As a part of the Talent Acquisition team, hiring managers within your business will often come to you, expecting you to know everything about the position that they need to hire for their team.

Hot tip- you are not expected to know everything but by asking the right questions, it will make it much easier for you to share your company’s mission and vision with the candidates that you approach for the role.

Below are some tips and questions for you to ask the Hiring Manager at the start of the process to save you, and your organisation, considerable time in the hiring process:

Take the brief

Book a 30 minute meeting with the hiring manager. Don’t waste your time starting to fill the role without first having this conversation. Send a meeting brief so that you and the manager know what to expect from the meeting… specifically that you’re not looking for a candidate that doesn’t exist 🙂

Meeting Outcomes

Team:

Understand who are they, what they’re looking for and what technologies they use.

Role:

Understand what the candidate will be doing. Problems that need to be solved, how will they make an impact in the role, autonomy in the team, stakeholders and any other skills the role might need in the next 6-12 months that can be hired for now.

Candidate:

Experience needed for the role, core technologies or software they will be working with, personal traits and attributes.

Growth:

Career progression and growth opportunities.

Market:

What’s the state of the market and how realistic is it to find the right person for the role. If you’re unsure, reach out to the TalentVine team and we can find this info for you.

Below is a list of questions that will help you get started and learn about the team. It is also recommended that you spend some time with the team, either in a group or one on ones and get to know them and understand how they work, them and the role they need to be filled. In turn, you’ll be able to screen candidates correctly, share more insights with the candidate and not waste anyone’s time…. we all know how frustrating that can be.

Questions

Team:

1. What is the mission of the team
2. What problem does the team solve for our customers?
3. Who is currently in the team? Level, diversity, tenure
4. What are their strengths/weaknesses?
5. Where is the team based? Remote, local?
6. Will there be anyone else doing the same role as this person in the team? If so, who? What level are they at? Will they provide technical mentorship? Will this new person have the opportunity to mentor anyone?
7. How would you rate your existing teams’ performance?
8. What are you like as a leader? What would your team say you are like as a leader?

The role:

1. Why is this role open?
2. What will this person do specifically — list of bullet points and then ensure all of these are in the job description
3. What type of environment will they work in?
4. What does success look like?
5. What will they do in their first 30–60–90 days?
6. Who will they work with mostly?

The Candidate:

1. What skills must they have?
2. What skills are nice to have? What can they learn on the job?
3. What soft skills are required?
4. What companies have done this well that you would like them to come from?
5. Do you know anyone who could do this role? Have you spoken to them about it?

Growth:

1. What does career progression look like for this person?
2. How are you going to invest in their career?
3. What will happen if this person does not start in the next 12 weeks
4. What is the salary? Level needed?

From all this information, you should now be able to pitch the role to the candidate and make them excited about the role.
The interview process is also very important. At the brief meeting, you should ask the hiring manager who is the best person in the team to get involved with the interview process. As you get to know the team and business better, you will get to know interviewer’s strengths and the areas they might need some help with.
Make sure that the interview process is consistent so you can collect data, check for what needs to be improved to make sure it is scalable.

This article was written by Cloe Stanbridge and initially appeared on https://medium.com/@cloe.stanbridge/in-brief-how-to-take-a-job-brief-b6662e72d2d8