Guest blogger: Noémi Nagy
Back in December 2015 we met a young talent while searching for a new communication and marketing trainee. Her name was Noémi Nagy. What made her stood out was her determination about HR becoming her future and core mission. Obviously, we got very interested in getting to know her opinion after the first video interview experience of her life. Luckily, she was eager to share her point of view from an HR perspective.
“The purple squirrel syndrome is definitely a well-known phrase for all recruitment professionals.”
And for those who have not heard this expression yet: it is used to describe a case when the person in charge of the hiring makes the mistake of limiting themselves with unrealistically high expectations while on the hunt for a perfect candidate, which ultimately results in not being able to find and hire the required employee-to-be. Of course, many positions demand specialised expertise, so satisfaction and compromise would prove to be very difficult to fill these in.
“Thus there’s no use in searching for the purple squirrel - if our expectations are too high and we strictly insist on them, whether we succeed is very questionable.”
One thing is for sure though: if somebody with talent, affinity, persistence and a great deal of enthusiasm applies, it is almost certain that as our employee they can perform miracles and be seen as the real purple squirrel after some time.
So far so good, but how to find a candidate like that?
Nowadays there are plenty of opportunities to choose from that help with hiring, but to properly gauge enthusiasm we need to make an interview. Or at least we’d thought so.
Indivizo’s team has created an HR software that fills the gap between a CV and the interview. We might say it’s like resumés coming to life and talking to us.
Applicants answer the previously collected questions of HR professionals within a limited timeframe, which ensures that we doreceive the most important information, while we can watch the recorded videos wherever and whenever we wish to (and have time).
Its further advantage is that only those applicants who really mean it will take their time to complete the challenge. I guess it is unnecessary to start explaining why this makes it so much more effective than pre-screening over the phone.
What Indivizo’s users are especially pleased about is the flexibility and the collaborative aspects of the platform: team members with access to the applicants’ video recordings have the option to evaluate the answers based on different criteria, sparing a large amount of meetings in the long run. (And we have not even mentioned yet the growth in the number of relevant interviews.)
“One would be right to consider the newest friend of professional recruiters a ‘purple squirrel magnet’.”
I wish the best of luck to all dear HR professionals with finding their own purple squirrels. This, of course, might also be possible without Indivizo, but when a pleasant and effective solution offers itself, why would anyone choose to go down the more difficult road?
“To catch a glimpse of motivation, knowledge and personality without having done any interviews - this is the new era of HR.”
Noémi Nagy