The Elliott Gray Blog

In the exciting journey of hiring, the art of asking the right questions is your golden ticket to success. As professional recruiters with years of experience, we are here to share insights and strategies that will take your interviewing game to the next level and have you asking impactful questions that unveil the true potential of your candidates.   Talk me through your career journey: This question serves as an open invitation for the candidate to narrate their professional story. It provides insights into their career trajectory, major milestones, and the progression of their roles over time. Encourage them to start from the beginning and walk you through each significant step, highlighting key experiences (both good and bad), responsibilities, and missteps and achievements. As the interviewer, what we find is that this often highlights patterns of behaviour and opens a really genuine and organic conversation which gives much more insight into a candidate’s motivators than standard behavioural questions. Our experience is that candidates’ non-verbal cues really fire up and this tells you more than any ‘example’ they come up with to those standard behavioural questions. Did you enjoy the role/culture and why? This question dives into the candidate’s experiences and is an open invitation for candidates to share the moments that truly ignited their professional passion. It’s not just about job responsibilities; it’s about what makes their career heartbeat faster. Matching to culture first is becoming a recruitment norm. What we see, is our clients with the lowest staff turnover rate are the ones who put a focus on understanding a candidate personally and motivationally, not just their skill set. We do this by making a candidate feel comfortable. An interview should be about bringing out a candidates true personality, you as the employer want to know them, not a…

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here to stay. Instead of burying our heads in the sand, we tested it across our entire value chain. Was it a success? Yes and No. This is what we found: It’s a great box-ticking tool. AI can streamline the early stages of candidate assessment, by ensuring they meet basic requirements. For example, we use it to accurately check Australian citizenship status for clearance purposes. For straightforward criteria like this, it’s accurate, fast, and effective. It doesn’t tell the whole story. When ChatGPT surfaced, we asked it to assess candidate CVs and create client briefs. A task we’d always done manually, we wanted to see if it could save us time, and maybe even uncover some hidden insights. Instead, the opposite occurred. The AI-generated briefs simply regurgitated the CVs in a disjointed way. They didn’t provide any additional value, and we had to spend more time filling in the gaps. The feedback from our clients (and willing guinea pigs) was also very clear: the briefs lacked the human touch, which was precisely what they’d engaged us to do. It can’t connect with people. Getting to know candidates is a critical step that can’t easily be automated. Using AI and then having a quick phone call to verify details just doesn’t give them time to truly open up. In our experience, a CV only tells 20% of someone’s story, and it’s our job to find out the remaining 80%. That’s why we’re committed to 60-minute in-person interviews with every short-listed candidate. Instead of asking standard behavioural questions (with answers that can be googled in advance), we talk through their CV from start to finish, to understand and verify their entire story. Plus, face-to-face conversations help us find out what truly motivates them, and what…

It is hard not to get carried away with all the manic that happens within a recruitment agency, just like any workplace there are highs and lows that you need to prepare and adjust for. How to prepare and adjust is th…