When it comes to hiring new employees, most of the time employers are too busy analyzing the individual’s skills and background to really take the time to consider how well these candidates will function within the teams that they would be joining if hired. As important as these general interview goals may be to the executive search and hiring process, given the way that most organizations function these days, through the work of teams as opposed to individuals, it is in this capacity that employers must begin to work more effectively to assess the ability of their candidates to function within such an environment. Failing to find individuals capable of working well with others can have a variety of negative effects on the effectiveness, productivity, and morale, particularly if others are forced to step in and pick up the slack left by a poor team player.
To help employers learn what to look for in their candidates with regard to their ability to blend in with their prospective teams, here are a few tips brought to you by executive search firms to guide these efforts.
1. One of the first steps interviewers should take in accessing how well a candidate will work within a team is by seeing how they interact with the team’s leader. This can be achieved through a simple extension of the interview process bringing in the team leader in question to help in the questioning.
2. Teams tend to function as goal oriented entities, so to determine how well the candidate in question can do so will need to be determined, preferably through a line of questioning aimed at assessing how well the individual has worked to meet goals in the past, as well as how organized and deadline driven they have been in doing so and what the results were at a time when they failed to meet a specific goal.
3. For the next step the employer will need to have already created a highly detailed job description, carefully laying out all the duties and responsibilities entailed in the position. While this is of course a typical practice in the hiring of any new employee, it is important that this be explained to the candidate as it relates to the internal functioning of the team.
4. Two more highly important traits required of team members are the abilities to share resources and communicate effectively. These two points mean that individuals must be willing to share everything from physical resources such as materials and computers, to immaterial information such as ideas and feedback on projects. This ability can best be assessed by inquiring about situations in which the candidate met with communications problems and other issues in these areas and how they dealt with these issues.
5. Finally, one of the most important aspects of any team member is their commitment and dedication to the goals and objectives of the team. Companies are made up of teams and teams are made up of individuals, so by showing commitment to the success of their team and its members, each individual is ultimately striving for the success of the overall organization, and looking at the dedication of a candidate to their previous teams and employers can be a strong indicator of how they might be able to transition this work to your company.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
