Pre-Interview Actions
- Develop a “candidate profile.” This must go beyond the duties and responsibilities for the position. It must include a profile of the type of person which you seek.
- Establish a hiring team. This could be a group of 2 or 3 other people that interview the candidate and make recommendations. These could be senior managers, coworkers or other team members that the candidate will work with.
Rules to follow when hiring
- Do the right preparation “before” beginning the interview process.
- Most employers ask questions that focus on skills and knowledge when they interview. They believe if they can hire the person with the best capability or the most experience than they will make a good hire. This is only a small part of the story.
- When selecting employees, put as much or more emphasis on the applicants’ values, beliefs, and interests as on competencies and credentials. These are the elements that drive employees to learn skills and knowledge. Values, beliefs, interests, and attitudes are vastly more difficult to change as opposed to skills and knowledge.
- Providing the employee with a “why” for staying is more important than financial compensation when interviewing. Financial incentives do not motivate or build employee loyalty. Discuss theirs future prospects with the organization.
- Perform the right “post interview’ procedures to ensure that you have is fact sleeted the best candidate.
During The Interview
- Ask a series of “base-line” questions to all candidates for consistency purposes. Often times, employers ask divergent questions with each candidate thereby skewing the results of the interview. This creates a validated method to assess the two qualification areas leading to a hire; 1.) ability to do the job and 2.) willingness to do the job.
- Here’s a great way to plan the “base-line” questions:
- Ability to do the job – match required job skills (i.e., technical knowledge, problem-solving ability, writing ability, etc.) with demonstrated candidate skills and experience.
- Willingness to do the job – match required performance characteristics with demonstrated candidate performance skills and behavior. – (planning and prioritizing tasks, assisting customers, working with a team, meeting deadlines, etc.)
- I like to begin the interview with base-line questions that first focus on the ability to do the jobs. For example I’ll ask a few open-ended questions like:
- Take me through your job history. This allows me to observe the candidate as they explain their history.
- What are you doing now?
- How is it important to the company, client, team?
- Why are you leaving?
- What could they do to get you to stay?
- What kind of company are you looking for? Why?
- The single best predictor of a candidate’s future job performance is his or her past job behavior. Interviews that probe for past job behavior have been found to be more reliable than ones that focus on personality traits, such as “I’m dependable,” or “I’m hardworking.” Ask questions that allow you to discover how the candidate handled previously difficult circumstances.
- “Think of a time when you had to …… Tell me how you handled this.”
- “Can you give me an example of a situation that required you to …..,” “Explain what you did to resolve this situation.”
- Get specific examples of past job behaviors that relate to abilities to perform the job. Examples of behavior based questions are structured like:
- Tell me about an example of how you demonstrated “dependability” to your company, client or co-worker.
- Ask value-based hiring questions
- What is most important in your life?
- If you had all the money that you needed how world you spend most of your time?
- What makes you “worth” what you are, in terms of compensation?
- Who has been the biggest influence in your life? What did they do to earn that?
- Create scenarios and try to discover how the candidate makes decisions. Give the candidate a challenging yet realistic circumstance to resolve. Example:
- Tell me how you would handle this situation: “A client that you call is angry because they found out you have given a lower price to their neighbor.”
- This is not so much to test “what” they say but rather the process they use. Pay careful attention to “how” they are communicating. Do they become easily agitated, are they fearful of being rejected, do they display a lack of confidence, is their body language congruent with whet they are saying, do they look away at times?
- I often hear that passion is important in the work environment. This is. certainly true, yet how do we evaluate passion? Asking someone what they are passionate about it not enough. Again we may get the rehearsed response. We must ask questions that allow us to discover how passion is manifest in the candidate. One question that I find that allows this to become visible is:
- “If you only had 5 or 10 minutes to tell a group of school kids why you get a kick out of your work, what would you say?”
Post Interview Actions
Making a new hire can be like buying a car or a house. We tend to “make the purchase” for the wrong reasons. Many employers make an “emotional decision” when hiring. They tend to hire people that they “like” rather than those that would be best for the job. Because of this we recommend performing the following purely pragmatic tasks, after the interview:
- Conduct “confirmation interviews” prior to employment. Ask specific questions related to the values, beliefs, interests, and attitudes identified as necessary to the role. For each of these characteristics, simply ask the previous employer: “In your opinion, does this individual have interests in X? What did this individual do to give you this opinion?”
- Perform a background check on all candidates. Be sure of check municipalities related to previous residences. Many employers make the mistake of only checking criminal and DMV status.
- Obtain authorization to check their credit. This is a clear indication of character. While few may have perfect credit, seeing how the candidate explains their credit history can be very revealing.