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Use the Interview to Defend Your Candidates

By Lou Adler, March 15, 2006

If you've ever had a good person you've presented to the hiring team get blown away for stupid reasons, you've got to learn how to defend your candidates. At one level this requires that you present concrete evidence to fight decisions made on emotions, biases, intuition or a too-narrow range of technical skills and competencies. Too many good people get excluded for the wrong reasons when evidence is not used to justify the selection. Too many average people with great interviewing skills get hired when feelings, prejudices and intuition override judgment.

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Here are some things you can do to get started on better defending your candidates:

1. Know the job. Before you start looking for candidates, ask the hiring manager what the person needs to do to be considered successful. Have the manager define the key projects and challenges the person is expected to handle. Then ask the manager to describe how better people handle these same tasks compared to average people. I call these types of documents performance profiles. Prepare a preliminary performance profile ahead of time by talking to the best people you've placed in similar positions and find out what they did differently than the average performer. This way, you can ask the hiring manager to modify your preliminary performance profile rather than starting from scratch. Doing most of the work to prepare a performance profile ahead of time demonstrates solid job knowledge and will earn you some potential partnership points.
   
   
   
   


2. Become a good interviewer. You'll need to be a better interviewer than your hiring manager clients if you expect to defend your candidates from superficial or narrow assessments. One way to do this is to get detailed examples of major accomplishments related to those described in the performance profile. If you spend at least 10 minutes digging into the candidate's biggest team, job-related and individual accomplishments, you'll have plenty of evidence to overcome generalizations and flawed assessments. On the tech side, too many interviewers dig into areas unrelated to real job needs, so be sure to challenge your candidate's apparent lack of technical depth by relating it directly to the real job requirements.
   
   
   
   


3. Use more outside evidence. Don't defend your candidates half-armed. Use test results, in-depth references and multiple examples of recognition which the candidate received for doing outstanding work. Point to early promotions, special bonuses, awards and raises as evidence of exceptional performance.
   
   
   
   


4. Don't take no for an answer. This is the recruiter's mantra. Too many people make decisions without all the available evidence. A recruiter needs to fight the tendency to judge competency too soon based on minimal information. Unless the hiring team has enough hard and fast evidence to make a good decision, you'll need to continue fighting for your candidate if you believe the person is being judged unfairly.
   
   
   
   


5. Use the "close upon an objection" sales technique. Even if you don't have ready proof to defend your candidate, use the promise of getting it as a way of keeping the hiring manager open-minded. "If I could present further evidence that the candidate is far stronger than your initial assessment, would you at least reconsider it and postpone your judgment for a few days?" Of course, then you better get the proof.
   
   
   
   


6. Lead more panel interviews. If you're a good interviewer, why not lead a panel interview? This way, everyone hears the same information. By digging deep and getting examples of major accomplishments during the interview, the other interviewers learn more about the candidate than they would have on their own. The key is to have one person lead the interview session, with the other panel members asking for clarification and examples. If you're in the room, why not lead the interview? This way, you can be sure your candidate's accomplishments are clearly understood by everyone involved.
   
   
   
   


7. Coach your managers to interview properly. If you can teach your managers how to improve their interviewing skills, you're instantly recognized as an expert in your field and an invaluable member of the hiring team. You might want to consider using the performance-based interviewing process I recommend as part of this.
   
   
   
   


8. Lead the debriefing session. To ensure that superficial information is not used to eliminate (or hire) a person, it's vital that the recruiter be present during the debriefing session. The collective judgment of the group is a valid means to assess competency if everyone involved presents hard evidence. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Usually the dominant person's opinion prevails or the concerns of one or two people overshadow the positive judgment of others. To prevent this, it's best if the recruiter leads the debriefing session to ensure that all the evidence is considered in an objective manner.

Doing everything described above probably takes 2-3 additional hours per final candidate. For a slate of three candidates, this collectively adds an additional day's work to the search. However, if one of the three candidates gets hired, you won't have to do the search over again. Doing searches over again can take another one to two weeks worth of sourcing, networking, cold-calling, screening, recruiting, etc. Learning how to defend your candidate's is how you increase your productivity by 50-100%. To me that's a pretty good trade-off. Here's the principle involved here: get better at the right stuff, not more efficient at the wrong stuff.