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Hiring Without the Guesswork
Part 2 of 2
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Personnelly Speaking |
Note: Part 1 of this article appeared in the September 2000 Industry Focus.
Step Three: Interview According to Plan
After prescreening according to minimum requirements and conducting a five-minute interview, the serious interviewing is at hand. When preparing for interviews and while conducting them, there are two things to think about. The first is what you probably already concentrate on, the actual interchange between you and the applicant. The second is your overall interview strategy. That usually neglected part of hiring involves choosing how many interviews you'll give applicants, how long they'll last, the purpose of each, and who will conduct them.
Some companies attribute their success in hiring to interview standards that are much higher than others in the industry. Doing three interviews is almost unheard of, and for the owner to conduct one of them is very different; give it a try.
Interviews with the candidate are critical. Doing a good job here is tricky because of one unalterable fact about those presumably polite interchanges: You want to get under the applicant's skin, and the applicant doesn't want you to.
Because you're in the position of power, you can take your pick of techniques that encourage the truth to surface. Time is a key ally. Kirk's main interview lasts two to five hours and contains carefully timed peaks and valleys. After reviewing with candidates the results of a personality quiz, Kirk asks them to start with high school and describe their experiences up to the present.
"When you're talking about yourself, that's an 'upper,'" Kirk says. Then take the candidates on a downhill portion of the roller coaster. Kirk will express concern with certain of the quiz's findings. The applicants must defend themselves. After a bit of that, Kirk says "Let me tell you a little more about the job." That sends the applicants' spirits soaring again, because they figure they might get an offer.
After a few ups and downs, says Kirk, "you'll see their role playing come down. They'll say, 'Let me tell you the truth about something.'" A productive interview must last between 45 minutes and 90 minutes to scratch the surface. "Once they hit that point, you can ask incredible questions about their job history and they'll just tell you."
Your other key interviewing tool: listening. In order to do that well, you need to know in advance what you want to hear. This is where your carefully crafted job description comes in, becoming a blueprint for the interview. Take your script of questions or list of behaviors into the interview and pose follow-up questions until the trait is uncovered. Don't concentrate on candidates' descriptions of their actions as much as you listen for the attitude or preference you're trying to uncover. Where possible, ask for examples from the past.
Another client, Ron Parks, is one of the most disciplined listeners I found. He first devised a list of questions that uncover behavioral traits and are also hard for applicants to see through. Then he trained himself to listen for linguistic patterns, as well as content, in their answers.
For example, to discover an applicant's chief means of learning and relating to any task, Parks will ask, "How do you know if a co-worker is doing a good job?" There's no right answer. Parks simply wants to find out what kind of "proof" is offered. If the applicant says she can simply see the results of a good job, she is dominantly sight-oriented. Others are hearing oriented, and still others are reading-oriented.
To find out whether a person enjoys a lot of detail in a job or prefers a more general, big-picture orientation, Parks listens to the specificity in a response. Asked what part of a job gave him the greatest gratification, one fellow said, "Installing chicken cookers." Then he corrected himself and said, "No, installing big machines." To Parks' ear, that means: "This is a very general guy. Even though installing a chicken cooker is a very broad description of a job, it was too specific for him. He's going to make lots of detail mistakes if we force too much of it on him."
Remember the purpose of interviewing: to get and give information. The process you construct should aim to collect data on what some call horizontal and vertical planes. Horizontal information, such as a candidate's schooling and background, isn't very hard to discover, but you need a sizable amount of it to begin to make your decision. Vertical information plumbs the depths of a candidate's personality, and it will determine who gets the job.
Step Four: Do Use Personality Tests
Personality testing is one tool that some of the best hirers use to probe vertical, or soft, data. Yet it's probably the most controversial issue in hiring. That's understandable. No one likes the idea of his or her dazzlingly unique self being reduced to a test score or personality type. Tests of hard skills, such as computer keyboarding, spelling, carpentry, and machine operations are fine. But our predispositions? There's a constituency that feels it is un-American, a breach of privacy.
Here's how to get over that hurdle: Assume there are no bad or good workers. There are, however, a lot of people in the wrong job. Consider the supervisor of a sophisticated inventory of 50,000 parts who can't stand detail or repetitive tasks. Is he a happy man? No. And no sane manager would have put him there if he or she had known about his preferences. The best personality tests don't produce answers; they produce a profile of leading indicators about someone. And the best use of the profile is to supplement or confirm what you have already learned.
If you accurately assess a person's soft skills, the payoff is enormous. You've not only landed a productive employee but freed the employee's manager to do constructive, rather than remedial, coaching. The first mistake that anybody in management makes is to assume that through training, incentives, or disciplinary action, you can change people who are not doing the job right. People can change; but in the end, I think, most people won't.
To implement testing in your company, decide whether you want to create your own or buy an established test. Either way, be judicious; a test must be technically sound, be appropriate for the job and company involved, and comply with a slew of government regulations, including the new Civil Rights Act. The American Psychological Association suggests that company owners contact the psychology department of a local university to find an industrial psychologist who can make recommendations.
Step Five: Keep Score with the Right Goals in Mind
Score your candidates immediately after seeing them, and make sure the same (preferably senior) person is seeing all the candidates for any one position. Assuming you have two or three candidates with the characteristics to succeed in the job, the final piece of the puzzle is how well they will fit into your team or your company's culture. Look at whether the candidate has similar goals and how well his or her personality traits will mesh with those of existing employees. Grade according to that as well, or compose questions to probe further.
The most important thing to remember while doing evaluations is that you are matching a person to a job profile, not comparing candidates with one another. Comparison works OK if the worst candidates are sixes and sevens (still good scores), and you select an eight (an even better score). But if the worst is a two and the best is a four, then you have a problem.
Another quality-control feature: make your decision based on a candidate's weakest score. Let's say you've graded a job candidate in three areas: she scores eight in her capacity to do the job, another eight for her behavioral preferences in a job, and a six on how well she fits the company team. Many selection processes would say, Well, you've got two eights-hire her. I say, wrong. The smallest number will always bring the other two down. Your lowest number should be a seven or above.
Step Six (Finally): Check References Anyway
By this point, you won't be eager to do reference checking. After all, you've already worked so hard to get the right person that you don't really want to know if there's a problem. What's more, if you've been systematic in every other part of the hiring process, reference checking won't turn up anything you don't already know.
Still, do it. But to make it worthwhile, be sure to reach beyond the references-acquaintances and former bosses-that the applicant expects you to call. Ask those references for further references for the candidate, and then call them.
The Payoff
Your biggest reward for creating and following a good hiring process will surprise you. It won't be the lower turnover or other concrete results you set out to secure-though you'll likely achieve them. It will be this: If you hire the right way, you will manage your people better than ever before. You won't be able not to. You'll know precisely what motivates them, where they're likely to make mistakes, and how to package your feedback.
About the author
Robert Palow is president of RP Consultants, a Placentia, CA based company that specializes in labor and employment practices. He has more than 30 years of management and legal experience in the human resource field.
ABSSI / Industry Focus / November 2000
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