Facebook seeks a Recruiter who can 'Be Bold' and also 'Move Fast.' How do you react when you and your leadership team disagree on the quality of a candidate, and it sets your search back?
Facebook has 5 core values listed on its website. One of these core values is 'Be Bold.' This mantra is explained as, 'Building great things means taking risks.' Facebook believes that 'The riskiest thing is to take no risks.' They also go on to say, 'In a world that's changing quickly, you're guaranteed to fail if you don't take any risks.'
Another core value is 'Move Fast.' Facebook explains 'We believe that it's better to move fast and make mistakes than to move slowly and miss opportunities. Doing so enables us to build more things and learn faster.'
Each time you shortlist and present a candidate to stakeholders and decision-makers, you are taking a risk that they will say 'no' to your candidate. There will be times when you think you've hit the jackpot and found the best candidate possible for the role. You will excitedly present the candidate to your leadership team, and unfortunately, the hiring managers don't feel the magic.
The interviewers want to know that you handle disappointment professionally rather than becoming visibly upset or demotivated. Discuss in detail how you react when disappointments arise. Show the interviewers that you can maintain Facebook's core values even in the face of disappointment. Then, focus the bulk of your response on the action steps you take to pick yourself back up and move forward.
"In my current role as Recruiter for Company XYZ, if a leader disagrees with the quality of my shortlisted candidate, I am sure to remove any emotion from the equation and come back to them with factual data from my talent marketplace analytics and other forms of benchmarking. There are times that the hiring managers need deeper data regarding the talent acquisition landscape. When leaders can look at the full picture, they are much more likely to take an open-minded approach. This approach often clears up disagreements on candidate quality. Sometimes a disagreement on the quality of a candidate means that I go back to my search and find a couple of new candidates for consideration. Other times this situation means that we collectively compromise by interviewing the candidate one more time in an attempt to uncover the core reason the leader feels hesitant to make a job offer. I believe that it's in the company's best interest that all stakeholders agree on a candidate before a job offer is made. As a Facebook Recruiter, if I encounter a situation like this, I will be bold by pushing back when necessary; however, I will also move fast to course-correct to ensure that we do not miss out on opportunities to capture an even better candidate."
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