Recruiters tend to think of “Prepping” in terms of prepping the candidates. In Danny’s jam packed Webcast entitled Sending Your Clients to Prep School, he proposed the “New Normal”… focusing on a heavy CLIENT prep and heavy candidate debrief. In prepping your clients, here are some questions Danny suggests you approach your clients with:

Ask the client if they have a strategy for the interview. What are they trying to measure at this meeting? (Suggest the areas you know your candidate to be strong in.) Do they understand the current market realities regarding the dearth of talent and the choices our candidates have?

  1. Recommend the client use the “behavioral” style. (Suggest they forget the resume and say, ‘When in your career have you had to go through an IT conversion while growing?’) Once they get the questions they’ll ask, inform your candidate.
  2. Ask if the client is going to discuss money. (If they say no and then do it anyway, they want your candidate.)
  3. Who else will meet your candidate? What is their frame of reference? Influence in process?
  4. Let’s play “gotcha”…What questions about the candidate’s background give our client pause or are red flags? How will they expose them?
  5. Where have the others you’ve been interviewing impressed you? Where have they fallen short?
  6. How can we determine the candidate’s technical knowledge? (Inform your candidate.)
  7. What idiosyncratic preferences do you tend to have?