By Melanee Cottrill, Civitas
You’ve learned that Most Hires are Average. You know that The Best People Aren’t Easy to Find. If you need a refresher, here is a link to our last newsletter.
Now that you’ve found some candidates who could be that elusive above-average hire, at least on paper, it’s time to start digging. Just like digging a hole, when digging into a candidate’s qualifications it’s critical to make sure that we’re using the right shovel. They may look great on paper – but in reality, mom and dad may have held their hand to that 4.0 grade point average – and I don’t’ think you want mom and dad coming to work every day.
The typical hiring process starts – and scarily enough, often ends – with a job interview. An interview that is likely to be driven by confirmation bias, our tendency to seek information that confirms our initial impression of a candidate, as Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, notes. “Based on the slightest interaction, we make a snap, unconscious judgment heavily influenced by our existing biases and beliefs. Without realizing it, we then shift from assessing a candidate to hunting for evidence that confirms our initial impression.” Confirmation bias is natural, we all do it whether we realize it or not.
So how do we overcome our nature?
Structure, my friends, is the answer. A normal, unstructured interview is not especially effective at predicting job performance. In a study of Google’s internal hiring process, Bock determined that unstructured interviews can “explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance.” Add a little structure, however, and that number nearly doubles to 26 percent.
Structure doesn’t have to be complicated. Create a list of standard questions for every interviewer to use – and don’t deviate from them. Follow-up questions are fine, there is nothing wrong with digging deeper. But don’t let the interviewers add or remove questions. Have every interviewer take notes (candidates inevitably start to run together in our minds), and rate answers on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being terrible and 5 being the most amazing answer ever possible. As hiring guru Lou Adler says, “use the interview to collect information on the assigned areas, not to vote.”
Speaking of interviews… never, ever, ever have one person interview and make a decision. Instead, do multiple one-on-one interviews. Have each interviewer pose questions related to a particular skill or behavior that is crucial to the job. And in the words of Adler, “If you like the person, be skeptical. Make the person prove his answers. If you don’t like the person, give the person the benefit of the doubt. Go out of your way to prove the person is competent.”
Coming Up: The Right Skills Are Hard to Fake
