Cover the gap of knowledge

You are an IT guy and you are doing an interview to a candidate, s/he is explaining you all the activities that uses to perform, answering the questions you do, etc. Everything is fine, you do not see any issue and the person explains the aspects in a very good manner.

Then the HR person does her interview and she finds that the candidate is not able to explain the basic concepts of the basic concepts of the job. The candidate is not able to talk into natural language, to explain the concepts in a way all people should understand. When the interviewer ask for more basic clarifications because she has no IT background, the candidate does not know how to explain these concepts.

After the two interviews, the recruiter and myself had a call about the candidate. It was fine for me but the recruiter discarded the candidate. The point of conflict was: the communication skills of the candidate.

The recruiter told me that the candidate was not able to explain the activities s/he perform and not able to concrete on specific questions.

I was saying that there were concordance and sense on all the candidate was saying, and this is where we were stuck.

The same day I was taking dinner with a couple of friends. She is recruiter for so much years and I commented the issue I had with this candidate.

She told me that my HR recruiter was right because the subject matter experts use to cover the gaps of information that the candidate does not mention and in this way the thread of the story makes sense and sounded fine for me, so here is where it’s supposed I did the mistake.

Then, when the HR recruiter starts to ask for something specific and ask for more details; here is when the candidate did not perform the effort to explain in a natural language, did not understood that the person in front of him was not a SME and was looking for this type of gaps and suddenly he started to get nervous because the responses he received were: “I still do not understand”. In any case the thread of the story made not sense.

(Pirineo Navarro, July 2013)