HR Director: 5 advantages of role-playing to recruit your managers

As an HR director, it is not always easy to accurately assess the interpersonal skills and level of managerial skills of candidates when conducting an interview.

In the context of a strategic recruitment of key employees, such as local managers, role-playing can be an excellent way to secure recruitment and reveal operational skills in real situations.

Here is an overview of the 5 advantages of using role-playing to recruit and evaluate your managers as an HR Director.

 

What does the role-playing involve?

The role-playing consists, as its name suggests, in placing the candidate in a specific context, faced with a problem defined upstream. The objective is to gauge the candidate’s ability to respond to a managerial challenge spontaneously, in action.

This recruitment tool, once reserved for the evaluation of technical expertise, is now becoming popular and is particularly useful for probing the behavioral and relational skills of a candidate, such as an operational manager.

Here are some examples of professional scenarios to offer your managers as HR recruiters:

• Manage a conflict situation between employees;
• Deliver positive and negative feedback;
• Make a collective decision;
• Managing a managerial emergency;
• Manage a negotiation with a supplier;
• Welcoming a customer;
• Integrate a new employee into the company;
• Managing an employee with a difficult personality (insubordination, misconduct, etc.);
• …

The scenarios can also consist of:

• a group exercise with 3 to 5 candidates to assess teamwork;
• test-in-baskets, interactive online exercises: the candidate must, for example, file mail, a test that makes it possible to assess the management of priorities, emergencies, organizational skills, etc.;
• a role-playing game (between employee and manager, for example);
• serious games, virtual scenarios inspired by video games on the principle of gamification of recruitment processes.

 

HR Director: Why use role-playing for your managers? 5 Benefits

Organizing a scenario for the recruitment of your managers has many advantages. This makes it possible to:

1. Probing managerial skills

Role-playing is an excellent way to highlight several managerial skills in candidates, such as:

• the ability to unite a team,
• leadership skills,
• stress and emotional management,
• managing conflicts, emergencies or crises;
• analytical capacity,
• the spirit of synthesis,
• relational and emotional intelligence,
• listening skills,
• empathy,
• interpersonal skills,
• diplomacy,
• self-confidence,
• non-verbal communication (body language),
• …

Unlike job interview questions, which are often prepared in advance by the candidate, role-playing allows you to obtain natural, spontaneous and very revealing reactions.

2. Securing recruitment

While organizing a face-to-face interview and taking references remains essential in any recruitment, it sometimes provides a very limited vision of the future manager’s interpersonal skills and motivations.

Once at the job, the employee may not be able to deal with exceptional situations and that he is unable to manage the managerial challenges that are imposed on him. The consequences can then be serious for the company.

Role-playing makes it possible to limit recruitment errors, and, consequently, to reduce the costs incurred by candidate sourcing and turnover.

3. Assessing managerial style

There are just as many managerial styles that there are managers. Thus, even if it is still possible to have a theoretical overview of the candidate’s managerial mode, the simulation allows us to observe the type of management in a concrete way.

It is a valuable tool to ensure that the managerial mode is aligned with the company’s culture and values.

4. Unlocking unsuspected potential

While role-playing is very beneficial for identifying weaknesses, it is also very useful for revealing strengths that would not have been perceived in the context of the interview.

These are real talent revealers, which allow the candidate’s real potential to be highlighted, far from the formal framework of the face-to-face interview or the telephone interview. Indeed, the desire to “make a good impression” during the interview can sometimes prevent the candidate from showing his true potential.

5. Strengthen the employer brand image

Use role-playing as an HR Director to recruit your managers will also enhance the employer brand. Indeed, the company illustrates its desire to establish More equitable recruitment, away from the traditional model and based on operational skills rather than exclusively on the level of education and professional career. It also demonstrates the ability of the company and the HR department to adapt to changes in the world of work, with recruitment processes in tune with the times.

 

HR Director: How do you organize a simulation to recruit your managers?

These simulation exercises must be carried out in a structured way, and require a certain preparation phase beforehand. They can be carried out in a individual or collective, within the workspace, or in an outdoor setting, to test the candidate’s skills outside his or her comfort zone.

Whether it is to replace an employee who has left his or her position or to create a new position to be filled, it is above all essential to analyze the need as well as the managerial skills inherent to the position. This will help define your expectations and the type of scenario, and this process will greatly facilitate the evaluation of the candidate.

It is important to emphasize that the objective of the managers’ situation is not to obtain a “right” or “wrong” answer, but rather to observe the candidate’s natural reactions in order to have a more global vision of his or her interpersonal skills and managerial skills.

In addition, given the time required to organize such simulations, it is strongly recommended to organize these simulations after conducting an individual interview and a pre-selection of a few candidates whose profile is aligned with the requirements of the position. For an interim HR director, role-playing is also an excellent tool to quickly assess a candidate’s skills and ability to adapt to various environments.