Once you’ve moved past the first stage of the hiring process, it’s time to start interviewing the candidates whose resumes and cover letters impressed you. Much like resumes and cover letters, interviews offer you a chance to get a glimpse of how a prospective employee acts in a professional setting, and lets you get a better idea of whether they’d be a good fit for your company, both in terms of personality and work habits. When you interview candidates for your next open position, make sure to keep an eye out for the following red flags of a potential bad hire, and protect yourselves during the hiring process with an Employment Practices Liability Insurance policy.
They Arrive Late - Or Not at All
If your interviewee has any scheduling conflicts, they should inform you during your correspondence about the interview. An interviewee who arrives late or skips the interview altogether should immediately be tossed out. If they cannot manage to be respectful of your time for one brief interview, they likely will not be respectful of anyone’s time at their job.
However, feel free to use your best judgement - if it seems to genuinely be something sudden and unavoidable (for example, if the candidate unexpectedly falls ill or has transportation trouble) and the candidate communicated with you about it as soon as possible and sounded apologetic, you can give them a second chance if you feel that they were otherwise impressive. However, if the candidate’s tardiness or truancy was not adequately explained or you didn’t feel very strongly about their resume one way or the other, this might be a good place to start narrowing down your pool of prospective employees.
They Aren’t Prepared
As Monster says, someone who approaches a job interview lazily will bring the same approach to his or her career, and may not care about your company and position. The following details indicate that a candidate didn’t adequately prepare for the interview:
- They aren’t dressed professionally
- They don’t have any questions prepared for you
- They don’t seem to know important details about your company or the position
- They haven't brought a resume, a pen and paper, or other important things
They Can’t Explain Themselves
It happens - some people do express themselves better on paper than they do in person. However, a prospective employee should have no problem giving some examples of work they’ve done and why it would make them an asset to your company, especially concrete examples of their work (such as, “I increased sales by 30%”). It’s not bad to have a humble employee - someone who excessively boasts about how wonderful of an employee they are may not have the best effect on your office atmosphere - but someone who can’t go into any detail on what they’ve done in the past or what their skills are may not have much to discuss. As we mentioned last week, many people tend to go vague to obscure a lack of real, valuable information.
They’re Negative
It’s completely normal for a person to look for a new job if they aren’t happy with their current one, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons for an employee to be unhappy with their current job and coworkers. However, there’s a difference between tactfully describing their grievances and completely insulting their job and team, and someone who is extremely negative will likely treat your workplace the same way. In addition, someone constantly insulting their workplace and blaming their coworkers for problems and failures will likely be an irresponsible employee and bad team player.
You also want to look at how they treat you and your team during the interview. Obviously an openly rude employee should not be tolerated, but some people will treat the interviewer and high-level employees with respect while acting rude and dismissive towards other employees, such as receptionists. An employee who can’t manage to be positive and polite during a brief interview will absolutely carry that behavior into his or her career.
About Axis Insurance Services
At Axis Insurance Services, we aim to help our customers identify their exposures and protect themselves. Founded in 1999, we offer insurance programs to a wide variety of professionals and industries including attorneys, real estate, healthcare, architects, and more, and also have a wholesale division. We pride ourselves on offering flexible insurance coverage tailored specifically to each customer’s needs. To learn more about our solutions, contact us at (201) 847-9175 to speak with one of our professionals.
