Interviewing Thai Staff - My Techniques And Strategies

[This is the 2nd post covering my experiences on opening up and managing a company here in Thailand. I hope this series of articles will benefit those that are considering doing the same, or are actually already operating a Thai company]

In my Thailand Business Culture post I mentioned that I have worked with over 25+ staff in nearly 4 years of trading in Thailand. I didn’t realize I had gone through so many until I wrote that post and counted them up, but that is quite a few.

In the west, most people get jobs through someone they know. Or what’s more common in the corporate world is big bosses go head hunting. What I mean by head hunting is that executives keep an eye out for talented personnel that work with other companies and then offer them a better package when they could fill a position.

In Thailand, I’ve heard that both are rarely used, and if your like me and your company is fairly small, you’ll only have one option available to you: Advertising and grinding through the CV’s and covering letters to end up with a small pile of hot potentials that are worth coming into the office for a face to face interview. Here I will share the techniques and general strategy I have used that were really effective in weeding out the serious interviewees to the lazy ones. I’m also going to add a few more that I’ve thought about using since I last interviewed someone so hopefully this list will provide some food for thought for those that are considering employing staff here.

Firstly, when you advertise, especially for IT personnel, you’ll get bombarded with applicants. It’s unreal. When I was managing a very small sales team in the UK, I didn’t get know where near as many applicants as I get here.

First step is to give the staff some obstacles before you even get to see their CV. This instantly separates the guys that are applying for every single job on the jobs site to those that are careful in which company/industry they want to work in. A simple way to do this is to instruct people to send in their CV to an email address on your job ad. Set up an auto reply on that email asking applicants to email their CV and a covering letter to another email address. This may seem like your being a pain in the arse, or might even come over as being a little unprofessional, but you’ll be surprised at how many won’t follow the simple instruction. You now have 50% than you started with.

Next step is to go through all the emails to check who actually read the auto email and included a covering letter – You now have 10%

With the remaining few, I normally browse through the covering letters and go through their CV with them at a face to face interview (if they make it that far). I’ve never been interested in grades or what university people went to. I much prefer to get to know them and their way of thinking. If the university had an impact on how they work then great, but that’s for them to show me not a piece of paper.

I clearly remember one guy coming into the office for an interview. He started rambling on about his good grades and then proceeded to shove all these university papers under my nose. I passed them back without even taking a look at them and you could see he was really offended. I tried to explain that I’m unlike 99.9% of Thai managed companies and I’d much rather learn about him myself than go by a stack of papers that I don’t understand. He didn’t get it, he’s rich parents had paid a kings ransom in sending him to the best university in Thailand and here I am telling him I don’t care. He didn’t get the job.

So now we have a small handful of covering letters to read before we send the ones we’re interested in a list of questions regarding the position they are applying for. An email interview. This gives them as much time as they need to read and answer every questions. It’s a real shame how many applicants don’t put any effort into answering the questions. My thinking is: If they can’t be bothered to even research on-line for appropriate answers, I’m not going to bother wasting my time inviting them into the office.

By this stage, we should be left with around 5% - which is a very manageable number to handle. You’ve got applicants that read emails thoroughly, can follow instructions and either know their stuff or at least can research on-line to find the answers.

Next up is a phone interview. I don’t normally ask job specific questions over the phone due to the language barrier, but it’s just a way to organize a date and time for them to come into the office. I’m not sure if this makes it easier for them to come into the office feeling a little more relaxed due to our phone conversation or not. I hope it does.

I won’t go into what questions you should ask them on a face to face interview as these will differ between your company but I will say that I highly recommend organising a surprise test that interviewees were not expecting. This is well worth organizing. There have been people that have been smooth in all other areas of the interview process but the test has shown they are simply not right for the job.

If they pass the email interview, phone interview, face to face interview and the test, I’ll send them home. I’ve made the mistake of offering the job to people on the spot but that’s one I’ll never do again in the future. The reasoning behind this is that if people have to go through lots of hoops before they are rewarded, it’ll be worth so much more to them.

Now, you’ll probably only get away with the above if you’re an exciting company to work for, have a great team that the staff can learn from and offer excellent packages. I pay my staff well, have annual pay rises and bonuses, pay for their traveling expenses, always have pop in the fridge and take them to nice restaurants in the city. We work on interesting projects and the team/vibe in the office, on most days, in a cool environment to work in. What I’m trying to say is that there’s work to do not only with interviewing staff, but keeping them as well

Have you got any tips for interviewing people, whether that be here in Thailand, online or in another country?