How to be a Headhunter - - Part 4 - Phone Screening

The ability to pick up a phone, engage people, and assess them very quickly is a critical life skill, not just a recruitment skill.

This course will cover 3 key areas:

1. How to approach, prepare and present yourself on a phone screen, so you are received as a top performer in your field.

2. Separator questions: questions that allow you to differentiate a top performer from an average performer.

3. What are the psychological markers of a performer?

While screening candidates on the phone, keep the following 4 key objectives in mind:

1. You need to be perceived as a leading talent acquisition professional. Candidates should be impressed and enjoy interacting with you.

1. Candidates should come off your call, having a higher level of respect for you. Your relationship with them should be stronger after the call, not weaker.

1. You’ll need to assess the candidates to determine if they are top performers.

1. You need to be gathering competitive intelligence: extract data (net profit, revenue, new products, etc.) and relay it to your business heads, CEO or board. You’ll begin speaking the same language as them and build a strategic partnership with them.

Present yourself as one of the leading talent acquisition professionals, using the following 4 points:

1. Use a phone script and be structured in your approach to the candidate

2. Have a structured and organized selection process, and describe the key milestones of the process to the candidates so they always know what they are and what they’re doing;

3. Be very familiar with the candidate’s background so you seem knowledgeable at all times;

4. Understand the industry and the local and global trends, regardless of the field.

Phone Screen Road Map:

Throughout any phone or live conversation, you need to be energized and energizing; you’re pitching them their dream job, and it’s a very exciting moment for both of you.

1. Greet the candidate, introduce yourself and why you’re calling.

1. Compliment the candidates and ascertain that they are free to speak in confidence.

1. If they are, explain the process to highlight that it’s a premium process.

1. Proceed to ask the questions.

So far, you’ve been very polite with the candidate, built a relationship with them, and started screening them with 4 simple, but technical questions that will take 5-10 minutes, and you’ll gauge that person’s capabilities. An empirical and experienced candidate will be able to answer such questions off the top of their head without faltering.

Example: interviewing ahead of marketing

Q1: “What are your key customer segments and what are the key psychological drivers that are pushing this segment?”

Ans: A Top marketer understands the psychology of their customer very well and knows who is buying from them and why.

Q2: “What is your customer value proposition and can you cite an example where you were able to reduce cost by removing items from the CVP that the customer did not hold valuable?”

Ans: A Smart Marketer will look at your product or service, they’ll identify what the customer values and tell you to focus on it, and they will eliminate what the customer doesn’t care for, need or want. They’ll therefore be able to reduce cost and increase value

Q3 - Financial: “Can you tell me what is the annual and lifetime value of your customer and what is your customer acquisition cost?”

Ans: A Marketing professional should know the customer acquisition cost and the annual value of the customer, off the top of their head, to know how many customers they can attract with a set budget

Q4 – financial: “Can you describe a marketing initiative that you led? What was the marketing spend and the return on investment (ROI)? How did you measure it and what was the impact on the bottom line?”

Ans: This is the only question where the person can open up. You’re looking to see if they’re bottom-line driven if they’re using success metrics if they’re watching their market investments and the return they yield. They should have a quick response that’s equation-like: we spent 5M USD, but in dealerships, we increased customer throughput by 42% over the past 60 days, resulting in an increase in sales by 23% and a net profit of xx USD.

Never ask a candidate “Tell me about yourself”.

When conducting a phone screen, you want to immediately ask very detailed questions and separate candidates by asking questions that underperformers cannot actually answer.

Even in a social setting, when you’re introduced to someone who’s a top professional, such as a go-cart racer, you need to ask questions such as “What do you do with your carburettor?” If you meet a personal trainer, you want to ask “What does your carbohydrate and protein loading look like? Does it change throughout the year?” A top performer will be excited to be asked this question and launch into a passionate account and explanation, while an under-performer will get evasive and defensive.

Another thing you need to focus on is having the mindset of an owner. If you’re hiring a marketer, you need to ask, “How much should we be spending on marketing? What ROI should we expect from marketing? What’s the impact of the marketing on the bottom line?”

It goes back to having the owner mindset: What are the key things that you would like to know?

Addressing the director of a supply chain: “If I reduced your inventory days by 1 day, what would the cost of savings be? / What have you done to reduce your freight error rate (FER)?”

Addressing the CEO of a bank: “What is your revenue split across corporate, retail, and other business lines? How will that revenue look in the next 5 years?”

You need to touch on what are the details that only somebody who’s done the job and works to optimize the job, would know.

Separator questions are not that hard to create: for every job that you do, you need to write down the top 4 separator questions before you get on the phone with a candidate. A great thing to do is look at your candidate list, and if there’s someone who’s perhaps semi-retired, you can call them in for an interview, ask them what they feel are the critical elements of the job, and gauge what are the critical tasks and behaviors that someone needs to have to be successful in their role. That’s how you unlock separator questions for a role.

So far we’ve covered:

How to approach a phone screen (4 key objectives) to:

1) present yourself as the top professional in talent acquisition:

A. Be structured, use a phone script

B. Have a clearly defined and structured selection process and inform candidates of it,

C. Be extremely familiar with the candidate’s background and experiences,

D. Understand industry global and local trends,

2) Build a relationship with the candidate,

3) Assess the candidate, and identify the top 1% performers,

4) Capture competitive intelligence from candidates to understand what competitors are working on

- Separator questions (socially, at a party, or actually in an interview) will allow you to tell experts from amateurs in a matter of minutes.

What you should never do:

• Never be rude, or anything other than excited and positive (always come to them like you’re bringing them the opportunity of a lifetime)

• Never be generic, even when you’re talking about industry trends, cite specific numbers. Always ask specific technical questions to understand the competency level of the candidate.

There are many psychological markers, but here are 4 of the easiest ones to spot:

Value for time: Top performers are driven and dedicated and have a lot to accomplish in a short time. If you’re not a part of their agenda or their purpose, they’re not going to invest their time with you. The underperformer is exactly the opposite; they may not have a clear-cut sense of direction will have a lack of vision, and be open to investing their time in different activities. For instance, the top 1% of CEOs will typically spend their entire career in a single industry.

When you’re speaking with a top performer, they’ll share achievements as time-based results.

A candidate is hired to get results and if they’re fired, it’s due to their lack of results.

You can tell if a candidate is result-oriented, even before the conversation starts, just by looking at the candidate’s CV; top performers will articulate results in numbers, ratios, and percentages and underperformers, will use vague terms like “significantly”, and “exceeded budgets”.

Key behaviours:

1. Stating results in numbers

2. Benchmark themselves against the competition

3. Do they know who the top 1% are?

Ask your candidate “Who are the top 1% in the industry?” “What books are you reading?” (A person’s reading list is tied to their ambition level; underperformers will not be reading anything work-related).

The secret to delivering great results is energizing others to deliver great results.

• It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re loud; introverts can still be full of energy and energizing. You’re looking for people who have excitement, a drive, a passion for their profession.

• It can also show up as a person who has many, overflowing ideas, so much so that you almost have to pull them back and slow them down. Conversely, for underperforming employees, you feel like you have to pull them along.

• Apply this easy and telling metric: coming out of the interview, are you more energized or less so? Did you end up feeling charged up or drained after the discussion? You will feel this immediately even on the phone.

Focus is a ubiquitous pillar of any success story. If you do a regression analysis of top CEOs in the world, you’ll realize that all of them have been in their industries for more than 30 years.

When you’re interviewing someone for a marketing job, you’ll prefer a candidate who says “I’ve wanted to get into marketing my whole life, and now I’m finally a CMO, I just want to further my skills and become the best CMO that I can be” over one who says “I’ve been a CMO for several years, and I’m looking at my options; I can go into sales at this point, or maybe your position or something else.”

Top candidates don’t focus on possibilities, they focus on who they want to become, and it’s an expression of their identity because their sense of self is expressed through their work.

Apply the patented ring of focus with your candidates during the phone screen. Consider their:

1. Relationships (professional, personal, and intimate) People who are successful align their relationships.

A. Professionals' relationships: (they’ll put a lot of work into them) They’ll identify who the top 1% are, they’ll build relationships with them and learn from them. Innovation and development happen at this level;

B. Personals: Top bankers in the world will be friends with other top bankers. They will have an ecosystem of success that will create an upward spiral for their careers.

C. Intimated: Historically, the most powerful royals, only married within their own to keep power and wealth centralized. In a basic sense, top performers make sure that their spouse shares the same vision that they have.

2. Community service: top performers will use their profession to be involved in the community and give back. They’ll perform acts of service that tie into their profession while reinforcing their skill set, relationships, and success.

3. Geography: Top performers will not let geography stand in the way of their careers, they’ll find the epicentre, move there and develop themselves.

4. Hobbies: top performers will practice hobbies with other top performers from their industries. There, they will share ideas, educate each other, and get an edge in the market. Underperformers will participate in hobbies with people who have nothing to do with their profession.

5. Education: courses and qualifications: Top performers will constantly be up-skilling themselves in a way that’s completely in line with their careers. You will often see underperformers take a course that’s not related to their profession.

6. Reading and writing: Ask them what they’re reading; underperformers will read things that are not related to their profession, and they’ll say I only read for fun. Someone who’s in the top 1% will read a minimum of 24 books that are related to their profession. When a top performer read this much, they’ll be flooded with ideas that they’ll be almost forced to express, so they might write papers, books, blogs, etc.

On a phone call with a potential candidate, you can immediately tell if a person is focused:

• The purpose of the call is to qualify the person for the job, and a top performer will highlight their skills, and no matter how much you digress, they will circle the dialogue back to the topic, and they’ll be focused on winning the selection process.

Here are the steps that you need to go through:

1. Set up and conduct the phone screen

2. Create and use separator questions

3. Identify the markers of a top performer (easiest 4 to catch: the value of time, result orientation, energy, and focus)