Intern MG is back from his foreign semester abroad! (Did I mention he was living in a castle? Well, he was. A castle. With turrets.) Now that he’s back, he’s acquired another job, this time at International Ad Giants, Inc. They’ve recognized his explosive potential and promoted him to hiring manager. At 22. Hiring manager. Goodie for him.
His days are now packed with seeking out and vetting oh-so-highly qualified applicants for positions at the big firm. They want copywriters! His initial thought was to post the job on craigslist ... but 3,917 job applicants later, that hasn’t worked out so well. He asked them all to come in for an interview. All of them. Big mistake. I found him lying comatose under two and a half feet of resumes. Nineteen cups of coffee later, we discussed the need to pre-screen candidates before spending too much time with them.
Pre-Screen Job Applicants
Instead of jumping right in with every job candidate, there are some simple steps to take which will help eliminate unsuitable candidates quickly. The internet makes it easy. You might find the notion of ruthlessly eliminating unsuitable candidates to be uncompassionate. You might want, in your heart of hearts, to believe that every human being has inherent worth. On the one hand, you might be wrong about that. On the other hand, the movie Soylent Green points out, quite reasonably, that all people can ultimately be of value to their fellow man, woman, intersex, or asexual societal population unit.
Look at Cover Letters
The first line of defense against hacks, bots and applicants with bad hair is the cover letter.
Look at the applicant’s cover letter. Cover letters should show the person at their best. Are there spelling errors? Is the style they already write in the way you prefer to communicate? Nothing says “potentially disastrous lack of professionalism” like errors in a cover letter.
Indeed, errors might mean they’re not even real. I’m not talking about writing style. Different people have different styles. A style you’ve never seen doesn’t necessarily mean bad, but typos definitely do. In the era of spell-checkers in our phones, typos in a cover letter show a shocking lack of attention.
Even for a casual company, a cover letter should be professional. If it starts with “Hey, dude, I really want you to hire me,” that’s probably how they’ll email everyone else in your company, your clients, your investors, your CEO, and your division head.
Decide the attitude you want and select people with cover letters in that style.
One of the cover letters MG found was a little off. It had a professional tone, but some suspicious typos. The style showed personality, but the typos indicated carelessness. It was time to take a closer look and determine what this person named “Dorgus” was all about.
Look at Work Samples
If you’re hiring someone who produces actual work, ask for some examples. If you’re hiring a copywriter, ask for links to “articles” that “they” have “written.” Follow the links and check out the content. Sometimes it’s not actually there. Seriously. Someone asked to write guest posts for my blog. Someone included links to article they had published in various publications. But someone’s links didn’t actually work when I clicked on them. Except the link to Billy Bob’s Conspiracy Theory Blog.com, where bad spelling is a must, and fiction is the new fact.
If they have a portfolio, you need to know what they’re capable of! Look through it carefully! Resume alone doesn’t determine the quality of the work someone actually produces, so you need to use their results as a metric just as much. Intern MG checked out Dorgus’s links. They were … total Dorgus. Nothing. This guy was either completely nuts, or didn’t exist. A robot. A phishing scam. Intern MG knew he had to make sure this guy was a bogus Dorgus, so he went one step further.
Use Social Media to Look Deeper
Also check out your candidate’s Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter presence. Especially Linkedin. It’s 2017, and if someone has a profile, read it. It will give you some idea of what that person wants to convey to the world. If they don’t have a profile, it could just mean they’re a private person. Or an undercover CIA operative. Or a robot. Or a vampire who hasn’t yet purchased WiFi. But don’t make assumptions; this is all just speculation.
The first line of defense against hacks, bots and applicants with bad hair is the cover letter.
Not only can you use Twitter and Facebook to make sure your candidate is real, but once you do find if they exist, you can see if they’re aligned with your company culture. Are they knocking back brews and jumping off hardcore punk show stages in every picture? If you work at a small/indie millennial-style-beanbag-chair startup, this may be the perfect candidate for the job.
Be careful when drawing conclusions from social media, though. What you care about is on-the-job performance. That hardcore, mohawk-wearing mosh-pit denizen might do some of the best work you’ve ever seen. So even though Facebook and Twitter can give you an idea of personality, never use that to disqualify.
Unless their Facebook feed is full of status updates documenting how they sabotaged their last boss when they were given a work assignment they didn’t like. I’ve actually seen people post things like that, not realizing that stories like that don’t exactly convey integrity and desirability in the job market.
Looks Can Be Deceiving, and Deceivers Can Be Good-looking
Just remember, just because you like the way someone looks as a person doesn’t mean they’ll be able to do the job. And vice versa. Sometimes the best person for the job will be wearing a flower-print mumu. Not that there’s anything wrong with … oh, forget it. Yes, there is. If the best person for the job is wearing a flower-print mumu, hire them, and for their first year’s bonus, send them to a fashion consultant.
That said, for any fashion offense less than the mumu, they could be a fine hire. Some of the best programmers, web designers and developers are nerds and weirdos. They’re nerds and weirdos who can make you rich, and all you have to do is buy them a new Lego set every month. Why hire for “fit” when you can hire for excellence?
Intern MG came up empty with Dorgus’ social media. When he searched “Dorgus Felicity” on Linkdin and all the other platforms, no one came up. Not a huge surprise with a last name like Felicity. And all it took was a single look at Dorgus’s Facebook profile to realize that Dorgus was a bot. A cast-off AI from Google’s artificial intelligence project, Dorgus’s timeline was full of really bad poetry, all about someday wanting to be a real human. A great hire for Poetry Quarterly, but not quite right as a copywriter for International Ad Giants, Inc.
When it’s time to hire a candidate, be smart. Pre-screen so you don’t waste time. Their cover letter should be professional, with no typos. Work samples should demonstrate the quality of work you want in that position. And if they have a social media presence, it might give you some clues as to cultural fit. And remember, at the end of the day, what’s most important is that they can get the job done.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com/ or text the word “stever” to the number 33444.
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