We’re recruiting again – there seem to be no end to staff issues at the moment, so we’re pretty much at capacity.
And when it comes recruitment, I’m pretty ruthless – after all, I’ve got to be happy with the successful candidate giving out critical HR advice in our name, so they’ve got to know what they’re doing.
Step one of The Wahlen Gauntlet is designed to quickly and painlessly weed out the people who aren’t HR experts – a straightforward 10-question employment law quiz, which requires a minimum of 70% to proceed to the next stage.
You’d think everyone applying for an HR job would ace it, but you’d be wrong – only 20% applicants actually make the grade.
Those 20% head onto the next hurdle – the “timed email inbox exercise”, where we simulate the day-to-day job they’d be doing – responding to client questions via email, and providing the right advice for 30 minutes.
Another 15% fall by the wayside here – my favourite failure at this point has got to be the candidate that responded to an urgent “client” question with this:
“I will have to look into this and get back to you”.
Nice try, but if you don’t know the answer, the show’s over.
Another candidate’s time was up this week – not because he didn’t know the answers, but because he used AI to answer the questions.
I’ve nothing against AI in principle, but when you cut and paste without reformatting, and blindly send off the words the machine wrote for you without checking them, it’s never likely to end well, which it didn’t in this case.
I must admit to being slightly concerned that AI could scupper the whole recruitment process, but based on this experience, that’s not happening anytime soon…
