus or he just donot know what to look at, you need to be careful.

6. Do you like him? I just said you should control your feeling. BUT, your gut feeling about the candidate is telling you something you could not be able to get from logic.

7. Are you trying to find something which you cannt achieve in him or her? If you are, donot be.