The Stripy Strudel's Journal

The web is full of tips for job candidates on how to write a decent resumé, how to behave in an interview and so on. On the other hand, there's a clear lack of advice for employers looking for good candidates. Here I'm making up for this lack basing on my recent experience from dealing with HR departments of various companies.

• Healthy competition never harms business. It's only better if two of your HR managers make a go at the same candidate independently of each other.
• Big companies often hire a staffing agency, and the biggest ones might want to hire several to help each other.
• A conveyor is the best form of labor management. The better you manage to divide the hiring process into elementary operations and assign them to different people, the more candidates you'll be able to put through the production line in a unit of time.
• There's no point in storing of the information you can always get from the candidate. Ask them for their full name, address and telephone number every time you need these.
• Everybody wants to work for you, though not everyone realizes it yet. If you look for prospective candidates and approach them, always ask them to send you a copy of the CV you've found on their personal website, and inquire about why they want to work for your company.
• Never miss a chance to approach an employee of your competitor. In the end, it's them, not you, who are bound with those non-compete clauses.
• If you're in USA and arranging a phone interview with a European, write something like 03/04 12pm PST. Everyone knows that the day comes after the month, and that PST stands for Pacific Standard Time.
• Engineers' work time is too valuable to have them conduct phone interviews. It's enough if an engineer prepares a list of questions with correct answers for the HR employees.
• Always include a “tricky question” in your phone interviews. Collections of such questions you can easily find on the web.
• If your teams have fixed interview schedules, assign candidates to teams basing on which interview comes next.
• If possible, invite a European candidate to your American office, and the other way round.
• Write an ultimate, ideal letter to a candidate and use it in all cases. Provide for all possibilities ranging from accepting a student for summer practice to enticing a superstar from a competitor. Start with “Dear Sir (Madam)”.
• Ultimately, replace all your human HR managers with robots. Machines never eat, sleep or make mistakes, and some are even able to reproduce without going on maternity leave.

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