Candidate Shortlisting for NFP and Healthcare: Hiring for Attitude

While for some industries their main recruitment issue is attracting talent in the first place, for industries like healthcare and the not-for-profit sector, there is a huge pool of potential candidates. The problem with this, is the need to reduce the candidate pool significantly. So how can we do this?

It is a misconception that in the NFP and healthcare industry, it is easy to find the perfect candidate. Yes, there are plenty of people within the talent pool that have the right hard skills to do the job; but many are similar as the required qualifications are so niche to their industry.

This is where softer skills come into play; however, these are difficult to determine from a resume alone and when you could easily have fifty-plus applicants attracted to one job advert, you could spend hours with candidates determining their softer skills.

How can you filter your candidates down before face-to-face interviews?

We’ve come up with some shortlisting techniques that might help you narrow down your candidates and identify those who have the best attitudes ready for final interviews.

1. Phone Interviews

Conducting phone interviews are a much quicker way of directly speaking to an individual and getting a gut feeling of their attitude to the work they will be doing if they were successful. While this is certainly an option that will take some time, it will be significantly less time consuming to speak with each individual over the phone briefly than to organise individual interviews that could last the good part of an hour.

2. Group Interview Days

Split your candidates into a few groups and organise group interview days. By setting tasks and discussion points, you should be able to quickly determine which candidates have the softer skills you are looking for and those who would suit your organisation. The added benefit is seeing how they interact with other people when performing tasks, their potential for growth and their ability to think on their feet.

Shortlisting tip: When figuring out how many candidates you should invite to group interviews, multiply the amount of people you want to hire by 3 and invite that number. This gives you a nice range of candidates and a better idea of how many resumes you need to screen before finding those candidates.

3. Behavioural Testing

This is where behavioural testing could be an excellent option. Using a Candidate Management System (CMS) you can immediately filter through the candidates that will not fit your preferable behavioural style upon initial application. So those who qualify for their hard skills but whose behavioural style doesn’t fit your desired ethos would immediately be apparent.

“This all sounds great, but I don’t have the time to do this!”

We know hiring for healthcare and the NFP industry can be demanding and time consuming. That’s where we come in. Employment Office can comprehensively screen all of your applicants and determine the best talent from the pool for your vacancy so you can save time and expenses.

If you’d like to hear more about how we can screen your potential hires, contact us today on 1300 366573 or email info@employmentoffice.com.au.