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Hot Tip #16 - Six Simple Ways to Increase Interviewing Accuracy

By Lou Adler, June 12, 2007

1. Make sure everyone who has a vote knows the job. If an interviewer isn't sure of the real job, he'll overvalue his intuition, his perception of the job, and the candidate's first impression and communication skills to make the assessment. As a result the assessment will be about 50% accurate for a yes vote, and a bit worse on the no vote side. Interviewers need to know real job needs in order to have a chance of making the right hiring decision. I won't take an assignment unless everyone on the hiring team knows what the person taking the job needs to do to be successful. Neither should you. Preparing a performance profile with the hiring team will help.

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Related Topics:

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1. Delay the yes/no decision for at least 30 minutes. Assessment accuracy increases the longer the interviewer waits to decide yes or no. It's always best to collect information objectively before deciding yes or no. This way all information has equal value. Especially don't make real-time judgments while the candidate is answering. Take notes instead, and evaluate the notes at the end of the interview. One way to delay the yes/no decision is to consciously wait until the end of the interview to assess the impact of the candidate's first impression on you. Then objectively determine if the candidate's first impression helps or hurts on-the-job performance. You'll be surprised that it has little impact, even for sales people.


2. Use a multi-factor assessment approach. On-the-job success is much more than just assessing technical ability and communication skills. Consistency, achieving results on time and on budget, cooperating with comparable teams, flexibility, and cultural fit are just a few of the factors that need to be assessed during the interview (see our 10-factor candidate scorecard for the complete list). Balance across all job needs is the key to increasing assessment accuracy.


3. Don't give anyone a full yes/no vote. Hiring errors can be minimized by broadening the focus of the assessment to all ten factors on the scorecard and narrowing each interviewer's responsibility. Except for the hiring manager, don't give any interviewer full voting rights. Instead, assign each interviewer just two or three traits to assess in depth. When interviewers have fewer traits to assess they tend to be more objective and conduct a more accurate interview.


4. Use panel interviews. Not only will you save time and avoid overlapping questions, but a panel interview also naturally increases objectivity. The key to a well-conducted panel interview is to assign one person a lead role, with the other panelists asking only fact-finding and clarifying questions. Give the panel 3-4 traits to assess using our performance-based structured interview.


5. Conduct a formal debriefing. Interviewing accuracy soars when interviewers share their information in a formal debriefing session. Our 10-factor scorecard can be used to summarize everyone's input. You'll discover that without the pressure of deciding yes or no, interviewers are more open with their remarks during the debriefing. Better: when facts and details are used to assess competency rather than emotions and intuition, the variety of opinions tends to narrow around the correct decision.

When the hiring team shares information as described, their collective yes/no decision is typically the right one. It starts by knowing job needs and using a logical business process to collect and share the right information.