You may want to review resumes before interviewing candidates as a way to protect your time from people you believe you won’t be able to hire (even though we will make the case that the resumes are not the candidate, and the intangibles are as crucial to success as a candidate’s experience). You might also interview candidates for a temporary or temp-to-hire position to make certain the employee is going to be a good fit and to avoid a bad hire (no one is more sensitive to the high cost of bad hires than we are).
What is most important to this process is the feedback loop with a staffing agency.
Without Feedback
Without the feedback as to why you rejected a resume, your staffing firm cannot adjust their selection process, modify their interview questions, and select candidates that may be a better fit. Without understanding what it was that disqualified a candidate from consideration or made them a bad fit, the next set of resumes isn’t likely to be any closer to the mark. If this is true for resumes, it’s doubly true for face-to-face interviews.
When you have interviewed a candidate, the reasons you hire or pass on a candidate are even more useful to your staffing firm in making better selections as to the candidate they provide. Because you and your staffing firm have both interviewed the same candidate, sharing what made you disqualify the candidate improves your staffing partner’s selection process. Your staffing partner learns, and their future choices on candidates gets better.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
We know that no one has enough time to do all the things they need to do in a day (us included). However, the investment of engaging in the feedback loop part of the process of working with a staffing firm pays dividends in the future. The feedback that you provide informs the decision about which candidates your staffing firm sends you. Over time, your staffing partner’s understanding of who works, why they work, and who is going to get hired, allows them to make better selections. It’s not that are deciding for you, but they are identifying candidates that you will be interested in interviewing.
This investment in providing feedback buys you back time because, having helped shape the selection process, you can trust your staffing firm to make good selections. If we do our part as your staffing partner, over time, as our process improves, we will send you candidates that perfectly fit your company. One day, when we’ve earned your trust, we’ll be able to tell you we have the right candidate, and you’ll trust us well enough to interview them sight unseen.
