Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time

CHAPTER 5

Evaluate Candidates Against the Recruiting Brief While Pre-Selling and Pre-Boarding

Recruit

Interview in a way that communicates and demonstrates your employment brand.

The tricky part of this stage of the Total Onboarding Program is that you have to think about buying and selling at the same time. The people you are interviewing don’t have to do that. They can sell first, get you to offer them the job, and then decide whether to buy. In that light, we’re going to split this chapter in two sections. We’ll talk about pre-selling in section I, then interviewing and assessing in section II.

Section I—Pre-Sell While You Buy

Treat Them the Way You Are Going to Treat Them

We’re not suggesting you pretend to be anything other than what you are. We are suggesting you treat the people you are recruiting and interviewing with the same respect that you will treat them with once they are employees, consistent with your employment brand. If you tend to be abrupt with your employees, go ahead and treat people you are recruiting the same way. At least they will know what they’re getting into. If you aren’t abrupt with employees, don’t be abrupt with the people you are recruiting. Don’t go too far the other way either. You don’t want people to accept jobs under false pretenses and then quit when they discover that reality doesn’t match their expectations.

Some of you have probably ...