Some estimates say the cost of a bad hire can run a company about two to three times the applicant's annual salary. Making the wrong choice could be devastating to your team, your job and the bottom-line. When you calculate the hours it takes to select, interview, test and train a new person, the hiring process becomes a task you want to get right the first time. Five interviewing experts offer their tips on how to find the right person for the right job.
Skill Assessments
With the multitude of "How to interview" books readily accessible, some applicants are so prepared for interviews it's difficult to tell who is good at interviewing and who is good at the job. "You may have a group of people who are highly skilled. Their resumes may have been written by someone else and they may have been coached on interviewing," says Arlene Vernon, PHR, speaker, human resource consultant and owner of HRx (www.HRxcellence.com), Eden Prairie, Minn. "We may look for someone who is very enthusiastic and has excellent communication skills. But if you are hiring for a position that requires a person work alone, you may want to hire an introvert who is focused and analytical," she says.
Bright people can answer almost any question intelligently, she says, so it's very important to hone interview questions to reach a deeper level. "You have to get very creative with questions," says Vernon. The old standbys, such as, "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" may not be enough.
Reaching Deeper
The general advice offered by all the experts is to use scenario questions when interviewing. "You want to look at the thinking process and the reasoning behind the answer," says ArLyne Diamond, PhD, former psychologist, now management consultant and owner of Diamond Associates (www.DiamondAssociates.net), Santa Clara, Calif.
Answers to questions like, "What would you do if you were running behind schedule, you had a full waiting room and the patient is moving very slowly?" will give you a glimpse into the applicant's personality and how they deal with stress, says Diamond.
Although scenario questions should be an interview staple, they cannot be relied upon solely. Diamond also asks applicants about their personality to get a general idea of who they are and how they might fit into the work environment. She asks what is important to them in another person, what they are looking for in professional relationships and what are some pet peeves they see in the way coworkers treat each other.
"Those questions will give strong clues into personality and character," Diamond says, which are the cornerstones of a good hire. "You can train technical skills. You can't train personality," she adds. Diamond also suggests leaving ample time for each interview, about an hour per person. She believes if you limit the interview to 15 or 20 minutes, you may get fooled.
Body Language
With such limited time in an interview, many hiring managers look for body language to give clues to hidden personality traits. However, Diamond cautions hiring managers against making decisions on quick, unexplained physical clues. Hasty judgments, she says, should not take the place of proper interviewing. "It's very possible that someone has extreme interview nerves," she says. They could also be from other cultures that do not share the same body language.
However, not all body language should be overlooked. Poor grooming, dirt under the nails, extremely chipped nail polish and hair that looks dirty and uncombed is unacceptable. "Unless they fell in a sewer on their way to the interview," says Diamond, "you don't want them."
Brad Turkin, executive vice president of Comforce Corporation (www.comforce.com), Woodbury, N.Y., also takes body language into account; however, he does not limit himself to body language alone when making hiring decisions.
"I look for direct eye contact. That tells me they are focused," says Turkin. "Are their arms folded, like a closed individual or are they open to taking on new responsibilities and learning new things? How casual are they in their dress and demeanor?"
Turkin also listens for insincere or incomplete answers. "I always ask the same questions more than once but in a different way. If their answers differ, that could be an indicator they are hiding something or have poor listening skills." He also incorporates team or peer interviewing and, when possible, brings final candidates in for a day on the job.
During a peer interview, applicants meet with one or two potential coworkers. "The way an applicant interviews with a hiring manager is totally different than with a peer," he says. After all interviews are completed, Turkin meets with the team to compare notes. If the applicant does well with peer interviews, Turkin invites that person to try a day on the job working with the team. He says the trial day is the deciding factor. "I want them to see how bad a day can be and then I want to see how well they handle it," he says.
After the trial day, Turkin asks his team about their observations and then meets with applicants for a debriefing. "I ask them to tell me about their day. How do they feel about the possibility of coming on board?" By that time, he says, most applicants, as well as the coworkers and managers, know if the match is successful.
Behavioral Interviewing
Bette Price, CMC, co-author of True Leaders and president of the Price Group (www.pricegroupleadership.com), a management consulting firm in Addison, Texas, is an advocate for behavioral interviewing. She believes the most common interviewing mistake is interviewers who talk too much. "The interviewer needs to listen 75 percent of the time and only talk 25 percent of the time," she says. Often interviewers spend so much time selling the company that they don't listen to feedback and take notes.
Behavioral interviewing is based on the premise that past behaviors are the best indicators of future behaviors. Price has developed a system that helps her tap into the feedback needed to make clear hiring decisions. While behavioral interviewing takes a bit more work on the front end, she believes the rewards — finding successful new hires and limiting turnover — are worth the effort.
Behavioral interviewing identifies job-related competencies, based on technical skills and soft skills, such as patience, communication, thoroughness, listening, sensitivity, etc. Almost everyone can name the technical skills needed for a position. However, identifying the soft-skill competencies may be more challenging. To identify them, Price suggests benchmarking the job. "Ask what the manager thinks is needed for the job, what the best performer thinks is required and what others who will work with the new hire think is required to perform the job successfully," says Price.
Then create a list of behavioral questions that identify with those competencies. Behavioral questions have three parts:
Here's an example: A mammographer must demonstrate a certain level of sensitivity on the job. To detect if an applicant has that trait, develop questions that tap into that skill or competency, such as "Tell me about a time when you had a very ill patient in tremendous pain. How did you handle that situation and what was the result?" or "Tell me about a time when you had a woman who was embarrassed about being undressed for a mammogram. How did you ease her embarrassment to get the needed image?"
Although the answers will differ from applicant to applicant, you are looking for three basic elements in each answer:
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their thoughts about the situation
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their transferable skills
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their self-management skills
Price suggests writing questions that relate to each of the competencies required for the job. That list becomes the standardized questions for each person interviewed. "That ensures that they are all judged from the same standpoint," she says. Then establish a rating system to evaluate the responses. Price suggests assigning a simple rating system, such as a one-to-five score. Rate each person during the interview and take notes to document the interview.
Insurance
For added insurance, Price, along with many other managers, enlists the help of behavior assessments to support information found from interviewing. Many types of assessments are available. Price uses a TTI DiSC-based assessment, which measures dominance, influence, steadiness and compliance behaviors. The assessment has a 94 percent face validity among all who take it and has the highest reliability of any four-quadrant assessment on the market. The firm's values assessment also touts it can provide insights on work environment fit, strengths, weaknesses, communication, work environment fit, working with others and effectiveness.
As with most assessments, there is some controversy about the accuracy of the results and how much the report should weigh on hiring decisions. However, if you decide an assessment is right for you, there are many options.
According to Jerry Mabe, president, CEO and cofounder of RightPath Resources Inc. (www.rightpath.com), a human capital management company that offers Internet-based behavioral assessment tools, there are as many types of assessments as there are aspects to measure. Mabe has used behavioral assessments most of his career and he co-created his own called RightPath, which touts a 90 percent accuracy rate in 90 percent of the people who take it.
The fundamental belief behind the assessment is that innate behavior transcends age, race, gender and national origin, and behavior is the single highest predictor of successful hires. For RightPath, the measured behaviors are dominance, extroversion, compassion, conscientiousness, adventurousness and innovation.
"Behavioral traits are set by the time you are about two years old and they don't change," says Mabe. "The way you act may change because of learned behavior. But you are not changing your innate behavior, you are modifying it." He says that we do our best work when we are operating in a manner that is aligned with our natural traits and the assessment can determine that. He reasons that when a person is under pressure, say in a stressful job, they are likely to revert to their natural or innate behaviors. Understanding the behaviors needed for success in the job and then looking for those behaviors in the interview process will help hiring managers find the right fit for a job.
Faith Leaping
The more interview techniques you have, the better your chances are to find the right person. When all else fails, it's up to the hiring manager to go with a gut decision and take a leap of faith. But enlisting the help of tried-and-true techniques may give you extra assurance to make the leap with confidence.
Leah R. Troiano is the senior editorial consultant for RT Image.
