When it comes to hiring new talent, recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers do their best to accurately evaluate potential candidates and determine whether they are the best fit for each job opening. By knowing the responsibilities of the position and the culture of the company, it is the responsibility of everyone on the hiring team to compare resumes to job requirements and settle on the talent that is the best fit.
After combing through resumes and cover letters and having some initial phone screens, the hiring team enters what can be the most important part of the process—the job interview.
Creating and executing a successful job interview is an art. The interview must be carefully planned and strategically approached by the team involved in the hiring process. Without careful planning, things can be overlooked or missed, and you can wind up with an incomplete assessment of the candidate—a mistake that can cost time and money and cause a lot of headaches.
Thankfully, there are ways to ensure a complete and thorough evaluation of prospective employees. To ensure hiring teams don’t skip a beat, here are the three most critical things they won’t learn about a candidate during the job interview—unless, of course, they implement the strategies below that focus directly on evaluating them.
1. The Candidate’s Soft Skills. Although an interview is obviously an interpersonal situation (at times, even a small group situation), the one-on-one skills exhibited in this relatively artificial context differ from the soft skills someone will need when working productively in a team setting, skills that include the ability to communicate, collaborate, and deal with stress and/or conflict in a mature and constructive manner.
That being said, figuring out if someone possesses the particular soft skills he or she will need to succeed in your specific company environment and culture can be challenging. At the same time, finding out whether a candidate possesses or lacks these skills is critical to making a good hire.
To evaluate an interviewee’s soft skills, have a skilled interviewer present the candidate with theoretical situations created with your specific organization and culture in mind and inviting the candidate to describe how he or she would navigate each situation. The interviewer then should evaluate the candidate based on his or her responses.
Another, potentially more accurate, option is to put the candidate in a mini-workgroup of employees, a group that would include those with whom the candidate would be directly working if hired. Ask the group to complete a short task and conduct a post-mortem where the team evaluates the candidate’s actions.
2. How the Candidate Actually Works. Too often, candidates will present a work sample without providing a full explanation of their role in the project. Hiring managers must be aware that just because a candidate sends a link to a finished Website as part of his or her portfolio, for example, it doesn’t mean the candidate actually built the entire Website. If interviewers find themselves in this situation, have the candidate clearly outline his or her role in the project in order to give you a full understanding of his or her capabilities and actual contributions to the business.
In addition, there is no harm in asking the candidate to complete a solo mini-project. After all, the best way to see a candidate’s work is to ask him or her to do some work for you. With an exercise like this, the interviewer can see the candidate “in action,” thus, getting a better sense of his or her real work style, habits, and approach to workload management—all things that can be key to his or her success as an employee.
3. The Candidate’s Loyalty. Although no one can really tell the full scope of a person’s loyalty during an initial meeting, it is a characteristic that could take an employee from mediocre to exceptional if he or she acts on those loyal instincts.
One option for evaluating this characteristic is to ask probing questions that allude to how the candidate may or may not demonstrate team and company loyalty. The trick is to avoid asking loaded questions about ethics and morality, instead focusing on how the candidate has demonstrated loyalty in his or her personal and/or professional life.
All too often, hiring involves a lot of guesswork and gut-level reactions—which leads to the realization that you hired the wrong person for the job. This especially can be the case when interviews are conducted without formal structure and coordination from the hiring teams such as managers, HR personnel, and recruiters. To remove the guesswork, all members of the hiring team need to reflect on the specific soft skills and professional experience you are looking for in a candidate. You then need to construct an interview process in which the questions are designed to uncover those skills and the interviewers are trained on the types of responses they should be looking for.
If you coordinate your efforts, structure the process, and ask thoughtful questions, the candidate will provide you with the insight needed to make an informed, and successful, hiring decision.
Steve Dempsey is the VP of Recruiting at Aquent, a staffing and recruiting firm focused on creative professionals.
