1 Assessing for teamwork skills

You started this course in Week 1 thinking about why employers are interested in recruiting people who have good teamwork skills and who can demonstrate the competencies they are looking for in a team player. Hopefully, by this point in the course, you feel more confident in your understanding of why it is advantageous for a business to have good team players. You should also be able to foresee some of the difficulties that may arise if an applicant is not able to develop these competencies.

Recruiting new staff is expensive for any organisation. Advertising the vacancy costs money and the interviews consume time. Recruiting the wrong person can do great harm, both to business performance and team morale. When the mistake is realised, the employee may leave, fail probation or be dismissed, potentially damaging their self-confidence and stalling their career progress. The entire cycle of advertisement and interview then has to be repeated, with all the attendant costs and risks for the employer. It would be so much better for everybody to get it right first time.

Now listen to Rebecca Fielding from Gradconsult talking about how employers spot a good team player during the recruitment process.

Download this video clip.Video player: wdt_video_week8_section1_fielding.mp4

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Transcript

REBECCA FIELDING:

The way that you can spot a good team player throughout the recruitment process is multitudinal. And again, it really depends on the type of role that you're going for and the type of team that you are going to be working in. But you can certainly expect at the application form stage, if it's an application form, to get asked a question about when you have worked in a team in the past.

Perhaps when you faced a challenge as a team or something's gone wrong as a team. Or when you've succeeded. So I think you can prepare yourself and reflect on those experiences previously. Later on in the recruitment process, if teamwork's a significant and important part of the job, you can expect that there'll be some form of team activity as part of an assessment centre or a day in the life experience, for example.

Where you'll be brought together by other people, and there will be observers and assessors watching how you interact with other people in that group. That's one of the most common ways of assessing teamwork in a recruitment process. The problem is, it's really strange. It feels incredibly odd to be watched and for people to be watching how you interact with others.

My top tip for anybody who finds themselves doing a teamwork exercise at an assessment centre is simply to be yourself. Approach the exercise as if you were in your normal work environment. Be thoughtful and listen to other people's opinions. Summarise back, manage your time, and make contributions.

If you don't say anything, then they can't assume what's going on in your head. So my top tip is demonstrate those fabulous teamwork skills that you've got by supporting the other people in that team and making a contribution yourself.

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Before you look at interview questions and assessment activities in more detail, let’s take a step back to the beginning of the application process – your application form or CV.