FROM AUGUST 2015'S RECRUITER MAGAZINE

It is often said that recruitment isn’t rocket science. But few can have boiled hiring down to its essentials quite as far as Karren Brady (Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge) vice-chairman of West Ham United Football Club, businesswoman and one of Lord Sugar’s advisers on BBC’s The Apprentice.

Brady told recruiters attending Recruitstock, the FIRM’s (Forum for In-House Recruitment Managers) annual learning event in the New Forest in June: “I only ask one question in an interview. I tell candidates ‘I will ask you this one question, and if you can’t answer it, the interview is over’, and then you can ask me anything you like. I always say to them ‘Tell me something about my business I don’t already know’.”

She continued: “They should know something about my business, otherwise why should I employ them. And depending how they answer that [question] we carry on.”

Brady recalled how when she first started out in business, people would walk in for interview, “and I would literally go ‘No’ ”. 

“People would turn up in trainers and with tattoos, and I would think ‘you’re never going to work here’,” she explained. “I always think that you should dress appropriately, so if you want to work in a bank you wear a suit, if you want to work in a bakery you wear something completely different.”