The Culture of Feedback Starts with the Interview Process – Carmela Krantz, Founder of WOVEN

Carmela has 30 years of experience leading all aspects of Human Resources in several small and mid-size rapidly growing businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the course of her career, Carmela has been the first Vice President of Human Resources at nine companies, including six start-ups. Her professional experience includes technology, retail, hospitality, and wholesale companies and a variety of business outcomes. Throughout her career, she has built high performing teams to deliver the full suite of human resources programs and services.

Carmela has worked closely with employees at all levels to help them build strong communication and leadership skills and strong working relationships to drive positive business results. Now, she is using her extensive and diverse experience to lead WOVEN – a Human Resources Advisory and Executive Coaching practice.

Read the interview on the culture of feedback with Carmela Krantz below.

How do you test for it in the interview process?

During the interview you are trying to understand two things – does the candidate have the skills and experience we need in this position and, are they the kind of human we want as part of our organization. To accomplish the latter, ask questions about how they like to be managed, what role do they typically play on a team, what are they passionate about, what is their approach to solving problems and resolving conflict.

The objective here is to begin to learn about how the candidate behaves based on the belief that past behavior is one of the best indicators of future performance. Are they a person who embraces feedback and are they constructive in their approach to giving and getting it?

How do you coach and train employees on this and why?

Be intentional about the candidate experience you want your company to have in every step of the process – from your careers page all the way through to the offer. This includes interview training for all employees who conduct interviews and creating interview panels where each interviewer is focused on specific areas – setting a standard of both how we interview and what are we interviewing for.

Living by that standard is critical to learning about candidates and having a consistent method to evaluate them for ability to do the work and fit in the organization.

When does this go wrong?

It goes wrong when companies compromise and choose the resume over the individual.

What happens if you come off too strong or weak on the culture of feedback?

Companies can end up with an unintentional culture. Individual employees depending on the size and/or tone of their voice can have a very real impact on the culture of an organization.

How can it stunt growth or lead to declined offers?

Employment brands are well defined – either intentionally or unintentionally. Culture is what you do, it’s not what you say. If you say a culture of feedback is important and what really happens in the company day in and day out is not that, in time it will impact the employment brand which will impact the ability to hire and retain employees.

If you’d like to learn more, please visit WOVEN here.

Interested in reading more? Read more Guild Talent articles on our blog.

Jeff Possiel

Jeff Possiel

Content Lead | Guild Talent

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