Have you ever hired a new employee and thought, “Where is the person I interviewed?” The interview was great, the candidate had all of the right answers, and they were enthusiastic about fitting in with your team. But once they were on board, it didn’t quite work out.
Hiring new talent is one of the most impactful responsibilities of a leader. As a business owner, manager, co-worker or customer, you’ve experienced the consequences of the wrong person being hired.
Also, hiring managers can increase risk to an organization simply by the questions they ask in an interview. For example, a pregnancy discrimination charge resulted from one question asked by the interviewer trying to break the ice: “When are you due?”
The job interview has been one of the most commonly used selection practices. Yet, regular interviews may not provide consistent results, and they have not accurately predicted high performers.
Many interviewers fail to recognize how ineffective they are in this process. In a recent survey, 47 percent of hiring managers report they spend less than 30 minutes with a candidate before extending a job offer. Almost 60 percent of hiring managers acknowledge they make hiring decisions solely on instincts. And among interviewers who have never been trained, only 7 percent lack confidence in their ability to conduct an effective, legally defensible interview.
Human talent has taken on a new strategic importance as organizations depend less on tangible products and more on knowledge and service. In many industries, organizations are chasing too few qualified candidates, and that will worsen as more workers retire. Organizations cannot afford to stumble through ineffective selection processes. Candidates also are better at sizing up potential employers. The selection system must impress candidates and make them feel good about the hiring process, and the people they engage with.
The interview should be designed to predict future job performance reliably and accurately. Many times interviewers simply focus on technical knowledge and experience. However, to get a full picture of a candidate, interviewers should focus on competency-related behaviors as well as dispositions that relate to satisfaction, success or failure in a job. Competencies include customer focus, building strategic work relationships, decision making, facilitating change or sales ability.
To have the greatest success in the selection process, hiring managers need to understand the difference in the information gathered from candidates when using situational versus behavior-based interview questions. Candidates with high cognitive abilities are more easily able to craft stories that describe how they will handle a future-oriented scenario. However, describing how you would handle a situation in the future does not always correlate to actual performance. Past behavioral examples are a much better predictor.
If assessment tools tied to the functions of a position are used, they should be just one factor in the overall hiring decision. For example, a job offer was rescinded after an assessment tool identified the candidate would not be effective in leading meetings. However, no discussion occurred in the interview about the candidate’s 20 years of experience leading meetings and conference calls. Assessment tools can be highly useful after the hiring process to identify opportunities for training and development.
Understanding how to gather the best information in an interview, including motivational fit, results in finding the candidate that not only can do the job, but also wants to do the job.
Karen Shannon is director of human resources and business consulting for Ollis/Akers/Arney. She can be reached at karen.shannon@ollisaa.com.
