The Art of Interrogation

I was watching Dragons' Den the other night.  I haven't seen it for ages as I tend to feel the Dragons' take a condescending and arrogant approach to everyone who is on the programme.  But I thought I'd give this new series a go. There was a chap (Rupert) on who had invented a range of stuff to do with flying.  He came across as more bumbling professor than polished entrepreneur.  I can imagine that many people would instantly dismiss him as a bit of an eccentric.  In fact that's what a couple of the dragons did.  The poor bloke looked like being sent off without any serious consideration until one of the Dragons (the one with the background in recruitment!) bothered to ask him a couple of pertinent questions.  One of them being around how much money he'd made from pervious inventions.  One year he had made $800,000.  Suddenly all the Dragons perked up.

If you missed it you can view the episode via iplayer here.
 
James Caan finally invested in him (£80,000 for 49% of his business). 
 
Anyway, my point is this... without proper interrogation Rupert would have walked off with nothing. 
 
I was on Bill Boorman's radio show on Monday talking about the skills recruiter's need in the current market and (without giving the long rambly story of James Caan and Rupert the inventor) I suggested interrogation and interviewing skills.
 
Recruiters need to be able to "interrogate" their client to understand their exact requirements, they should come away from the meeting with the ability to write a job description, person specification and full company briefing document.  They should then be able to create competency and skills based interview questions to pose to each candidate they meet.
 
In a strong economy I feel skills in this area have slipped.  Over the year's I have done a lot of work with one particular recruitment firm.  In the "old days" they would write a job description and person specification from scratch for each role.  They would write competency based interview questions against these documents and then for each candidate they shortlisted they would produce an written assessment of how they matched up against the job description and person specification.  As client's pushed to reduce the timescales on assignments and, no doubt, as complacency set in all these standards slipped.  They ended up using the job description provided by the client, not bothering with set interview questions and scraping the assessment document all together.  Along the way I suspect the consultants stopped using their interrogation and interview skills to quite the same level. 
 
Now, I suggest, that if recruiters are to retain clients and make successful placements these skills will have to be relearned or reinstated.  Interviewing isn't an innate skill but it's one ALL successful recruiters must have.

By the way if you are interested in personal development why not check out our new site UK Recruiter Plus - the definitive online guide for the recruitment industry.  

Comments

[Duncan Elliott]

An excellent point Louise and it chimes exactly with my most recent blog post, which was all about recruiting on skills rather than assumptions.

[keith Robinson]

Really nice piece and could'nt agree more about taking a "brief" from the client.