A reference check can sometimes save you from making a big mistake, but only if you know what to look for.

Subtle Hints

As an assessment method, reference checks tend to have severe leniency errors.  The comments from referees often sound positive and as the reference checker you can sometimes feel as if you aren’t getting to hear any of the genuine negatives about candidates.

Even though referees tend to avoid telling you about the negatives, if an employee performed poorly, the referee will also dislike telling outright lies about how good they were.  Because of this, hints about candidate issues may leak out in referee answers.

Hints are generally quite subtle, but can show themselves in numerous ways.  You should take the following hints as invitations to probe more deeply, rather than viewing them as damning evidence in themselves:

Faint praise – “His performance on the project was quite good.  He did his job.”

Lack of enthusiasm or hesitation – “Hmmm, yeah, ummm…I would rehire her”.  Sometimes the referee just sounds a bit bored.  When you get a referee who was impressed with their employee, you can really hear the difference.

Qualification and hedging – “I might rehire her, but only if the right job came up.  She would be good in certain roles.”

Euphemisms – “Very independent” might mean the employee didn’t get along with others.  “Assertive” might mean they were argumentative or aggressive.

Evasiveness – When the referee avoids answering direct questions about competence levels and/or their responses don’t really match your questions.

Very short answers – These, along with expressions of impatience, might be because you called at an inconvenient time.  However, it is sometimes due the referee’s discomfort with having to talk positively about a poor employee, and being uneasy about the deception.

Not being allowed to answer – In lieu of responding to your questions, the referee just reads a legalistic statement with only dates worked, job title and summary of responsibilities.

It is a critical part of reference checking to probe further even on hints of negative issues or faint praise.  I recommend that reference checkers:

Be clear about levels of confidentiality from the start.  The more confidential the reference check, the more honest the referee can be.  Most managers don’t want negative comments to get back to the candidate because it could ruin professional relationships – particularly in very small industries (although aren’t they all).

Assuring complete confidentiality is a problem though, because it prevents you from giving the results to your client.  If you assure partial confidentiality (e.g. information is given to the client only) you need to consider how you will answer questions from the candidate about why they didn’t get the job, if it was due to a poor reference. *

Keep asking follow-up questions.  You might say, for example, “You say he was moderately strategic – can you give me an example of how he could have been better?” or “You said she was a very independent worker, so how did she go when needing to work with her team?”

Ask in a roundabout way.  Saying, “Any glaring weaknesses?” can make a manager hesitate to criticise, but, “Any areas that their next manager needs to be aware of in order to best manage them?” sounds a bit gentler and more reasonable.

Ask a specific, direct question.  If you know what issues you are looking for you can ask direct questions.  Some manager won’t tell you if you don’t specifically ask, but won’t lie either when you do ask.  If you say, for example, “We picked up that he was a bit arrogant – did we get that wrong?” you sometimes get a reply along the lines of, “I wouldn’t say arrogant, but he is very self-confident and sure of his opinions.”

Legalistic Statements

If the referee reads a legalistic statement with only a summary of dates worked and responsibilities, but can’t answer your questions, you must ask something like, “Is it standard practice for your organisation to not give detailed, personalised references, or is this case an exception?”

If it’s an exception then alarm bells should be ringing, loudly.

Be reasonable

If you are going to really dig with your questioning, you have to be careful about how you interpret negative information.  Conflicts or personality clashes can happen to just about anyone if they’ve been working for long enough and many people have had a job that they weren’t suited to.  But, if a theme of interpersonal issues keeps coming up, you might have a problem on your hands.

* When this article was originally published, debate raged over whether confidentiality could even be upheld legally.  The view of a lawyer writing for Recruiter Daily was that this was a grey area that hadn’t yet been tested in court.

First published in Recruiter Daily 1^st March 2010

1. the importance of the role and responsibilities - are they inflated?
2. the candidate’s achievements - are they embellished?
3. the reason given for leaving the company – does it mask poor performance, or a conflict situation?
4. tenure - has it been increased to remove gaps?
5. staff managed - did the candidate directly manage them? Was this in an acting capacity only?
6. revenue brought in or financial benefits – has the candidate exaggerated these to make herself appear more successful?
7. certification or degree – did the candidate complete this, or fail, or drop out? Has it been conferred yet?
8. academic dates - has the candidate changed these to cover failed or repeated subjects?
9. previous remuneration - has this candidate bumped it up a little in order to get a bigger salary this time?

Wood says that on top of the above, recruiters should be on the lookout for embellishments or “flourishes” generally. ”My favourite example of CV embellishment was given to me from a fellow recruiter,” he says. “The candidate had listed himself as the director of a national community service organisation. In interview, after a long series of probing questions, it turned out that the candidate’s organisation amounted to him and his sister moving some boxes from the garage for an elderly lady next door… once!” Subtleties in the language the candidate uses can hint at embellishments, he says.

For example, did the candidate do the whole lot, or “initiate the project”? Did they make important decisions or did they “research the issue”, “analyse the problem” or “make recommendations”? Did they work with other employees as opposed to “managing” or ”supervising” them? Other areas to approach with caution include:

• CV introduction and summary - canny candidates will tell you exactly what you want to hear in the CV summary, Wood says. “The summary might be true, of course, but communication or leadership skills are easier to exaggerate than job responsibilities or role lengths. This is because they are harder to define (and probity check) and they rely on candidates’ self-perception. They may also feel to candidates like less of an outright lie.”

• Hobbies - these might give you an indication of the candidate’s sociability etc,if they’re accurate. Wood’s research, however, shows that this is an area to which experienced recruiters pay far less attention than their inexperienced colleagues.

• Photos – research shows that good-looking people who put pictures on their CVs tend to get rated better than those that look average, but only if the CVs are mediocre, not if the CVs are strong, Wood says. His advice to recruiters: “Ignore the picture.”

• Academic qualifications - compared to inexperienced recruiters, experienced CV assessors place less emphasis on academic qualifications, particularly if they’re not relevant to the role. “If the degree is relevant (e.g. a medical degree for a GP), of course it’s important, but looking for any tertiary qualification, just for the sake of it, can cause you to miss good candidates. Research shows that academic qualifications are not as strong a predictor of future job performance as one might expect.”

“As recruiters we need to deal with embellishments and half-truths from candidates all of the way through the assessment process,” Wood says. “Many candidates will be perfectly honest, but there is a sizable proportion that will exaggerate and embellish to try to get that job. And some, like our ‘director of a national community service organisation’ will have absolutely no qualms about it.”

Left-brain/right-brain theory has frequently been oversimplified since the late 1960s, when elements of Nobel-Prize-winning split-brain research found their way into popular consciousness. But in the last 10 years, research has continued to shed more light on the area. And it’s easy to see the applicability to managing in general and project management in particular.

But a word of warning – over the last 40 years numerous management consultants have conducted training and implemented workplace changes, based on this research. But they often have not fully considered the consequences nor measured the benefits. If someone is telling you that you just need to “use your right-brain more” or complete a “left-brain/right-brain test”, it should be ringing alarm bells.

What the research does show is that when people are performing particular tasks, we consistently show greater activity in one side of the brain than the other. Some people also seem to have a clear preference for one approach. But brain hemisphere specialisation is not ‘all or none’. If you scan brain activity, any higher brain functions, such as those used in conversation or problem solving, engage both sides of the brain, to a degree.

This body of research highlights our two very different approaches to the world and how they relate to how our brains have evolved. A variety of concepts are obviously crucial for determining whether people have the competencies needed to succeed in roles. But by understanding which mental functions use one side of the brain to a greater extent than the other, project and program managers have another way to view role tasks, as well as the staff that may be working on them.

In simplified terms, the left-brain is used more for:

• language – grammar and vocabulary, literal meanings;
• linear, sequential processing and calculation;
• dealing with pieces of information in isolation, and deconstructing issues (these bullet points, for example); and
• use and manipulation of objects such as tools.

The left side of the brain is absolutely critical for our ability to communicate through written or spoken language. But different language disorders are related to different areas on the left side – it’s not just one big language area. Left-brain functioning also tends to emphasise the uses of things and this can even apply to other people, who may be seen as a means to an end or someone to compete with, when thinking in this way.

A heavily left-brain approach can sometimes lead to deconstructing something to such an extent that its holistic meaning or context is lost – resulting in a ‘Can’t see the forest for the trees’ situation. An example of this would be a senior manager reprimanding individual staff for turning up late and then implementing a clock-card system, but failing to see the broader pattern of those people all being from one unit where management is poor and staff morale is low.

The right-brain is used more for:

• complex visuo-spatial tasks – like imagining a drive route or designing a house;
• language also – but in relation to tone, metaphor and humour;
• context – pattern recognition and understanding part-whole relations;
• emotional processing and affiliation (still not completely settled in the research);
• flexibility and openness to novel tasks; and
• the element of creativity that connects disparate ideas and multiple meanings of objects.

Without right-brain function, you would not be able to interpret metaphors such as, “Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan” and understand them in relation to your organisation; you would only understand language in very literal terms. This is what happens to some people with right hemisphere damage.

Role Suitability and Development

Because different work tasks require different types of thinking, some are more closely related to activity on one side of the brain than the other. By understanding the difference, it is easier to appreciate how well a person may match a particular role and possibly help them if they are struggling to adapt their style. When moving to a new role they may be completely unaware that their typical approach is now ineffective. Project managers, and even program managers, can use this insight to help their team members understand that there are alternative approaches to work problems, that might be more effective.  To quote an oft-used metaphor, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

What follows are some scenarios that illustrate how understanding left- and right-brain approaches may help.  These are issues that a manager might consider anyway, but understanding left-brain/right-brain research can add extra perspective.

1. A manager is very competent at listing process steps and rationalising them, searching balance sheets for small cost reductions and monitoring staff adherence to KPIs. These are fairly ‘left brain’ approaches that she has taken to management and they have been very useful.  They’ve saved money and improved call centre efficiency greatly.

Some of the changes that reduced customer call times led to cost savings by reducing staff, but they also led to longer term problems with staff turnover and customer satisfaction.  The manager also wants to move into a less tightly defined senior management position, where she needs to consider long-term implications of business decisions.

In this scenario the organisation could consider:

• How she may need to adapt her approach to look at broader contextual factors (a more ‘right-brain approach’)
• What sort of mentoring or other assistance might help her either in her current role or in making a transition to a more senior role

2. A particular program requires a program manager with the ability to quickly build rapport with key contacts and stakeholders. They also need to consider where the market is heading over the next few years and think in overall business terms about what projects to green-light. A senior project manager with seemingly the right experience is being considered for the role – he is intelligent, logical and precise, but is also highly task and schedule focused, tending not to see the broader context of situations.

Will this person be the one most suited to the program manager role? What changes in thinking may he need to be successful in the role? Can he be given guidance to change his approach? By understanding the great skills that he has, but also realising his limitations, it may be easier to understand whether he is right for the higher level role, and if not, on which type of project he can provide the most value.

3. A scenario planner who is used to seeing the bigger picture, planning ahead and thinking creatively about potential problems and solutions (quite ‘righ-brain’ perspectives) is being considered for the role of a project scheduler, which requires much more linear, sequential reasoning. Are they the right person for the role? Would they struggle with the new role, both in their motivation and their ability to think in such a manner?

The two sides of the brain perceive the world in very different ways – when performing certain tasks there is a clear difference in activity between the two halves. With an awareness of these different approaches, project managers can help staff to view role tasks through a new set of eyes.

Further Reading

Left Brain Right Brain: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience – Springer and Deutsch

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World – Iain McGilchrist (2009)

“The danger of doing it late is that the HR professional has invested so much time in the process already that they don’t really want to find out anything bad,” says Wood, an Organisational Psychologist.

“It’s better if you see it as a serious part of the recruitment process, rather than just a hurdle to get past. Because if you just see it as the final step then you don’t probe on the hints of negative information; you just breeze through it.”

Some employers call referees before narrowing the shortlist to two or three candidates, Wood says. “They’ll make the check like an interview, and they won’t just reference check the one person who they think is going to get the job, they’ll reference check four or five people, which is a completely different mindset.

“It’s treating the reference check as one of the serious stages of the recruitment process and saying, ‘We’ve got some information from an interview’, for example, ‘but we want to verify that or triangulate that with information from another source. If it doesn’t match up we need to do more investigation’.”

However, contacting referees late in the process is understandable and often unavoidable. Phone calls can be time consuming, and “you don’t want to bother someone’s referees unless the candidate looks like someone you probably want to hire, and candidates don’t usually want you to bother their referees unless they’ve got a good chance”, Wood says.

Even if a recruiter or HR manager has limited time and resources, and can only call referees for a few candidates, they can strengthen the integrity of the process by having “the right mindset”.

Be prepared to probe

Rather than simply calling a referee and casually asking what they thought of a candidate, HR personnel and recruiters should prepare specific questions and be willing to ask follow-up questions, Wood says.

“A good interview is structured and standardised. You’ve got some questions, and then you branch out from that with probing.

“The referee doesn’t always want to tell you when the candidate has had interpersonal problems or couldn’t do their job very well – there might even be legal reasons why they don’t want to criticise their previous employee,” Wood explains.

“However, they don’t always like telling outright lies either – for this reason, hints of negatives will tend to leak out.

“You really need to probe further when there is implied criticism or they’re not convincing,” he says.

What to ask

Questions should verify the candidate’s abilities by addressing the competencies required for the role, Wood says. Referees should also be questioned about the candidate’s personal traits.

The five applicant traits that employers assess most often through reference checks are:

1. Cooperation/consideration – how they get along with others;

2. Mental agility – general intelligence;

3. Energy – how hard they work and how much they get done;

4. Dependability – punctuality, number of sick days they take; and

5. Style/refinement – how sophisticated they are, especially if they’re dealing with particular clients or customers.

Simple questions such as “Would you rehire the candidate?” can be worthwhile, “but I think you definitely need to make the referee work a little bit”, Wood says. “So you can ask things like, ‘Compared to other project managers, how would you rate them? Were they average, above average or below average?’ You can do that sort of thing and you can also ask some strategically placed open-ended questions, and I think you tend to get a bit more when you do that.”

Don’t expect the “unvarnished truth”

As important as reference checks are, research shows that a referee’s opinion is not as “predictive” as other forms of assessment, such as a good, structured interview with the candidate, Wood adds.

To begin with, the candidate is choosing their referees, so they’ll tend to choose people who they think look favourably on them. And because referees with negative information won’t necessarily divulge it, it’s still not “the unvarnished truth or an unvarnished opinion”.

“Ideally you should have a lot more influence on who the referees are rather than just letting candidates give them to you,” Wood says.

Some employers actually insist on interviewing a particular person, such as a direct manager from the last job the candidate left. “If the candidate doesn’t want to give their details there’s usually a reason… I understand if it’s a current employer who doesn’t know their staff member is going for a job – that makes sense. But if it’s a former employer and they won’t let you referee check them, you really want to ask why,” he says.

Another limitation is that referees don’t have any vested interest in taking the time to answer questions; after all, they’re not the one going for the job.

However, their level of patience can be telling in itself. “If a referee really likes the candidate and has a lot of respect for them they won’t mind; they’ll want to do them a favour, and that’s often a good sign,” Wood says.

His other tips for sound reference checking are:

• if you don’t have time to call all referees, consider who has worked with the candidate most recently and who has worked with them the longest. Direct managers are better than former peers who may have become friends, or someone two levels above the person;

• ask your candidate to call and warn referees who will be getting a call – it makes things go much more smoothly;

• verify the referee’s identity by ringing the HR department of the company first and getting them to put you through, rather than ringing the direct number your candidate has given you;

• look for themes and patterns – one manager a referee didn’t get along with doesn’t make a pattern; one job where they didn’t perform doesn’t make a theme. If necessary, ask the candidate for additional referees;

• be organised – especially if you are reference checking a lot of candidates. You will tend to be leaving messages for a lot of them, so you might get multiple people calling you back – you need to be able to quickly match their name up to who they are.

HR managers are increasingly being called on to run employee-opinion surveys, implement company-wide learning and development initiatives, introduce new performance management systems and handle mergers, Wood says.

“HR staff sometimes fail to see that what they are carrying out is actually a large project and should be treated with the respect it deserves – with a detailed project-management plan, budget, schedule, and risks and issues log,” he says.

“I’ve seen and talked to people who have got a very simple plan that doesn’t take into account all of the knowledge we have about running projects successfully. It might be a very simple Excel file with a list of tasks and dates, without enough detail about the subtasks involved, or about how some of those tasks are dependent on others being on time.”

According to Wood, an HR manager will know their department lacks project-management skills if their initiatives often:

• go well over budget;
• are not completed on time;
• fall well short of the outcomes they were supposed to achieve;
• have a lot of ‘surprising’ problems from left field; or
• are not resourced properly.

Before embarking on a project, an HR manager needs to consider its size and complexity, Wood says. “If it’s big and complex, it’s more likely to need a proper project-management plan.”

The manager should also consider the risks involved, such as the impact that missing a deadline or going over budget could have on the business.

“One of the things that a good project plan will have is a really good consideration of the risks and some contingency plans, and it will have an issues log. There will be much more consideration of the things that could go wrong,” he says.

The other key question to ask is whether or not it is a “one off”. Projects for which there is no standardised process to fall back on or experience to draw from are more unpredictable, so they are more likely to run over time or over budget, and less likely to realise all of their aims.

One benefit of adopting a formal project-management process is that a “proper” plan gets signed off by project sponsors at the start, Wood says.

“They’re people in positions of power who are allowing the project to go forward, so they have a vested interest in the project being successful – and they have the power to allow the budget to carry out the project, and to stop the project if it’s not going well.

If the stakes are particularly high, a technique called “stage gating” might help to mitigate risks. “That means a certain bit is done, the sponsors will check whether it’s on time and on budget and going well, and they won’t sign off the release of more money to go forward unless they’re satisfied,” he says.

“It reduces the risk of something going horribly off the rails and no one doing anything for three or four months – you check early on that it’s going well.”

At the end of a project, a post implementation review (PIR) will help to pinpoint mistakes and highlight lessons that can be learned for next time, says Wood.

There is more to project management than being systematic, he adds.

“One of the things I would say that a good project manager might have in common with a good HR person, is that a good project manager needs to be really good at stakeholder management and influencing people,” says Wood.

“They can’t just be technical… they have to be good at finding out what stakeholders want and persuading people and getting them on board. That’s one of the strengths an HR person would probably have that would make them a good project manager.

“They might just need to learn a bit more about the technical aspects. If you’ve got a mentor and maybe read a little bit about it, you can definitely learn on the job. And there are five-day courses and that sort of thing as well,” he says.

Sometimes managers implement a process and then walk away. But if key aspects of the business change, and the process doesn’t change accordingly, “what was great six months ago might be out of date”, he says.

If the organisation has no system for review, it could become “stuck in bureaucracy that doesn’t make sense anymore” for months, or even years, before anyone realises.

Striking the right balance between standardised process and flexible practice isn’t easy, Wood says.

“In very target-driven sales environments, it’s tempting to say, ‘As long as you get the results, I don’t care how you do it’, but in the long term that can create problems.”

Processes for recording staff actions and client reactions might initially demand more of people’s time but later reveal patterns that can be addressed and improved.

A standardised process can also help employees who are job-sharing or doing shift work to communicate important information, allowing one worker to pick up where the other left off, Wood says.

“In highly regulated or risk averse sectors, protocols and standardisation become crucial. For example, procedures for sterilisation and hygiene are likely to be indispensable in the medical profession,” he says. “Banking is another industry where there is great risk and also a lot of government regulation.”

Although “a little bit of process can be good in a lot of situations,” sometimes process will stifle spontaneity, creativity and a timely response, he adds. A racing car driver needs flexibility to exercise judgement and skill, and react in the moment – as do some managers.

“It’s really getting the balance right for your organisation, for your people, for the service it’s providing and for the level of risk,” he says.

A process for changing the process

Sometimes the issue is not so much the lack of process, but the lack of a “process for changing the process”, Wood says.

It is important to ensure workers are able to make suggestions to create, remove or improve processes. “They might be wrong sometimes, or they might not see the bigger picture, but they might have a really good point. And people who create the processes higher up don’t always realise the inefficiencies they create, or the repercussions.”

The process for suggesting change needs to go beyond an informal conversation where a worker says, “I want to change this”, and the manager says, “No, this is the way we’ve always done it”, Wood says.

At the same time, it needs to be user friendly. “I’ve talked to people in very large organisations who have wanted to make a positive change to the process, but it was so much work and it went to a committee… it was so hard that they never tried it again. You’ve got to make it easy.”

Best-practice involves a system where workers can put in a request, “almost like an appeal”, to have the process changed, he says.

Regular re-evaluation

Existing processes should be re-evaluated regularly. An important starting point is to ask various teams:

• Are there any processes that are making it difficult for you to do your job? and
• Are there any processes you’d like changed or added?

“If something’s bothering people, they’ll talk about it. They just need the invitation,” Wood says.

“Consulting carefully with people at the coalface rather than just dumping process on them is really important – and it needs to be followed through,” he adds. “There’s nothing worse than getting people to spend their time telling you what’s wrong and then nothing’s done.”

When Wood’s organisation, Adaps, set about re-evaluating its processes, he asked staff to list the benefits of first increasing, then decreasing, levels of process and standardisation.

Conducting this type of exercise forces employees to consider both sides of the equation, and makes them more open to change, he says.

“Initially it can be a little bit of work,” particularly if processes are being introduced rather than scaled back, “so that can be the challenge – helping people lift their gaze towards the horizon and look a little bit more long term”.

In terms of monitoring and maintaining a process, it helps to have someone who is naturally process-orientated to “champion” the cause – if no existing staff member is keen, it could be worth recruiting someone especially, Wood says.

There is a lot of material available about how to interview – such as behavioural event interviewing, asking for answers in the STAR format, or using probing questions, but sometimes recruiters go into interviews without a firm idea of just what they are trying to achieve.  There are five key things that recruiters should try to achieve when interviewing.

1. Match Competencies

A recruiter’s primary aim should be to match the candidate to the competencies identified as necessary to perform the job.  This is an obvious aim, but it must pervade all of the other four goals.

Competencies can be knowledge, skills, abilities and personal style needed to perform well in the job, and it’s the bread and butter of recruiters – it may not even be consciously considered that much. You also want to establish a match to the culture.  Sure, someone with 10 years in the Melbourne Symphonic Orchestra might fit into the culture of the Armed Forces, but you’d want to check.

2. Verify Experience

The next goal is to verify the person’s experience.  People embellish, omit, exaggerate and downright lie on their CVs.  But it is more difficult to do this during face-to-face questioning, if the interviewer asks direct questions.

For example, when a candidate states that they managed a project, recruiters should ask: “Were you the one managing the project or were you reporting to the project manager? How did you jump from project coordination to managing a $1.2m project?”

When a candidate uses the word “we” a lot, it may be a sign that the person is a modest team player, but interviewers should ask for clarification of who actually had ownership and accountability for final decisions.

3. Gather More Information

CVs have information gaps that need to be filled and can raise as many questions as they answer.  Recruiters need to gather more information through questioning, using the CV as a starting point for their assessment.

Don’t settle for vague or glib answers.  Ask, for example, “Who had final sign-off on the budget”, “Who worked with you on managing the budgets? What were their roles?” and “What was the exact size of the budgets you were working with?”

4. Assess Motivation

This is an important factor to gauge because without a clear and strong motivation for the role, the candidate may be gone in three months, leaving you red-faced.  Or they might take one of those other four roles that they are being recruited for by other agencies.  Examples of the types of questions that can help determine a candidate’s motivation include:

• “Why do you want this job in particular?” They should be able to answer this.
• “How do you feel about the 90-minute drive to work?  Have you done that before?”
• “Are you willing to update/alter your CV before we send it to the client?”  And then see how quickly the candidate does this.
• “Are you able to rearrange your schedule to come in to our office in the next few days?”

5. Observe Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills are less important for some roles than others, but they’re virtually always relevant to a candidate’s success at a client interview.  Listen and observe during the interview, but also think about whether you really need super smooth, five-out-of-five social skills or whether it’s just a ‘nice-to-have’.

Some of the obvious things to look out for are:

• Social ‘appropriateness’ (although people have different ideas about what this means);
• Strong prejudices or inflexible beliefs;
• Emotions – indications of impatience, confidence, anxiety, conceit, enthusiasm, boredom, etc; and
• Communications skills, as evidenced when a candidate:
• Is articulate and easy to understand;
• Presents ideas in a structured way and in a logical sequence;
• Listens and comprehends, and answers actual questions asked; and
• Does not interrupt too often.

Good techniques are essential to interviewing, but having clear goals is equally important, otherwise you are just blindly following a process.

Don’t be that interviewer who has no preparation and no clear interview goals, walks in with only a brief glance at the CV and says, “So, ummmm, you worked at Telmar Industries?”

“It might sound like a minor point, but getting this balance right can be challenging, particularly early in one’s recruitment career. And the approach you take can have a big impact on your long term success,” he says.

The danger in getting it wrong is that recruiters sometimes lean too far one way – often starting out by trying too hard to be a candidate’s best friend, and then once their confidence grows, swinging to the other end of the spectrum – mercilessly interrogating a candidate with no regard for their feelings, he says.

Wood recalls interviewing, in his early career, “a senior candidate who gave off an arrogant vibe of ‘do you really need to be asking me these questions?’ He also explicitly said that his experience was strong enough that he couldn’t see the point of being interviewed, particularly by me. At the time I questioned whether I should go ahead with my entire set of questions. But, I nervously pushed ahead and as the interview progressed he turned out to be ill-equipped for the role. He also had a few half-truths in his CV. His confidence quickly fell away as I continued to ask questions, because I had a clear idea of what I was seeking, and arrogance and rudeness weren’t among the requirements.”

For more senior positions it is especially important that recruiters do ask the hard follow up questions and try to dig, because “getting it wrong for these senior roles is likely to have far more impact on an organisation”, Wood says. “And you need to do it even when it’s obvious that a candidate really doesn’t want you to; especially when a candidate really doesn’t want you to! What makes it difficult is that they may be someone you want to build a good relationship with in the future. This can be difficult if you have to interrupt them going off on major tangents, keep asking questions of someone who is deliberately vague, or uncover embarrassing exaggerations in their CV. By the same token, the candidate should probably be the one feeling apologetic if they do have those exaggerations in their CV in the first place.”

New recruiters sometimes forget that it is actually their right to ask questions, Wood says. “The candidate is applying for a position that in some cases pays a substantial salary and their performance may have a significant impact on the success of the organisation. Given the importance of the hiring decision, of course they need to be interviewed by you. And yes, it’s okay if at times it makes them a little uncomfortable.”

Wood recommends keeping the following factors in mind when attempting to get the “friendliness balance” right:

1. Your obligation to the client - ”First and foremost, if you don’t perform due diligence and properly assess your candidates then you are more likely to send poor performers to your client. Bear in mind, though, that if you don’t treat the candidate nicely and respectfully, it might decrease your chances of them actually accepting an offer when it arrives – and off to another company they go.”

2. Professional ethics - ”Again, if you aren’t properly assessing candidates and are instead giving them a free kick, then you aren’t doing your job as a recruiter – this has repercussions for both the client organisation and all of the other candidates for the role.”

3. Reputation of the recruitment agency - ”If you don’t interview properly then it will eventually catch up with your agency, because clients won’t get the quality of candidates that they should. “In the long run, poor or incomplete interviewing also lets the whole profession down.”

4. Common courtesy - ”He or she is a real human being you are dealing with and it’s often an uncomfortable situation for them. They need to be treated with respect for no other reason than that. Put yourself in their shoes – we’ve all been interviewed before.”

5. Your future relationship with the candidate - ”If you build a strong, respectful working relationship with a candidate you may be placing them in roles for the rest of your career. They may also refer other talented staff to you. They might become a future client of yours, asking you to recruit staff for their team… or their company.”

“The best interviewers I’ve worked with are always very friendly and polite to candidates, while also making it clear that the candidate is here to be interviewed for a job… a job they haven’t been put forward for yet,” Wood says. “You can smile the whole way through if you want, as long as you keep asking the questions you ought to. It is an investigation of their suitability, not just a fireside chat.”