interviewing

The One-Question Performance-based Interview Redux

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:11:34 -0800

When you become a really good interviewer, you realize the interview is the best sourcing, recruiting, and closing tool ever invented.

Back in the early ‘80s when I launched my recruiter career, I was filling senior staff positions (engineers, accountants) and mid-level managers, and quickly realized these few common truths about human nature:

Most hiring managers make selection decisions based on limited information and their need to fill the job.
More candidates - even the best ones - make superficial guesses about the job based on limited information and their need to change positions.
Managers don't trust recruiters.
Candidates don't trust recruiters.
Knowing the job can help create trust.

Lose Your Personality and Become a Better Person and Better Interviewer

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:53:57 -0800

When I started out in the search business, it became quickly apparent that most managers weren't great at interviewing. For one thing, I always thought my candidates were great, and they didn't.

Part of this difference of opinion was due to a lack of understanding of what the real job entailed, lack of any rigorous assessment process, and a desire for many to take short cuts, waiting for the "perfect" candidate to arrive. In this case, unanimity of perceptions substituted for evidence and logic. In the bargain, many great candidates were excluded for bad reasons.

The Secrets of Hiring Great Sales People Finally Revealed

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:37:37 -0800

Over the years, I've been involved in developing hiring tools for sales representatives in a variety of industries including high technology, financial services, industrial products, consumer products, auto sales, woman's cosmetics, business services, medical products, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare.

10 Great Ways to Make Bad Hiring Decisions

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:12:00 -0800

I wrote a rather controversial article last week comparing Obama vs. McCain using our 10-factor evidence-based assessment system. The stated purpose of the article was to propose that Presidential candidates should be vetted just as rigorously as any candidate for any job.

Random Chance and How Managers Make Faulty Hiring Decisions

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:39:25 -0800

Hiring is too important to leave to chance, but that's exactly what hiring managers do when hiring experienced outside people.

Consider this: managers typically make three different types of hiring decisions – an internal move (either a promotion or lateral transfer), hiring a rookie right out of college, and hiring an experienced outside person for an open position.

What's surprising is that a different set of rules applies for how each decision is made. More surprising is that the success rate for recent college grads and internal moves is far more predictable than for an outside, experienced hire. This suggests that it might make sense to change the outside hiring decision to more closely mimic the process used for college grads and internal promotions.

Use the One-Question Interview to Make More Placements with Fewer Candidates

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0800

You need to become a better interviewer than your clients if they're excluding good candidates even before they meet them, or if they're not too good at assessing competency.

6 Steps for Hiring the Best Every Time

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0800

Over the past 30-plus years, I've been involved in thousands of searches, worked with hundreds of hiring managers, trained 3,000 to 4,000 recruiters, and worked closely with dozens of major companies. Following are some of the common threads among the best techniques, processes, and tools that I have seen and used.

Recruiting Darwin Awards – Not Everybody Evolves

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:24:06 -0800

Several years ago my children introduced me to the Darwin Awards. We've had a lot of fun reading some of the stories of the winners (or should I say "losers"?). These awards go to members of the human race who do something so dumb that they end up removing themselves from the gene pool – hence the name. For instance, take the guy who had a fuse in his car blow out on a long trip. He had the bright idea to use a bullet to replace the fuse. The logic was sound – it's made of metal and conducts electricity, doesn't it? Everything was going fine until the bullet heated up and exploded, leaving a big hole in his chest. As we travel the world talking to recruiters and recruiting organizations, I've become aware of some practices that, while not quite as deadly as the above example, do cause one to wonder what people are thinking. In the interest of brevity, I'm going to list just a few of the more egregious examples. I'll stop short of naming names, but know that every example is real.

The Antidote for Bad Interviewers

Wed, 21 May 2008 10:24:03 -0800

You've been working hard to put together a strong slate of candidates for a hard-to-fill position, and through networking and sheer force of personality have assembled three qualified individuals. They each have strengths and weaknesses, but they all have been successful in the past achieving the types of goals and completing the types of tasks that need to be done in this job. Your biggest concern: an unpredictable hiring manager. You're never sure just who is going to hit the mark with this manager because it doesn't follow any pattern that you can see. The manager tends to take immediate likes and dislikes to certain candidates for reasons not based on their backgrounds.

How to Interview Top Performers

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:00:00 -0800

Top people cannot be interviewed the same way as everyone else. Although most recruiters and hiring managers know this, few know how to do it. It's not about selling the job, charming the person, and over-talking. It's about using the interview to get the candidate to sell you.

The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:52:18 -0800

Everybody - from the Board and CEO down to every manager and supervisor - talks about the importance of hiring top talent. But only a rare few have converted the concept into reality. A number of companies have actually succeeded in embedding the idea into their corporate cultures, but in most cases, even these leave the "how" up to the recruiting department and each individual manager. Creating a road map on the "how to" of hiring top talent is the purpose of this book. It's now more important than ever. The worldwide demand for talent has increased as the supply of trained, talented, and available labor has declined. Even a temporary economic slowdown will not alter demographic trends and the long term need for talent.

Defend Your Candidate from the Competition and Superficial Assessments

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:40:01 -0800

I wrote a version of this article for ERE in April 2007. It seemed worthy of repeating as a year-end reminder of the critical role that recruiters need to play to ensure that bad decisions don't preclude the best person from getting hired. As you'll find out, the key point of the article is that good candidates, who we spent a great deal of time developing, can often be lost for easily preventable reasons. Setting up some process or check-point can prevent the problem from arising in the first place. If this isn't possible, you need to have some counter-measures ready to employ to mitigate any problems that do arise.

12 Great Sourcing Gifts for the Holiday Season

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:10:51 -0800

If you want to generate one great candidate day after day after day, follow my 12 golden rules for sourcing the best. These are this year's stocking stuffers whether you're hiring active or passive candidates.

10 Steps to Increase Interviewing Accuracy into the 90% Range

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:00:00 -0800

There are two huge problems when hiring is viewed as an end-to-end process. The first one involves sourcing. Most companies are terrible when it comes to advertising, recruiting, and attracting the best. Of course, as a recruiter, how I make my money is by finding top people that others can't. And, in today's Internet age, this is actually quite easy. However, this is a big waste of time if you or your hiring managers don't know how to accurately assess candidate competency.

Hiring and Recruiting Challenges Survey 2008 Preliminary Results

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:00:00 -0800

We are currently in the midst of our somewhat annual Hiring and Recruiting Challenges 2008 Survey. You should take the survey. Just the questions will get you jazzed. The answers, on the other hand, will make you shudder.