Whether you are the CEO or a newly promoted manager, the majority of your interview training, if you received any, was likely from legal counsel coaching you with a dozen questions you are not allowed to ask. But how should you conduct the job interview so that you can be confident you are hiring the best possible candidate for the job?
Hiring is an exercise in risk management.
In hiring, you are always locked in competition with other employers. As you are assessing the risk of hiring someone, the candidate is simultaneously assessing the risk to their career of being hired by you. And just as you are evaluating multiple candidates, the candidates are often assessing multiple employment options.
When viewed as an exercise in risk management, the typical hiring process (the process used virtually everywhere) is fundamentally broken. How else can you describe a process where the right people get routinely overlooked, the wrong people often get hired, and nobody keeps score? And when every other functional area from finance to marketing is now data-driven, there is absolutely no reason that hiring should still be driven by gut instinct and personality. As you’ll see in the links below, it’s pretty easy to change your hiring process. The research has been done by many organizations. The data is available. At this point, most hiring mistakes are just self-inflicted wounds.
The elements of a great interview process, according to research.
Here are a few of our most popular articles on interviewing to help you identify a top performer and to get them to accept your job:
1) How to Prepare for the Interview Process
A great recruiting process is like a great dinner party. You may invite several people, but you want each one to feel special – like a guest in your home. If you invite a dinner guest, you want them to feel warmly welcomed. You want to show respect for their time. Evidence of your thoughtful preparation will be everywhere. You will be considerate of their needs and preferences.
2) How to Organize the Interview Process
Effective interviewing is an exercise in risk management. You want to be rigorous about verifying a candidate’s ability to do the work. You want to follow a fair and methodical process…but you also want to be sure you don’t cross the line into analysis paralysis. When you surprise a candidate by introducing new steps into the interview process, you are not reducing your hiring risk, you are actually increasing it.
3) How to Manage Candidate Expectations During the Interview Process
If you are like most employers, you probably don’t do a terrific job of managing candidate expectations during the interview process. Perhaps you left them hanging by not clearly communicating what your interview sequence would be, how long things would take, or how many times they would need to come back for additional interviews. That uncertainty all works against you at offer time.
4) How to Select Candidates for an Interview
Extensive research proves that, statistically, years of experience is only the 14th best predictor of future job performance. If you want better hiring results, look for the context of a candidate’s achievement, not the years they have been working.
5) How to Evaluate a Candidate’s Experience During the Interview
When interviewing, hiring executives usually place a huge emphasis on a candidate’s track record of achievement. But they often overlook the context of that achievement. If someone works in a highly successful, well-operated company, and is highly successful as a result, we attribute their success to their innate ability. But if the exact same person works in a less successful company, fraught with employee tension and communication issues, and they failed at their task, we still attribute their failure to their innate ability to perform their job responsibilities effectively.
6) How to Evaluate a Candidate’s Cultural Fit During the Interview
It is often said that people are hired for skills but fired for “fit.” But what is fit, and how can you determine it before making a hire? How do you avoid hiring a mis-fit? Well, first, you need to take an objective look at your own work environment. Then, when you are interviewing people, you need to look beyond their credentials and experience, and instead look at how they achieved their results in their last few jobs. Look at both what they enjoyed and what they struggled with in their past jobs…and see how your environment compares.
7) How to Interview for Career Patterns
One of the most interesting parts of interviewing for me is listening to the stories people tell about their careers. Some people are always the victim of circumstance, but most often (in their own stories) they are the protagonist, and the boss or external events are the villain. Sometimes the hero overcomes the obstacles, learns a lesson, and reaches a new level of self-awareness. But sometimes the “hero” just quits to find a new job…and then proceeds to find a new job every 18 months after that. Funny thing about 18 months. That seems to be just about the time that people are really held accountable in executive roles.
8) How to Evaluate Executive Ability During the Interview
Everyone knows that the traditional interview is a poor predictor of future job performance. So if you want to consistently hire great people, you need more rigor in your interview process. How do you assess business acumen or strategic thinking? How do you assess an executive’s ability to turn ideas into action? How do you suss out their ability to work well with the rest of your executive team?
9) How to Look for Passion, Grit, and Determination in the Interview
Passion takes many forms. One kind of passion is easy to spot in an interview. It’s the instant-on enthusiasm and charm of an extrovert. They are fun to talk with, everything seems exciting, and you feel uplifted in their presence…like anything is possible. CEOs and Boards are often drawn to this kind of person because of their ability to “rally the troops.” But this kind of enthusiasm can also wane very quickly.
10) How to Get Beyond Interview Questions with Work Sample Testing
Talking about work is not the same as doing work. An interview often showcases one set of skills (talking about work) but cannot take the place of observing someone’s work. If you want to really know how someone works, give them some work to do during the interview sequence. Are you shocked? Don’t be. We recommend this at every level of hire, from Executive Director to Administrative Assistant.
11) Developing Interview Questions
If you are like most hiring managers, you probably “wing it” with a few standard questions you’ve used before. Or perhaps you start to think about your questions as you are walking up to the reception desk to meet your candidate. But when you do that, you are making two big cognitive mistakes. The best way to avoid these two cognitive biases (and a whole host of other biases) will be to think hard about your interview questions long before the interview.
12) How to Evaluate a Candidate’s Expertise
How do you evaluate the expertise of another person when you are not an expert in their functional area (a CEO interviewing a CFO, for example)?
13) Why You Should Never Ask a Candidate to Rate Themselves
Scientists have proven that Darwin was right when he said, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Research shows that “people with true knowledge tend to underestimate their competence.”
14) How to Interview an Innovator and Change Agent
How can you distinguish the poseurs and pretenders from the Real Deal Innovators? The world is full of one-hit wonders who, like Forrest Gump, happened to be present once at a successful time in history. Their false confidence and hubris will stand in the way of your innovation as surely as their inflated salary requirements will impoverish your new initiative.
15) How Your Interview Conduct Affects your Employer Reputation
The advent of employer reputation sites like Glassdoor has added an entirely new dimension to the recruiting function, far outside the scope of HR: personal risk to your own executive career and board relationships.
16) Should Subordinate Employees Be Allowed to Interview Their New Boss?
You may think you are demonstrating respect for the subordinates by including them in the interview. But it’s not respect. It’s a mistake. There are better ways to include subordinates in the hiring process.
17) How to Conduct a Panel Interview
Including peers in the interview sequence often means you are asking an opinion from an inexperienced or infrequent interviewer who does not have a full picture of the job. So to gain their perspective, develop their interviewing skills, and save time, an interview panel often makes sense, but be sure to avoid the pitfalls of panel interviews.
18) How to Interview Internal Candidates for a Position
It can be awkward to interview a current employee who you think is not qualified, but it’s important and can be done respectfully.
19) How to Interview a Business Development Professional
If you’re looking for an employee on the front lines of your organization (sales, customer service, etc.), you might have this image of an outgoing, gregarious individual. Or maybe you picture the aggressive (pushy?) self-confident types, who relentlessly drive sales results. Well, research shows these might actually be the worst choices for your front-line customer-facing positions.