The key component of making any recruitment campaign a success is sourcing the right candidates in which to shortlist & interview from. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But if it is so obvious, surely common sense would ensure that the advertising process is fundamental to any recruitment campaign – attracting the right candidates!

You’d of thought… but time & time again we see poorly written adverts written on company websites, job boards, social media & all over the internet. It’s not just employers who are guilty of this – some of the worst we’ve seen have been poorly written adverts by recruitment agencies.

If you are responsible for recruiting, or looking to recruit any time soon – complete the below form and receive your free eBook & template to use, to ensure you are on your way to recruiting success and making your next great hire.

When hiring a new employee, it is important to ask the right questions.

But how do you really dig into what makes someone tick as an employee, and how do you determine if they’ll be a good fit for your business — not only in terms of their skills, but also their personality, and as a part of your company culture?

To help you come up with the perfect list of interview questions to ask potential employees, we’ve come up with 40, and divided this list into five categories; basic interview questions, behavioural interview questions, salary & career development questions and getting started questions. Pick and choose a handful that feel most applicable from each list.

Complete the below form and your eBook, with 40 questions you can ask candidates during an interview will be in your inbox in minutes.

Happy interviewing 🚀

Speaking to a number of owners, directors and hiring managers, we often get asked – are job boards really the best way to recruit?

A lot of recruitment agencies will say, job boards are a thing of the past, it’s all about tapping into our little black book, the under the radar pool of candidates that they have access to, and yes, when recruiting at CEO or Director level, especially for big organisations paying salaries of £100K plus, yes. But for your more general roles, albeit office based admin, accounting, trades & construction, hospitality, sales (I could go on), job boards are by far the best source of candidates. Job Boards are where the majority or recruitment agencies get 95% of their candidates from – but they wont tell you that, why would they – then you could cut out the middle man, and recruit direct 😉

Over the past 5 years, I must say that with unemployment at an all time low, there has been big skill shortages which has not made it easy to recruit for many roles, across various sectors. But now, as we emerge from the pandemic, and with more and more good employees unfortunately being made redundant, there is a pool of good candidates, looking for a new job across the majority of sectors – and where do they go first to look for a job, you’ve got it – job boards.

Don’t just take it from me, here is some data from the job boards to back this up.

Indeed (data updated for March 2020)

With a strong worldwide presence, Indeed continues to lead in the market overall:

• 250 million unique monthly visitors
• Database of 175 million CVs
• 10 jobs added per second globally

However, the data from three of the UK’s other leading job boards is also hugely positive:

Totaljobs (data provided for May 2020)

• 5 million visits
• 5 CVs in their database
• 8m applications made
• 66,376 jobs posted

CV-Library (year-on-year data provided for June 2020)

• Website traffic up by 5.9%
• CV registrations increased by 19.2%
• Average applications per vacancy increased by a massive 106%, with an average 30+ applications per job

Reed (data updated for June 2020)

• 70% increase in clicks from Google through to their website
• Some sectors, such as social care, has seen the number of jobs posted more than double in June 2020 (year-on-year)

These impressive figures for job board interest show that these platforms are still by far one of the most effective tools to use for your recruitment.

However, we fully understand that it is not only time consuming to reach out to all of the individual job boards, pay them all separate, then right a fully optimised advert that really sells your opportunity, post it on each one, then watch sporadic applications come in to your inbox – if it’s not something you are familiar with, it can be a real headache. That’s why we’ve launched Blue Rocket Recruitment 🚀 –  we do it all for you, write your advert, post it across all the job boards, plus give you access to your own fully branded, cloud candidate dashboard which ranks all candidates in order of suitability, just leaving you to recruit as many candidates into you would like into your business, and for just £399 – no more.

Attract. Engage. Hire. Grow 🚀🚀

If you’d like to learn more, require any more information or simply have a vacancy that you’d like us to advertise for you, please do not hesitate to contact either myself of one of the team on 023 8033 6633 or email hi@bluerocketrec.co.uk 

All the best,

Steve Wyeth

Founder 🚀

When hiring a new employee, it’s important to ask the right questions.

But how do you really dig into what makes someone tick as an employee, and how do you determine if they’ll be a good fit for your business — not only in terms of their skills, but also their personality, and as a part of your company culture?

To help you come up with the perfect list of interview questions to ask potential employees, we’ve come up with 44, divided this list into five categories; basic interview questions, behavioral interview questions, salary & career development questions and getting started questions. Pick and choose a handful that feel most applicable from each list.

Happy interviewing! 🚀🚀🚀

Basic interview questions:

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. What are your strengths?
3. What are your weaknesses?
4. Why do you want this job?
5. Where would you like to be in your career five years from now?
6. What’s your ideal company?
7. What attracted you to this company?
8. Why should we hire you?
9. What did you like least about your last job?
10. When were you most satisfied in your job?
11. What can you do for us that other candidates can’t?
12. What were the responsibilities of your last position?
13. Why are you leaving your present job?
14. What do you know about this industry?
15. What do you know about our company?
16. Are you willing to relocate?
17. Do you have any questions for me?

Behavioral interview questions:

1. What was the last project you led, and what was its outcome?
2. Give me an example of a time that you felt you went above and beyond the call of duty at work.
3. Can you describe a time when your work was criticized?
4. Have you ever been on a team where someone was not pulling their own weight? How did you handle it?
5. Tell me about a time when you had to give someone difficult feedback. How did you handle it?
6. What is your greatest failure, and what did you learn from it?
7. How do you handle working with people who annoy you?
8. If I were your supervisor and asked you to do something that you disagreed with, what would you do?
9. What was the most difficult period in your life, and how did you deal with it?
10. Give me an example of a time you did something wrong. How did you handle it?
11. Tell me about a time where you had to deal with conflict on the job.
12. If you were at a business lunch and you ordered a rare steak and they brought it to you well done, what would you do?
13. If you found out your company was doing something against the law, like fraud, what would you do?
14. What assignment was too difficult for you, and how did you resolve the issue?
15. What’s the most difficult decision you’ve made in the last two years and how did you come to that decision?
16. Describe how you would handle a situation if you were required to finish multiple tasks by the end of the day, and there was no conceivable way that you could finish them.

Salary questions:

1. What salary are you seeking?
2. What’s your salary history?
3. If I were to give you this salary you requested but let you write your job description for the next year, what would it say?

Career development questions:

1. What are you looking for in terms of career development?
2. How do you want to improve yourself in the next year?
3. What kind of goals would you have in mind if you got this job?
4. If I were to ask your last supervisor to provide you additional training or exposure, what would she suggest?

Getting started questions:

1. How would you go about establishing your credibility quickly with the team?
2. How long will it take for you to make a significant contribution?
3. What do you see yourself doing within the first 30 days of this job?
4. If selected for this position, can you describe your strategy for the first 90 days?