Load the Dice and Hire Right with Great Interviewing Skills!

Have you ever interviewed Dr. Jekyll and had Mr. Hyde show up on their first day of work?  If you’ve hired more than 5 staff odds are this has happened to you at least once.  Not only is this frustrating, it can be very costly.

Bad hiring decisions inhibit your ability to get your work done.  If the individual is not the right fit they either don’t have the skills to do the job at hand or they are somewhat of a disruptive influence to the team.  Either way, you probably have an unproductive employee, a disgruntled team and you spend far too much of your time, as a manager, trying to make them work out or trying to manage them out.

Bad hires can also cost you money.  If you factor in both hard and soft costs, you can spend from 50% - 200% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them, depending on experience level, skill set, scarcity of talent, and other factors.  

But it doesn’t just cost money to replace a bad hire, it costs to keep them as well.  Hewitt estimates that a dis-engaged employee loses up to 1/3 of their annual salary in productivity.  

Conversely, hiring well can create exceptional teams who perform at peak levels.  Skilled, cohesive teams are also happier teams.  And a happy team makes for a happy manager - and one with more career opportunities.

But how do you ensure that every hire is a good hire?  Well - quite frankly you don’t.  After spending 15 years in recruitment and interviewing over 5,000 candidates (for myself as well as my clients) I can safely say that hiring is, as they say in Texas, a Craps Shoot.  Human beings are unpredictable so you will never be able to get it right 100% of the time.

But you can load the dice.  And one of the easiest and most effective ways to load the dice is to learn to interview well.

I know, I know.  How hard can it be, you ask?   All I need to do is to go through the resume, make sure I can get along with the candidate and that they will fit into the team and ask questions about whether or not they can do the job.  Then I select the best candidate - and hope I’ve made the right decision.

And you’d be right.  That is exactly what you need to do.  The problem is, most managers have never been trained to do this effectively and therefore lack the tools and skills to do so.  Interviewing is one of those skills that managers think should come easily.  But, without proper training it’s actually one of the toughest things to do well.

As a result, many managers go by “gut feel” or a set of inexact criteria poorly applied to all candidates interviewed.  Many times to their detriment.

Even if a manager understand the importance of hiring for a set of values or culture fit and building skill set, they can lack the tools to properly identify these values, culture fit and innate abilities needed to fill the open position.  

Most managers also lack the ability to structure questions in such a way as to elicit what the candidate did do in a similar scenario rather than what the candidate would do.  

This is critical because, unlike the share market, when it comes to potential job candidates, past performance is indicative of future results.

And this is hard because, even when asked directly about a past event, most interviewees will talk in theoreticals, trying to impress by giving the right answer, instead of giving specific examples. And most interviewers don’t press them because itʼs not in most people’s nature to hold others’ feet to the fire when they give information that’s not exactly what they are looking for. But itʼs the interviewerʼs responsibility to do exactly that.  To continue to press until the candidate relates a real live incident - one that can be verified with reference checks.  This is a skill that must be learned

Even when asking situational interview questions (where you give a candidate a scenario and ask how they would respond) the structure many managers use to ask these questions often seeds the very answer they are looking for!  It’s like giving an open book test - what’s the point?  You don’t actually learn anything about the candidate except that he or she can listen and parrot back what the manager asks.

How do you learn to interview well?  Consultants, like myself offer Interview Skills Training courses.  But some  recruiters will offer this service for free.  Caveat emptor here though.  Make sure that you only work with recruiters who know your business well and whom you trust to do a good job.  There are many “cowboys” around who could actually do more harm than good.

Make sure any training you attend includes the following:

• How to plan and structure a great interview which will allow you to objectively compare candidates and ensure the best choice.
• How to determine if the candidate is truly the right cultural fit for your team (and not rely on “gut feel” or hire someone just because you like them).
• The difference between skills and strengths: only one can be taught, while the other is the most important for a great hire.
• How to structure robust interview questions to elicit the verifiable information you need to determine if the candidate can perform in the role.
• How to increase your ability to hire top talent within the marketplace by accurately and effectively selling the position and company.  Remember, it’s quickly becoming a candidate’s market again.  It’s as important for you to sell the opportunity as for them to sell themselves.

Learning to interview well is one of the most important things you can do as a manager.  Great hires help you and your team become more productive, save you money, reduce stress levels all around and, last but certainly not least, make your job more enjoyable!