Even though this blog post is aimed at helping HR professionals, it could also be an excellent place to start if you’re a potential candidate preparing for an upcoming interview.
In this article, we’ll work through all the steps, from choosing a potential candidate to cheat-sheet interview questions.
Finding High-Potential Candidates
A potential candidate is someone who is being considered for a position at a company. On the other hand, high-potential candidates are individuals that demonstrate the ability to grow faster (generally with more success) than the average potential candidate.
Finding a high-potential candidate is the goal, of course. However, this may not always be as easy a task as it may seem. Nonetheless, this is where the interview process starts and is, thus, a crucial step to finding the right candidate for the position.
How Do I Find And Evaluate High-Potential Candidates?
There are various steps to follow to evaluate your potential candidates better, and we’ll get to these in a moment. However, finding them is the first and most crucial step.
1. Be Specific And Truthful About Expectations
Let’s say you’re a marketing and communications agency looking for a potential junior candidate; the competition to find a great junior candidate is already very high. Most likely, you’ll be flooded with resumes and CVs after posting a general job description on LinkedIn.
This outcome will be the same for every marketing and communications agency looking for a junior candidate.
However, if you post a job ad describing to potential candidates precisely what the job entails, requirements, and other qualifying factors, you’ll most likely get fewer applications.
The key takeaway is that getting fewer job applications isn’t bad; this is actually the first step to getting higher-potential candidates.
2. Make Employees Part Of The Process
Employee retention is an obvious goal for most companies; ensuring your potential employee fits in with the company culture is essential to employee retention.
Thus, if you already have high-potential employees demonstrating the company’s culture daily, why not make them part of the interview process? After all, these high-potential employees will be working with them in the future.
High-potential candidates with a specific job title at a particular company know what it takes and what skills are essential for other candidates to have. Accordingly, it might be a good idea to get current high-potential employees onboard when interviewing or sifting through the CVs of potential candidates.
3. Include A Trial Period
It can be effortless to be a great candidate during an interview but not a great candidate for the actual open position. Accordingly, it might be a good idea to have a trial period for each employee to better get to know the company's operations and vice versa.
7 Steps To Conduct Successful Interviews With Job Candidates
Conducting successful interviews with potential candidates is no easy task. This is why we’ve compiled a list of the necessary steps to run a successful interview, and we’ve listed these steps in chronological order for your convenience.