Hiring Online
In today’s business world, the Internet offers numerous advantages to save time and to expand the potential pool of interested applicants for a job.
In this interview with Make Mine a Million $ Business Awardee Kimberly Martinez, CEO of Bonitas International, we learn more about how she recently conducted an online hiring process for recruiting and interviewing candidates for an administrative assistant.
Interview: A Simplified Online Hiring Process
Q: So how did you go about using online resources?
A: Hiring talent is such a time consuming process and as we looked to expand our organization fairly rapidly in the last few months it occurred to us that what could automate the process which would:
* be a much better use of time of all involved,
* enable us to make sure all applicants heard exactly the same information in the same manner (we all know the first interview of the day does not hear the same enthusiasm as the last) and
* give us the opportunity to judge people on more than a piece of paper and then brief series of meetings
Q: Why did you decide to conduct your hiring process online?
A: In our company, we decided to leverage all of our online tools to really do as much recruiting for us as possible (selling of us and our opportunity), to screen people out so we only talked to truly qualified candidates, and to use the online process to help us create more data points to judge our candidates on. Here is the process we went through recently to hire a personal assistant:
1) We posted our job online in the online job banks (both our local paper edition as well as a national job site like monster.com)
2) The posting included a link to a subdirectory in our website which displayed the complete job description including salary and benefits info, a downloadable application that requested information regarding salary history, as well as a second web link to the "About Us" information on our website that told our story and talks about our values.
3) We instructed interested candidates to email or fax over their application, salary history, and resume, so we could immediately screen out anyone who was not the right match from a salary point of view for the job.
4) We reviewed the resumes, and for the candidates we were interested in we emailed them an interview assignment. For example, for my job of personal assistant I gave them 3 probable tasks that they would do including asking them to:
1. book a trip including air and hotel based on a promotional flyer I had featuring me giving a speech in San Jose, CA
2. price out 250 photo printed holiday cards I want to send based on a family snapshot I forwarded
3. get repair costs for some broken sprinklers in our yard
They were instructed to email or fax over the completed written assignment and from that pool of applicants we chose people for in person interviews.
* This part was intended to do three important things:
* weed people out who were just tire kicking and not really excited about the job;
* give them a true taste of the type of tasks they would manage; and
* "sell" them a little on the type of executive they would be working with.
Q: What were the results?
A: I had over 150 applicants for the job of my personal assistant- a job with a salary range of $10-$13 per hour. This process helped us to narrow it down to 10 finalists who were pretty emotionally engaged by the time they met with us in person for the first time.
After the screening interviews, which we did with two members of our team, we checked references and then used fellow M3 winner Hire Image LLC to do a background check before we made the offer.
Q: Would you do anything differently next time?
The only big change I would do for the next round is to give everyone in my local office a chance to be involved in the interview process for a new team member even if that means going out to a group lunch. I think it creates more organizational buy in and makes that first day a little less awkward.
