If you would ask anybody in the management fraternity to name an organization exemplifying excellence in customer-service, more often than not you would find that the reply would be “Nordstrom”. And as the legend goes, Nordstrom’s employee handbook has only one line: “Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules”. Wow! What a brilliant demonstration of faith in one’s employees!
But do you know the secret of this faith? Well! The answer to that is “Nordstrom’s extremely meticulous recruitment process”. Yes! Nordstrom puts such an amazing emphasis on its filter that they have unwavering confidence that anyone who has come through that filter must be good enough to be trusted completely. Yes! Recruiting is possibly the most important decision that an organization makes.
However, the society we live in isn’t an ideal one. In our world, deception is a reality that we meet on every corner, and the recruitment process isn’t immune to that either. The cost of inability for detecting deception on a recruiter’s part,and hiring a wrong person is huge–Non-performance, decline in team-spirit, misrepresentation in front of the client, probability of misconduct, breach in information-security and even corporate frauds.
While the recruitment tools like psychometric tests can add value, they have limitations. Thus it all comes down to that ‘moment of truth’ when an HR person is in front of a potential candidate – in the interview. Here, with some derived skills of social and emotional intelligence like ‘observing nonverbal behavior to understand emotions’, it is possible to detect deception. Let’s see some tips from the online video-based course of Socialigence:
- Stay vigilant towards ‘inconsistency in expression’; like a switch in tenses in the middle of the story, or varied speech-rate within a single sentence, or abruptly stopping midsentence and changing the direction of the conversation.
- Be attentive when the interviewee tries to convince and not simply convey. Truthful persons believe that you would believe them, but liars would typically come to imagine the worse. Consequentially, they also use a lot of absolutes like ‘never’ and ‘always’.
- Pay attention to any incongruence between gestures, words and emotions. Our brains are wired to have a natural matching up of our verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Thus, if there is an apparent disconnect then it needs to be delved into.
Dr. Sandeep Atre (Founder-Director, Socialigence) – Online Courses (visit:www.socialigence.net) – Customized Workshops (call: 7223984622)