Last reviewed: 22 June 2022
By Diane Lightfoot, CEO, Business Disability Forum
Once you have determined the skills you are looking for in role, how do you find that elusive “best” candidate? The answer, more often than not, is NOT the traditional panel interview.
Rip up tradition
Under the Equality Act, a work trial or placement or working interview are all reasonable adjustments for a candidate who might struggle with or be disadvantaged by a traditional panel interview. Best practice – as you will know from elsewhere in this toolkit – includes asking every candidate what adjustments they need at every stage of the recruitment or application process: “How can we make this the best possible experience for you?” But what about ripping up tradition and instead focusing on a recruitment experience or test that allows to really find the best candidate for the job – by letting them show you what they can do rather than tell you?
Traditional panel interviews show you how good someone is at… panel interviews! That sounds (and is) a bit glib – but more seriously, if the skills you need for a job are to be able to sell yourself (or your company), to build rapport with strangers quickly and to respond to questions on the spot in an intense environment, then a panel interview may be a great test. But if you are actually recruiting to a technical or other skills-based role (construction, manufacturing, care and hospitality all spring to mind here – and they are all industries experiencing record skills shortages) then actually asking someone to show you how they would do the job – a work trial or working interview – is a much better test than asking them to tell you about it.
Show not tell
This is particularly important when you consider that there are lots of disabled people who find traditional interviews difficult – whether this is because of extreme and exacerbated anxiety at interviews, difficulty in interpreting complex or ambiguous questions, or a condition that affects communication such as a stammer (often more pronounced in a high-pressure situations) or difficulty making eye contact.
I was talking to a good friend and Business Disability Forum Ambassador Phil Friend about this very recently and he gave the analogy of football transfer season making the point that a club will pay multi-million sums for a player purely based on watching their performance for a season (or more) – there is no panel interview for that. We don’t all employ – or can afford! – premier league footballers. An example closer to the ground (in this case literally): if you were recruiting a bricklayer, would you look at examples of previous work and then ask your preferred candidate to show you how they build a wall? Or would you interview them?
- “Tell me about the best wall you’ve ever built and why you are proud of it”
- “Tell me about a time when a wall you were building went wrong. How did you put things right and what did you learn from it?”
I mention bricklaying specifically as construction is an industry currently experiencing record skills shortages and which might – with some small tweaks to the recruitment process – be a great career choice for disabled people. It’s important to remember here that recruitment includes onboarding – and continuing the construction theme, Phil told me a story of a young man with a learning disability who had a job on a building site. He was very physically strong but couldn’t read numbers – so when one of the team asked him for a “number 9 screw” he couldn’t do it. They hit upon colour coding the boxes so instead said “bring me a red” which worked for him – and for them.
Work trials and other alternatives
Shifting to a work trial or similar could make a dramatic difference in the interview experience for both candidates and recruiters. Yet the vast majority of employers do not use them. Why? First and foremost, I believe this is due to a lack of awareness that this is a legal and reasonable alternative. This is true not just of businesses but also amongst employment support providers.
Second, I think is fear of change. How do we know that we will get the best candidate when we’ve relied on this tried and trusted method for so long? To this fear I would say, work trials do not mean the absence of a conversation. Rather they include a conversation that takes place within the actual environment of the job that someone will be doing. A meeting, for example. Third I think is that it is difficult: to unpick the process and the HR machine for an organisation of any size is a huge task. So, I’d urge you to start small – try it out in a business area or team and see how you get on – and who you recruit as a result.
Ultimately, by doing this, we are moving from saying “what adjustments do you need me to make to this process so that you can fit into it?”, to: “what do I need to do so you can demonstrate total effectiveness?”
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