With the job market revving to pick up again in Myanmar, organizations - both local and international - will soon experience a growing influx of CVs from potential candidates. Recruiters, brace yourselves, busy times ahead!

While CVs are useful in providing an overview into candidates' experiences, they may not always provide the answers that an employer needs to assess candidates in full. It’s not enough for businesses to go through all the CVs and applications, even after your Talent Management System has filtered out the CV pool.

So, once the filtering has been completed, how would recruiters determine who from the remaining pool of talent is ‘the right fit’ for their company? 

First and foremost, recruiters must have a clear understanding of what their business needs and need to be aligned with hiring managers on what the requirements are. Recruiters need to be able to ask for more clarifications and not settle for simple job descriptions. Too often, poor communication and misalignment lead to endless back and forth between recruiters and departments.

Find below 3 of many additional areas you may want to cover in your interviews and overall assessment of your candidates. You may have more that are relevant to the nature of your business, but we hope the ones presented below provide you with additional angles of analysis.

Asking the Right Questions

While skills can be taught on the job, a person’s inner behaviour is difficult to change. Therefore, it is important to understand the candidate’s inner behaviours - their interests, their motivation and drive - when trying to determine if they are suited for a specific role within your company.

Beyond personality assessments, focusing on asking the right interview questions can help you determine whether the potential candidate has the work experience, skills and values necessary to perform the job. Open-ended questions such as “Can you describe what your primary job scope was?” and “Tell me about your most difficult problem you've had, and how you handled the situation” can help you evaluate how involved the candidate was in finding solutions and achieving results.

Realizing the Candidate’s Potential

You may not find the ‘perfect’ candidate that checks off all items on your list and meets all your criteria. But it’s also important to analyze the candidate’s potential and future value. What can they bring to the organization in 12 or 24 months? Do they have the right attitude or fresh ideas that could benefit your business once they are fully onboarded? Do they have the potential to grow into a leader? These factors are important and should be given serious consideration during the hiring process particularly for roles with a clear path to managerial responsibilities.

Their Ability to Embrace New Technology

Technology will play an increasingly central part in a business, regardless of the industry. Recruiters should assess the candidate’s current level of digital literacy, as well as their willingness and ability to embrace new technology and tools to make their work easier. After all, candidates who refuse to adopt new and better technology into their daily work routine may impede their own ability to perform, and will never learn new skills or enhance their pre-existing abilities.

While hard skills should not take a backseat to soft skills, placing more value and consideration in a candidate’s contextual intelligence will help reduce the risk of making a bad hire that will leave the organization quickly.