Selection Skills for Recruitment

Select the Best. Manage the Risk.

Every business wants to hire the best talent, but do your hiring managers know how to select for that talent? And do so in a fair, objective and legal manner?

There are two key objectives of our Selection Skills for Recruitment workshops:

1) to equip hiring managers to select the best person for the job.
2) to mitigate the risks inherent in the recruitment process.

Selecting the best talent is crucial because it directly impacts the success and growth of your team and organisation. Hiring top performers not only enhances productivity and innovation, but it also boosts team morale and creates a positive, high-performance culture.

By choosing the right people, you minimise turnover costs, improve retention rates, and ensure that your team is equipped with the skills and expertise to drive long-term success. The right hire can make all the difference in achieving your business goals, while the wrong choice can lead to setbacks and inefficiencies.

Our Selection Skills for Hiring training helps you achieve all of this by covering a range of hiring skills, some of which are listed below. There are obviously many more we could mention and we can support your development with these too! Have a peak at further resources by following me…

Avoiding Unconscious Bias

Unconscious bias can influence various stages of the recruitment process, from drafting the job description to evaluating candidates during CV screening or interviews. The risk is that we may make biased judgments that overlook a candidate’s true potential, leading to missed opportunities.

Getting Past Their Preparation

Do you ever get the sense that a candidate is giving you a canned response—one of those high-level “look at me, I did great” stories? Or perhaps you’re unsure about what they actually did because they focused more on the context or what their team accomplished? Probing questions are essential to uncover exactly what the candidate did, as it’s their actions that we need to assess, not the context or how impressive their team may have been.

Questions to AVOID

Questions which are either directly discriminatory or which give the impression that your judgement will be based on non-work related criteria are against the law. Don’t ask them! These questions suggest you could be making judgements about something that is protected by employment legislation: gender, maternity, age, ethnicity, disability etc.

Assessing Experience

A surprise to many of our delegates, “experience” is not only an unreliable indicator of actual competence but could possibly be discriminatory to request in a job description or interview, as it may inadvertently lead to age discrimination.

Job Descriptions

Clear and legally compliant job descriptions help with recruiting the right candidates and can also be useful in the performance evaluation process, making it easier to assess whether employees are meeting the expectations laid out in their job roles.

Assessment Options

We can cover everything from structured interview’s and the guides you may need to create them, all the way through to work sample assessments and psychometrics.

Competency Based Interviews

“The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour”.

This means that to interview, we need to ask questions that discover what someone has done before. Interviewers are trained to design questions that are open, objective and have a behavioural focus.

Scoring the Interview

Once the interviews are done and all assessments are complete, how do we compare candidates? How do we make a decision? Having an objective guide on how to do this makes all the difference in giving managers the confidence to make an offer.

Our workshops build the skills and confidence needed for recruitment teams and hiring managers to run a great hiring process. In terms of the risks involved in the process, The FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) emphasises the importance of fair treatment and diversity within the FS sector. Failing to address bias in recruitment can lead to regulatory scrutiny and potential enforcement actions by the FCA. Additionally, broader employment legislation under The Equality Act 2010 prohibits both direct and indirect discrimination.

This means that hiring managers must understand bias and its affect on recruitment, so that they can manage those risks, and avoid costly litigation. In 2024, a housing organisation was fined £95k for racial discrimination. This wasn’t due to overtly racist comments or explicit bias but hinged on the subjective and problematic use of terms like “fit.” Such cases underline the critical need for objective and transparent hiring practices.

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