When a company interviews job candidates, hiring managers have certain requirements in mind for the job opening. Their focus is on finding out whether the job candidate is going to meet their requirements.

This attitude, according to business executive Anthony Tjan, is in many respects looking at things backwards.

Yes, it is important to determine if a job candidate has the skills, experience and energy to do the job. But this should not be the sole, or even the most important consideration, in the job interview.

Today, many businesses realize the importance of having outstanding talent. They want to have the best people, the top performers, because they know the importance of these people to the bottom line.

If that is the case, businesses also need to recognize that these people have choices, Tjan says. Too often, hiring managers during an interview assume they have all the power, that the job candidate is there as a supplicant and that the candidate’s only focus is to try to impress the hiring managers as much as possible.

But if you are interviewing talented workers, you need to recognize that they have a power base of their own. They are in demand. You probably aren’t the only company who wants them. They are evaluating you and your company as much as you are evaluating them.

That being the case, they need to be treated not as a supplicant, but more like a customer. Hiring managers need to realize that they have to sell the company to them. One of the key questions hiring managers need to know the answer to is this: If you had the opportunity to come and work here, would you? Most of the time, companies have no idea what the answer to that question is, Tjan says.

To help gain a sense of whether the candidate is really interested in working for your company, there is other information you should try to find out. You should ask where the candidate would like to live long term. You should find out where else the candidate is looking for a job and how your company compares to others that the candidate is looking at. You should also find out if there are any reasons holding the candidate back from taking a job with your company if you offered it.

Getting an idea of the likelihood of a candidate accepting your job offer, getting a sense of the motivations of a candidate – why he or she is looking for a job – and getting a sense of what stands in the way of him or her taking the job, are among the most important things to find out during an interview, according to Tjan.

If you’d like some help in sourcing, going through resumes and even conducting preliminary interviews for positions in your New York City-area firm, then call upon Winston Resources. We’ve been helping Manhattan-based companies find skilled and reliable workers for their temporary, temp-to-hire and direct-hire assignments for more than 45 years – and we’d like to help your firm, too. Contact us today.