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By now, Google’s infamous job interview brain teasers have become the stuff of legend. To wit:

“A coin was flipped 1,000 times and there were 560 heads. Do you think the coin is biased?”

While a thorough and rigorous recruiting and vetting process is necessary to ensure your company is attracting and retaining the best talent, an unnecessarily tedious and intimidating interview process can be counterproductive, and even scare away the type of candidates your company or agency is trying to attract.

Signs Your Candidate Recruiting and Interview Process Needs a Little Work

A strong talent pipeline is the lifeblood of any company and organization. You want to make sure your process is designed to recruit and hire the best and brightest, but a negative or excessively complicated interview process can backfire and actually serve as a warning to potential employees to avoid your company like the plague, especially in today’s climate where younger generations of workers place a much higher premium on work/life balance and company culture than ever before.

Here are a few signs that your interview process may actually be doing your company’s recruiting and hiring efforts more harm than good:

A long and drawn out application, recruitment, and interview process

Many companies scare away good candidates before the first interview has even been scheduled by setting up a time consuming and repetitive application process that requires candidates to jump through numerous hoops just to get their resume in front of a recruiter or hiring manager. While it will obviously take some time to properly vet and ultimately find the right candidate, dragging out the process for too long can be frustrating and a deal breaker for many candidates.

Uncomfortable and/or premature discussions about compensation

Openly discussing salary history may have once been the norm, but times and norms have changed, and candidates are increasingly becoming resistant to discussing their salary history with prospective employers, especially early in the interview process. Further, a number of States have enacted legislation that bars employers from inquiring into a candidate’s salary history.This aspect of the process should be handled delicately, diplomatically, and legally.

Combative or intrusive questions

Remember that candidates are also interviewing your company. Asking questions that make them feel defensive or uncomfortable will cast a negative light on the entire company.

Incomplete job listings

Vague, poorly worded, or listings that don’t include enough information about the position or the company are a sure-fire way to filter out quality candidates.

How to Attract Top Candidates and Build Your Talent Pipeline

There are a number of steps that you can take to ensure that your company is attracting the right candidates. Before posting a job ad or scheduling interviews, take some time to clearly define the needs and requirements for the role, as well as the educational background and experience of your ideal candidate. You want to set a high bar but remember to be realistic about your expectations as they relate to the parameters of the role.

For example, make sure that the job and skills requirements properly align with the actual responsibilities, growth potential, and salary and benefits package of the position. Remember that talented and skilled candidates have options, so treat the interview process as a two-way interaction where the hiring manager is also responsible for selling the candidate on the company. Think of the recruiting process as a relationship building exercise rather than a one-way transaction in order to attract the best candidates who will add value to your organization.

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