Hiring People_ Recruit and Keep the Brightest Stars - Kathy Shwiff [16]
Once you’ve reviewed all the available resumes and organized them according to their viability, it’s time to move on to the next phase of the hiring process: the interview stage.
INTERVIEWING
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“All the clever strategies and advanced technologies in the world are nowhere near as effective without great people to put them to work.”
—Jack Welch, former General Electric CEO and author of Winning
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While resumes and cover letters present only the information that candidates want you to see, interviews allow you to find out about qualities or flaws that are not revealed on paper. Specifically, it is an opportunity to ask the questions that will help you assess how the candidate will perform on the job.
At the same time, you will be able to get a sense of whether the individual will thrive in your company culture. Finally, the interview allows you to articulate company values and to sell the candidate on the idea of joining your team.
It’s vital to hone your interviewing skills and familiarize yourself with all aspects of the process. A badly handled interview can end up with a weak candidate making a deceptively strong impression, or send the perfect candidate running in the other direction, turned off by an unappealing manager or a job that was inadvertently portrayed as a dead end.
PRELIMINARY SCREENING
Some companies go straight from the stack of resumes to inviting candidates in. Interviewing is time consuming, however, so when the must-interview stack is large, you may want to do some preliminary screening, either through a phone interview or by using some type of quick assessment.
Phone Interviews
Consider screening candidates via a telephone interview before asking them in for a formal face-to-face interview. This is particularly helpful when you’re interviewing candidates who live in a different geographic area and you want to avoid the costs (transportation and lodging expenses) of bringing an ill-suited candidate in for an interview.
Phone interviews should typically last between 10 to 30 minutes, so make every question count. After all, this is your opportunity to determine whether the candidate has the minimum technical skills necessary to do the job. It might be helpful to jot down notes during the conversation, so you can refer to them later.
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The BIG Picture
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BEYOND DUE DILIGENCE
When Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., studied 43 of the best-run companies in the United States to explore what makes them successful, they found that one of the most important commonalities among these firms was their focus on people. Their hiring process, in particular, was intense, with many companies interviewing candidates as many as seven or eight times. The managers there wanted to get to know the people they were hiring—and to let the candidates get to know them as well. As these successful companies demonstrated, it pays off to take as much time as you need during the interview process to be sure the candidate is the right fit for the job and the organization.
SOURCE: In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. (HarperCollins, 1986).
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Ask open-ended questions that reveal how well the candidate would fill the position and fit into the company as a whole, and attempt to gather as much information as you can, while keeping the tone light. Engage the candidate by listening carefully and asking follow-up questions, requesting clarification of statements you don’t understand or asking for further explanations: How did she arrive at a specific decision? How did he feel about that outcome? Stay away from questions that can be answered with