Part 3 of our blog written by Think’s Managing Director, Chris Jones, about the trials and tribulations of recruiting staff.

In part 1 and 2 we covered “Starting the process” and “The Screening”– the initial stages of our recruitment process for a part-time Marketing Manager to join us here at Think Specialist Recruitment.  The first 2 parts of the process had so far taken just under 21 hours……

Part 3 – The Interviews

Having gone through the rather lengthy process of screening and responding to the applications we received, I had booked several first stage interviews.  I had initially booked 6 candidates in but, with a couple of drop outs, ended up having to find replacements and book a further 2 interviews.  Each candidate had their CVs printed off and I spent around 10 minutes reviewing the CVs in further detail and jotting down some specific questions to ask the candidates.  Time spent – 1 hour

Our first stage interviews are typically quite relaxed, more of an informal discussion around the candidate’s CV, skills and experience. This allows me to get a feel for the candidate, their capabilities and personality. It also provides us with an opportunity to tell them more about the company, what we were looking for our Marketing Manager to do and their thoughts around their ability to take the duties on.  A couple of candidates were ruled out post interview due to the hours not working with personal commitments or due to the fit and/or skill set not being right for us. We spent around an hour with each candidate. Time spent – 6 hours

I was starting to feel confident again!  We had some very positive initial interviews and were starting to formulate a good idea of what type of experience we could bring into the business and the (really high!) calibre of candidate available for a part-time role in the local area.  I decided on having a presentation stage in the 2^nd interviews and went about setting a task for candidates to complete and present back on at that next stage.  We had 3 strong candidates shortlisted but, disappointingly, one of the candidates we met with and liked a lot at 1^st interview decided that she did not wish to spend the time putting together a presentation and we agreed it best to stop the process there. This left us with 2 very competent, but very different, candidates to meet with.

We involved 3 of us at 2^nd interview stage, trying our best not to create an intimidating 3:1 panel and again trying to keep it quite relaxed in case there was any nervousness. The 2^nd interviews lasted around 90 minutes each including the presentations and follow up questions.  We then also conducted a de-brief after each candidate of approximately 30 minutes. Time spent – 4 hours

Total time spent on part 3?  11 hours

Total time spent so far on the recruitment process – 31 hours and 45 minutes

We got to the end of Part 3 with a candidate we were confident would be a great fit to the business, both from a cultural and experienced perspective – result!  Now we had to prepare the offer and hope they accepted!  

Read Part 4 of our blog in the coming days to see what came next in our hiring process…..

Chris Jones is the Managing Director of Think Specialist Recruitment, an independent support staff recruitment agency based in Hemel Hempstead and working across the Herts, Beds and Bucks area. We specialise in permanent, temporary and contract recruitment with areas of expertise including: administration, customer service/call centre, PA/secretarial, human resources, accountancy and finance, sales admin/sales support, marketing and IT Helpdesk/IT support.

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