We have increased our recruiting activities as part of our growth and our search for people to join our company . This increase in activity has lead to numerous opportunities to sit back and reflect about our identification, attraction and candidate screening process. As executive recruiters most of our time is focused on helping our clients find and secure talent for their businesses - and providing advice on their process to increase the quality of candidates that they attract. All this with the view to ultimately increasing the retention rate of the high performers within our clients businesses. However, I admittedly have not paid as much attention, strategy and focus on our own hiring needs in the past… that has now changed!

This increased focus has given me a renewed passion for how effective a simulation is as part of the screening process. Let us revert to the oracle ‘wikipedia‘ for the definition: ‘Simulation is the imitation of some real thing, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system.’

Now, before asking a prospective candidate  in your pipeline to participate in a exercise like this, it’s important to think about the characteristics, experience and behaviours you want to evaluate.

Let me demonstrate how we use it when recruiting an Account Director for our business. An Account Director in our business would typically need to do following things;

• managing existing relationships
• identifying new business opportunities
• executing recruiting projects
• online research & sourcing candidates
• writing client proposals & formal candidate presentations for clients.
• Interviewing candidates

In order to test these skills we give the prospective candidate the following tasks;

Test 1: New business development, Verbal Communication & Commercial Acumen.

Tasks

• Call a hiring a manager in the industry that they came from (which is typically not recruitment ) to identify if they had a need for a senior solutions sales person.
• Market a candidate that they had met with recently ( We ask the candidate to use their own profile as the candidate they would be marketing into the client)
• Understand the clients requirements by asking the right questions about the business and the position.
• Market the candidate to the hiring manager and generate their interest so they want to interview the candidate.

Test 2: Online research skills & Understanding of requirements.

Tasks

• Take the job brief and go to Linkedin
• Supply the public profile URL’s or the PDF downloads of the profiles of 4 potential candidates that match from Linkedin.

Test 3: Written Communication skills

Tasks

• We ask the prospect to write a business case on each member of the shortlist articulating the reasons why they feel they are a match for the job and the hiring managers requirements.

I recommend that when creating a simulation think ‘personalised’ and customise the simulation so that you can test the skills that are vital for that individual being successful in the position you are hiring them for.

note: this simulation is typically conducted after numerous numerous phone calls and two face to face meetings.