Hiring

     You know that the most important part of any organization is its people. You know that to get quality employees you have to hire quality individuals. You know how critical it is to find and hire the right person. But as important as we know this process is - we still tend to commit very little effort to hiring the right person. Why?
     For those of you that are saying hey, wait a minute, I take hiring very seriously. Let me ask you a few questions. How much time do you commit to preparing for your interview? More than likely you’re running into your office right before the interview is going to start, you’re hoping you can find the resume since you can’t remember their name, and you have very little idea of what questions you’re going to ask. Have you prepared any tracking form or interview matrix? Typically, notes are scribbled on the resume as you work your way through the interview with deep, thought provoking questions like, “so, tell me about yourself?” How do you compare one candidate against the next? More than likely after you feel like you have interviewed hundreds of candidates (actually three) you decided it’s time to make a decision. So you pull out all three resumes and begin to try and read over your notes and realize, you don’t remember much of the interview and you end up making what you hope is the right decision solely based on gut and probably a little bit of a guess. Unfortunately, without any concrete data as to how their skills matched your role requirements you simply end up hiring the person you liked the most. Please know that the reason I can describe this process so well is not only because I observe it regularly, but it’s a process I have followed myself. I can also acknowledge that this process has caused me to hire some very unfavorable candidates. Since I learn from my mistakes, I decided to invest the time necessary and truly commit to the hiring process.
     For starters, I decided to prepare. My preparation for interviewing candidates starts with identifying exactly what I need from a candidate. In other words, what are the critical role or position characteristics that the candidate will need to have to be successful? My recommendation is to identify your top 4 role characteristics. Some examples of these role characteristics may be adaptability, calming demeanor, strong leadership experience, and strong operational/management skills, etc. The idea is to identify the characteristics that are critical to your job position that you are hiring for.
     The next step is to identify questions that will help you identify how well your candidate matches the characteristics you identified earlier. The key point here is to ask each candidate the same series of questions. You can of course have follow up questions and probe further as they respond but you need to have the same starting questions. By asking each candidate the same series of questions, you can accurately compare your candidates. Otherwise, you have to try and compare candidates on three totally separate interviews, versus comparing three candidates on the same interview. So for example, if I’m trying to identify operational or management ability I might ask the following question: How do you organize yourself and prioritize projects? Or if I’m trying to identify their adaptability skills I might ask the following question: How do you handle a situation where you had planned out your full day and an urgent project was dropped on your desk? Please know that as the candidates respond, I will be listening closely to determine if and what I want to ask as a follow up question. The objective is to learn as much as possible about the candidate and how well they match your core role characteristics.
     At this stage I now invest the time necessary after the interview. Immediately after the interview, preferably with your interview partner – an assistant, colleague, supervisor, human resource representative, etc. you evaluate the candidate on how strong or weak they are in each core role characteristic. On my form I have my four core role characteristics across the top prioritized from more important to less important. Since I have four characteristics I will rate each candidate on a 1-4 scale; 1 being the best. This allows for a few things. One, it allows me to generate a score for each candidate so I can easily see who my strongest candidates are. Second, it allows me to see which candidate was stronger in the characteristics that are more important. You can easily have two candidates end up with the same score, but rarely will they be scored the same for each characteristic. So this quickly can become my tie breaker as the candidate with the better rating in the characteristic that is more important is the better choice.
     In addition to rating each candidate on how well they fit each characteristic, I also apply to each candidate an overall interview rating – this is your chance to identify how each candidate made you feel. Because let’s face it, this is also a critical component of hiring the right candidate. So I rate each candidate on a 1-5 scale for overall interview feel. This is important because you may have a candidate that has tremendous leadership experience and it is a critical role characteristic for the job function but the individual was extremely boring and lacked humor. Whereas you on the other hand love to have fun on the job and appreciate a good laugh when appropriate. This would probably not be a good fit so it is important to identify this as well.
     Ultimately, I’m left with two primary rating sections. The section where I rate the skill set compared to my key role characteristic and the section where I rate overall interview feel. What I have found is that the candidates who score well in their abilities usually also score well in the overall interview process. This is simply because if a candidate possesses the skills you identified as critical to your job function, you will naturally have things in common with this person which in turn impacts how you feel about them. Once I have each candidate evaluated I begin to fill them into one of four categories. 1) Top Candidates. It is my objective to identify at least three top candidates. By committing to getting at least three, it will ensure that you have interviewed enough candidates. 2) Potential. This category is for all candidates that you are on the fence with and have the potential of being in your top three. 3) File. This section is for all candidates that currently don’t have what you are looking for but may with development or may be a better fit for another role down the road. 4) Others Interviewed. This category simply keep tracks of all the candidates I interviewed so I can keep a final count as well as know who I need to send thank you for applying letters to.
     In addition to fully utilizing this matrix, I also commit time to talking to my top candidates numerous times. I will do a follow up call and have them answer the same questions I have already asked them. I will contact them again and have them fill out a questionnaire with the same questions. The objective is to connect with the candidate as much as possible so you can hopefully learn who they truly are. Unfortunately there are a number of individuals that have the ability to put on a false front and seem like the perfect candidate. But fortunately, those that are good at putting their best foot forward cannot sustain it for long. The responses from those who are sincere will be consistent since that is who they are. The responses from those who are not will begin to vary as they have to remember how they responded before.
     By committing to the interview process and truly investing time and effort into it, you increase your probability of hiring the right candidate exponentially. By having this matrix and utilizing it along with the set of questions allows you to manage the interview process in a way that provides the necessary data to help make the correct hiring decision.