The attributes you should look for in your candidates

It’s no secret that employing someone is difficult – it’s never easy to judge a candidate just from an interview. There are however qualities to look out for. These can be spotted through a candidate’s behaviour and their previous employment.

Interviewing for your next recruit can be stressful. It requires patience and a keen eye; especially when you consider the fact that you will have lots of CVs to decipher and many candidates to meet!

Every business is different. As with any role, the employer strives to find the right candidate who will not only fill the position but offer great potential to grow within the company.

In this blog, we’re focussing on the employer’s side of recruitment. That’s not to say that this is inadequate information for job seekers.

Candidates should be…

Likeable

This may be an obvious point, but it’s important that on the first encounter they’re polite, engaged, easy-going and cooperative with you.

Something else you can try out to test their friendliness is to encourage your employees to interact with them. You could get one of your staff to answer the door to the candidate when they arrive and then another to offer the interviewee a drink.

Confident

For some employers, there’s confident and then there’s too confident. The issue is that confidence can be misconstrued as arrogance. Just bear in mind that in an interview a candidate will feel the need to sell themselves.

The welcoming confidence attributes you can keep an eye out for is ensuring that your candidate interacts with other employees, makes eye contact with you and offers a firm hand shake to everyone they meet.

Eager to learn

No matter how experienced a candidate is, they should always be willing to learn and adapt to your processes. Your approach may differ to their previous role, so they should be open to change the way in which they work to suit you and the business.

Honest

This is one of the most sought out qualities in a candidate. A great way to assess their decency is by listening to the way in which they talk about their previous employer. What’s the reason they’re leaving? Are they leaving on good terms?

Something else to look out for is their openness talking about their flaws. Everyone has them. Candidates should always have a negative to say about themselves.

Self-sufficient and a team player

This is the ideal candidate – someone who can manage their own workload and work within a team. It’s always worth asking about their previous working environments as it allows you to hear how they work and interact with others.

Do you require recruitment support?

Our client services at YourRecruit are designed around you and your business. We work with our clients to create an ideal candidate persona before we even start sending CVs over to you.

Once we’ve spoken and met with you, we can usually envisage the ideal candidate that would suit your vacancy. We may even have someone ideal to recommend right away!

If you require support with filling your latest vacancy, then get in touch today by calling our head office on 01883 330 336 or email us: info@yourrecruit.com

You can find out more about our client services by heading over to our recruitment services page.