As a manager, interviewing candidates and hiring new employees is one of the most consequential responsibilities you will perform. The hiring decision is heavily valued by most companies. Who you hire becomes your signature that encapsulates your management style, your strategic prowess, and your credibility as a judge of talent. How many times has an employee’s performance, good or bad, prompted the question, “who hired her”?
Hiring a new employee and navigating your company’s process to bring on new employees can be the most enjoyable, or the most tedious task for you as a manager. It all depends how you and how your organization approach it.
In my experience, the hiring process has pitted subjective judgments of hiring managers against objective measurements by the organization. As organizations grow, it is natural to try to remove the personal judgments of hiring managers as much as possible, so firms can on-board new hires with as little risk as possible, both from a performance and a legal standpoint. Firms want to make their new hire a sure bet, and they want a consistent process to avoid the legal entanglements that can occur following candidate selection or rejection.
With the development of intelligent applications that can search resumes and other candidate documents for keywords and phrases that “match” the talent and experience the firm is seeking, companies can quickly cut through the initial landslide of resumes to narrow down the pool to a smaller group of candidates. These can be manually screened to see who ultimately makes it to the interview table. The process is efficient, but not necessarily effective. It relies on the hiring team to identify the words and phrases and experience that accurately reflect the desired profile of the candidate. It also relies on the candidate to use the “correct” terminology in their resume so that she triggers those matches.
One of the big misses I’ve seen in this part of the approach is the tendency to miss those candidates who might have attractive transferrable skills, but perhaps in a different industry. Perhaps you are looking for strong leadership traits in a candidate. A candidate may have demonstrated leadership in an environment outside your industry, perhaps in the military. If your criteria isn’t broad enough to pull that in, you’ll never get the chance to talk to that candidate. You’ll miss candidates who might have very interesting transferrable skills. Candidates who might be able to learn and change the game for your company. In my opinion, this makes our talent pools on companies narrower, with candidates with more vertical profiles and less diverse skills and experiences. We tend to get more of the same candidates.
Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to participate in numerous hiring exercises. I’ve screened a few thousand resumes and conducted a few hundred interviews. Most of those interviews have been with a panel of colleagues interviewing the candidate. The panel typically arrived at the interview room following an agreed upon process which included an interview script, a weighting protocol for each question, and a scoring mechanism to ultimately compare each candidate against the pool.
I always found it useful to see all the resumes submitted and I wanted managers who reported to me to do the same. It was typical for the Human Resource specialist to try to screen those first, and I understand the desire to keep me from getting bogged down as a manager. But, almost every hiring cycle, I brought somebody in for an interview because something jumped off the resume and grabbed my attention. Something that I didn’t call out on the front end as a required criteria. Something that wouldn’t have been flagged by a well-intentioned screener who didn’t have my vantage point. In several cases I hired that person. I was almost always glad I did.
Once you get to the interview stage, I’m a firm believer that it is a mistake to make your panel too rigid. There should be a balance between following a consistent interview and evaluation process for legal reasons, and allowing the panel to explore the candidate to really understand her as clearly as possible in the limited interview window. You should definitely agree on an interview script and on roles for the interviewers. If you have a 1 hour interview schedule, don’t write a script that takes an hour to get through. Leave room for conversation.
In the quest to make business risk free and success more predictable, I’ve seen a tendency to turn the interview into a candidate quiz. The questions take up the whole interview time. The candidate only gets to speak in the form of answers to your questions. There is no space for dialogue. The candidate gets 5 minutes at the end for questions. The panel is only mildly interested in those questions and unclear on who should answer those and how. Congratulations, you are likely to select the candidate who can answer questions quickly without stumbling in one hour. That’s a game show contestant, not your ideal new employee.
I believe the script is important, as are the roles for who asks each questions. But they should only be a guide. My best experiences as a hiring manager or as a member of a hiring panel, have been when we had few questions, which mapped reasonably well to competencies we were seeking, but allowed for follow up and probing with the candidate. The interview should be an unconstrained conversation between the candidate and the panel. Your questions are probably somewhere between good and brilliant, and closer to good. It’s during the conversation when you can begin relating to each other and surface true style, character, warts, and understand the true potential of this candidate as an actual employee in your company.
You don’t quiz people you meet in your personal life before deciding if you want to spend more time with them. You talk to them, try to relate to each other, and see where you have common ground before deciding if you want to hang out more. Why is this different? After all, you’re going to spend a ton of time with this person and count on them for much. As I said, your professional reputation is hanging on whether you get this right. Don’t you want the same level of trust and rapport before you begin your relationship with him?
At the end of the process, you and your panel need to use common language and a numerical scale to rate the candidates. You do need consistency here so you can defend your decision to upper management or even legally if there are questions later. Agree on the competencies you are seeking and how you’ll weight those beforehand. Then discuss what you heard from the candidate. You’ll see something pretty cool. That brilliant question you authored and asked about leadership, isn’t the part of the conversation where your candidate demonstrated that they had great leadership attributes. It will come from someplace else in the interview. It will come from a story she told that wasn’t on your script. It will come because you talked to each other. A conversation.
Talk to your candidates. Don’t quiz them. Treat them like people and you’ll be surprised at how great a team you can build.
Lead well.
(Please share your comments below.)
Click to visit Jim’s book page:
“The Modern Compassionate Leader – 12 Essential Characteristics of the Rising Sales Leader”
Follow Jim on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.
© Jim Martin and www.jamesmichaelmartin.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jim Martin and www.jamesmichaelmartin.com
