4 Things Employers Want From Job Candidates

By Arnie Fertig

Have you ever wondered how hiring authorities go about the process of figuring out who to interview and what to ask when they meet candidates face to face? Leslie Gurka and Joel Brodsky can tell you. They have spent their professional careers as educational leaders in the New York Public School System. Now, they consult schools systems around the U.S. on a variety of issues, including how to effectively hire the best teachers and administrators, as part of the Executive Leadership Institute team.

While their focus is on the educational system, their concerns, methodology and insights apply broadly to almost any hiring situation. In order to whittle down a large group into a manageable pool of candidates, they initially screen out résumés missing key ingredients, like licensing credentials. They regularly eliminate candidates whose writing reveals poor grammar or punctuation, and they critically assess the overall look and format of one's résumé and cover letter or writing sample.

Gurka and Brodsky recently discussed the whole hiring process with me. Below, they describe how they go about figuring out what to ask during interviews and how they ferret out winning from losing candidates: