By: Maria Williams
With a twelve-year career in HR and recruiting across multiple industries, California-based consultant Alex Cheney is not your typical recruiter. He’s a rare breed, a recruiting unicorn if you will. His upbeat, innovative strategies are causing a positive stir in the industry, so we touched base to find out more;
While setting up an interview can be difficult and stressful for both organizations and candidates, it can also be a gratifying experience to manage many different chores and concerns and meet a wide range of people.
After all, the satisfaction gained from successfully managing this process and connecting the right candidate with the right opportunity is utterly golden.
Following tradition, interviews tend to rely heavily on standardized questions to assess a candidate’s qualifications, skills, and experience—a method that has been the cornerstone of recruitment for decades. However, nowadays, it seems riddled with several inherent flaws.
So much so that these procedures frequently lead industries, like tech startups, to fail to recognize and celebrate candidates who may be more of a better all-around fit for inclusive company cultures.
Recognizing the major need for innovation, California-based recruitment consultant Alex Cheney, the mastermind behind A Little Bit Alex, has spearheaded the way forward, introducing game-changing interview strategies to shift the recruitment landscape for good.
In doing so, he is improving not only the hiring process for employers but also the job search experience for candidates. With a name in purple and blue neon colors, we knew it was time for a catch-up to discover how Cheney is “creating amazing candidate experiences and processes that are scalable for growing businesses—all through the lens of inclusion.”
“Tech, historically, taps into their networks—which, on paper, appears to be diverse because of the variety of skills each worker brings,” Cheney explains. “But at the same time, they all come from the same background.”
Instead, we need a “unicorn” candidate who actively invests in developing the preferred company. A gem who gleams with the “right set of skills and experience, as well as positive thinking, loyalty, and high performance.”
“I have been told that I am a recruiting unicorn who gets asked to find unicorns,” says Cheney, explaining his passion for the mystical creature. “I’m the kind of recruiter that likes to push to find the diamond in the rough, to help open the door to an organization, and to suggest people who may have transferable skills, for example. Besides that, unicorns are also really cool.”
He smiles. “My role is to educate the higher-ups to understand that diversity isn’t just color and gender, but also different backgrounds, skill sets, and diversity of thought. So, essentially, we should educate the leaders on what diversity and inclusion mean and then show them how to implement this knowledge when viewing applicants.”
After all, a recruiting process should highlight the importance of companies internally assessing their inclusive policies and establishing avenues that provide sufficient opportunities for underrepresented groups and diverse backgrounds.
Furthermore, an effective recruiting strategy can create a tool that gives candidates a window into the company’s soul. By focusing on a comprehensive and candidate-centric approach, Cheney aims to help companies find the right talent and ensure that candidates have a positive and fair experience.
His approach and solutions champion streamlined interview processes to eliminate redundancy and create a more engaging candidate experience.
For example, instead of considering specific qualifications or educational background for the job, he evaluates what candidates can contribute to the organization by asking questions like ‘How do you communicate with others?’ or ‘How have you approached conversations regarding feedback in the past?’
From here, his twelve-year career in HR and recruiting insights and expertise can decode the tools relevant to the job requirements and then decide whether to push for their hiring. “I like to ask questions that in my mind don’t necessarily have a right or wrong answer,” he explains. “It’s more about how you approach and subsequently handle a situation.”
Establishing an inclusive environment where everyone feels appreciated and valued is vital for attracting and retaining diverse candidates.
Another solution strategy he instills fosters major time-saving solutions.
Cheney believes in ensuring that everyone agrees with one another when it comes to hiring teams. “If the hire is expected to interact with 13 different people for their job, let’s get all 13 people together in a room to talk about what each of them needs from this person,” he adds.
“I’ve helped some organizations do that as well. It takes some of the pressure off of senior leaders who have so many more important things to do than interviewing and instead brings that responsibility to some of the middle management or team leaders who are capable from a skills perspective and are the ones who are hands-on in it every day,” smiles Cheney.
Besides soft skills and educational background information, incorporating live sessions, like coding, to gauge talent levels naturally provides a more accurate reflection of a candidate’s capabilities and potential contributions to companies.
In the end, recruitment is not about simply filling a vacancy. It’s about impacting a business’s long-term success while pushing forth those with potential who are often overlooked.
Specializing in leadership and executive training, process creation and improvement, and diversity and inclusion strategies, Alex Cheney is changing the recruitment landscape. To learn more, visit https://www.alittlebitalex.com/.
Published By: Aize Perez
