Weblogs as an interview tool

The pace of the projects that we’re currently working on is starting to pick up, so we’ve just recruited an undergraduate student to work with us over the summer. We’re fortunate in having a number of highly-rated universities within easy reach of us, so there’s a good-sized pool of talent to recruit from - and we’ve been extremely impressed with calibre of applicants that came to us.

One of the problems of recruiting technical expertise is that it’s rare that you’re in the position of knowing more about the field than they do - after all, if you’re recruiting a specialist, it’s usually because you need them to do the work that you’re unable to. So assessing their level of expertise can be difficult.

What made the process very much easier for us was the fact that both we - and several of the candidates - run weblogs. From the entries that we’ve posted over the last few months, the potential candidates could get a pretty good idea of what we’re about, and also an insight into the way we’re working. Some of the candidates mentioned their blogs in their applications, so one of the first things that we did while sifting through the pile of likely people was to take a look at what they’d been posting about. It quickly became obvious that the strongest candidates knew what they were talking about because they’d posted about it over an extended period of time. It’s a great way of establishing who’s a genuine expert, and who’s just read a couple more pages in the manual than you have!

Not only that, but reading someone’s blog is something of a window into their personality. That’s not to say that we were assessing them on the quality of their prose - but it did mean that we had more to base a decision on than just an hour’s conversation, in what’s an extremely stressful situation for everyone. And the same is true for the candidates getting to know about us - there’s only so much you can tell someone about your organisation in an interview, because the interviewer is supposed to be the one doing the listening. But by reading through the past entries on our blog, the candidates were able to get a much clearer picture of what we’re like to work with than they would get through an hour’s conversation.

Our new colleague - who’s a prolific blogger in his own right - joins us next week, so we’re looking forward to a third voice cutting through.

Filed under Blogs |