“Do You Interview Well?”
by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist
In any large firm, there are full-time HR people who interview prospective employees for a living, have specialized training, and know which boxes to check. Day in, day out, they deal with personnel issues. But in your organization you are that person. Unfortunately, you don’t get to focus on personnel issues, but have to deal with ALL the issues. Make a good hire and you may never have to think about it again. But a bad hire is the gift that keeps on giving—you’ll need to deal with unintended consequences for months or years, up until the day you are forced to make a change.
So let’s keep this simple: when it comes to hiring a new person, more is better. That is, more individual contact, more information flowing both ways, more reference checks, both parties asking more questions, etc.
The eternal question is this: (A) Do you absolutely need to get a warm body into the vacant position, or (B) could it actually be better to limp by until the right person is available? If the answer to that question is (B), then you need to ask 4 more questions:
- Does this person have the appropriate, necessary skills?
- Does this person have glowing support from former employers and co-workers?
- Where is this person in their career and does your organization fulfill the needs/wants of this person at this career stage and into the future?
- Will this person fit into your corporate culture and the team they’ll be joining?
The answers to 1) and 2) can be obtained simply enough, by reading through the resume, making phone inquiries, reading reference letters, and from an in-depth, one-on-one conversation with the prospect. The answer to 3) will require a little more digging on your part. Obviously, if I want or need this job, I’ll tell you whatever I think you want to hear. But you’ll need to be probing and insightful enough to know, or at least guess, what the real answer is.
Finally, the answer to 4) is perhaps the hardest and riskiest part of any hire, and maybe the most important for long-term hiring success. But it also directly relates to the original question: Do we just need any warm body or do we need the RIGHT warm body? The only way to get to a good answer is through multiple interviews: on the phone, in person, by you, by the team manager, by potential future co-workers, one-on-one, in a group setting, even with the prospect’s spouse. With more chances for interaction, it becomes more likely that potentially beneficial or synergistic traits will become apparent. This dramatically increases your confidence in making the right hire. Increased interaction also gives more opportunity to uncover any potentially negative issues that could submarine team productivity. Everyone can pretend to be someone else for a short time, and some longer than others. But increasing the number of interactions over the course of time and with various members of your organization, who each bring a different agenda to the conversation, you can increase the likelihood that you really know who you’re hiring.
Hiring the right person takes time and a great deal of energy on your part. But by committing, early on and throughout the hiring process, to making every effort to getting the right person that will not only fill a vacancy but actually make the team better, you are much more likely to be satisfied, long-term, with the outcome.
