Some thoughts on recruiting

We’ve been doing a bit of recruiting in the bakery recently and it made me think about my go-to interview questions. If you’ve been doing this a while, or have experience of interviewing from a previous career, this might be a bit old hat to you, but if not, I hope it might be useful.

Before we get to the interview itself, a couple of thoughts on recruitment in general. I always specify a cv and a cover letter and stipulate that we won’t consider any applicants without a cover letter. Particularly with job sites like Indeed it’s easy for people to just fire off a cv with no thought whatsoever. A cover letter takes slightly more effort and can act as a filter to weed out people who aren’t really fussed about working for you.

I would advise always interviewing at least two people for any role you need to fill. It seems like a faff, you think it’s just a Saturday job, I can’t be bothered to interview loads of people. If you only interview one person you will inevitably give them the job because it’s the easy option, but if you’ve ever employed anyone, you’ll know that having the wrong person in a role is never the easy option. Interview at least two people and you’ll be forced to make a choice.

Have some questions prepared for the interview. It’s easy to think, particularly with a more casual or part-time role, that you don’t need to have a list of questions, an informal chat will be fine. The problem with this is that some people are not natural chatters, particularly if they’re nervous. If you haven’t prepared any questions, conversation can dry up, you wind up the interview to avoid awkwardness and then realise the entire process lasted 3 minutes, not enough time to form an impression of anyone.

Try open questions, I usually start with ‘tell me a bit about yourself’ or ‘what are you up to at the minute?’. Questions don’t all need to be directly related to the job role. You probably do want to ask about what strengths the candidate has and why they think they’d be a good person for the job, but I usually also ask more random questions about hobbies, places they like to eat out etc. We are based near a university and get quite a few students and recent graduates. I always ask about how they found their course and what made them choose Falmouth. People tend to have less stock answers for off-topic questions which then gives you a more insight into their character. They are also more likely to relax which again helps with getting a more rounded sense of who they are.

Getting that more rounded sense matters. Experience can be useful but it’s much easier to teach someone to be a great baker or barista than it is to teach someone not to be unreliable or not to be lazy. One of the key advantages of experience, is that if someone has worked in a similar environment before, they are potentially more likely to know that they’re suited to it. If you have never worked in a kitchen or bakery before it can be easy to have a romanticised view of it.

Two things to look out for when you’re weighing up a potential candidate. Be aware that some people are just better at interviews, that doesn’t mean they’ll be better at the job. And try to avoid recruiting as a reaction to your last poorly performing member of staff. The last person was flaky, so you go for the most reliable seeming person even though, if you think about it you know they’re not a good fit. Yes, you can and should learn from what has and hasn’t worked previously, but don’t let recent negative experiences colour your judgement.

A question that I always ask is, ‘what were your favourite and least favourite things about your last job?’. Forcing someone to come up with a negative about their last role will give you a sense of how likely or not they are to be negative generally. A negative member of staff can be a killer for team morale (and almost no one recognises that they are a negative person). If you ask that question and then get a long list of unreasonable management, lazy co-workers and terrible working conditions I would see that as a red flag. Perhaps they genuinely worked somewhere terrible or perhaps they are prone to dishing out blame rather than taking responsibility.

Happy recruiting. If you’re anything like me it’s not your favourite thing to do but getting right will make your life a lot easier.