How to hire the best candidate, not the best interviewee
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The job interview. Often the final part of the recruitment process, it’s a phase of selection that is much maligned by both prospective employers and the prospective employees sitting on the other side of the desk.
But why is it that job interviews are often so disliked by everyone who takes part in them?
Candidates tend to dread their job interview for several reasons, some obvious, others not so much.
None of us really like to be judged by other people, and none of us like being told someone else appears to be better at doing one of the things that define us as individual. So, fear of judgement and fear of rejection are obvious reasons for candidate anxiety.
But there are other, equally valid reasons why candidates often hate to be put in the spotlight. For a start there’s that sense we’ve all felt about not really knowing what the interviewer wants to hear and the anxiety in trying to prepare by trying to second guess the questions you’re going to be asked and working out the answers you’ll give.
And then there are the usual performance-related worries – what if you have an off day, or your attempt to be relaxed and engaging comes off as disinterested and arrogant, or you suddenly have a mental block and can’t answer a question.
Most of all, though, candidates hate interviews because they believe it’s a forum that makes it impossible, simply because of the limitations of format, to show the best of themselves.
Interestingly, many employers feel the same way.
Once you get past the practical objections that those doing the hiring have – interviews eat up precious time, they’re hard to administer, they’re repetitive – the primary reason employers dislike interviews is the sense that what they’re seeing is a well prepared façade.
Just as candidates don’t know what the prospective employer wants to hear, so the employer doesn’t know whether what they’re being told is a true reflection of the candidate’s experiences, skills, and beliefs.
I have a friend – a now retired Chartered Accountant – who spent the latter half of his career as the managing director of a specialist recruitment agency in the industry.
Over the years interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of candidates and he always says that he quickly reached the conclusion that in most cases by the time a candidate sits down in front of you, you already know they’re capable of doing the job.
The big question is whether that person is the right fit for the business.
And the simple truth is that a traditional interview may not be the best way to find the answer.
If you spend 45 minutes asking your candidate to give you examples of how they’ve completed the kinds of tasks they’re going to be expected to carry out on a daily basis in your business, all you’re doing is validating their CV – and in the end, isn’t that what the references stage of the process is for?
Beyond that, you’re going to be bored senseless by the end of the interview day – creating the risk that you may get less out of each candidate as it wears on.
The person you want to hire is the person who will add real value to your business, not the person who performs best in an interview.
The problem with many interviews is that they are structured in such a way that you hire the latter rather than the former.
In the end there’s nothing wrong with interviewing a prospective employee – in fact, it can be a very useful part of your recruitment process.
But you need to be clear what information or understanding you expect to get from it, and you should avoid structuring it in such a way that it simply duplicates other parts of that process.
If you’re serious about using your selection process in a way that gives you real insight and allows your candidates to show the best of themselves, try one or more of these simple things:
1. Give them a problem to solve
Before the interview takes place, give each candidate a relevant problem to solve – it can be something they may come across in their role with you, it may be something totally unconnected to the job they’re applying for.
Ask them to explain in fewer than a thousand words how they would go about solving it and use part of the interview to explore their thinking and decision-making.
This will tell you a lot about how they think and act, whilst also verifying they can do what they say on their CV. For the candidate, they have an opportunity to give a meaningful insight into the value they might add to your business.
2. Give them a project to complete
This can be linked to the job they’d be doing if they joined your business and should be set a couple of weeks ahead of the interview.
The key here is to not give a due date for the project to be completed – tell the candidates they should return it to you as soon as possible and to a standard they feel will serve the purposes of the business. Allow them to ask questions but tell them that both the quality and quantity of those questions will form part of the application assessment.
This approach can tell you several things:
· whether they are in tune with the needs of your business (if yours is a fast moving company and you need work turned around fast, do you want a perfectionist who takes the whole two weeks to return a flawless piece of work, or a pragmatist who does it in three days to a perfectly acceptable standard?)
· are they someone who asks one or two key questions to get the essential information needed to do the job, or someone who asks for lots of guidance and needs more hand-holding?
· Are they self- sufficient and able to work on their own initiative
If you want, you can spice this up a little, too, by changing the requirement at a certain point, which would also test how agile, flexible, and adaptive they are.
3. Take them out of the interview environment
If you only have two or three candidates to see, consider holding the interviews on separate days and take them out into a social environment with other members of your team – perhaps to a café (when social distancing laws allow) – so you can get a sense of how they’ll fit into your culture and team dynamic.
4. Get other members of your team to engage with them
Getting feedback from other employees who meet candidates on the day of the interview can be useful in terms of seeing how they might fit in, were you to offer them the role.
It’s important to get the same specific feedback from each person, so you can benchmark – but also factor in anecdotal feedback as well.
Just as there are some brilliant students who just don’t perform well in an exam, so there are brilliant candidates who don’t perform well in a traditional job interview (which, let’s face it, is just another type of exam).
By doing as much as you can to level the playing field, you’ll give yourself a better chance of hiring the right candidate rather than the person who was best in the job interview.
If you’d like to find out more about how Constantia Consulting can help your HR team or business recruit the best talent on the market, please get in touch for an informal chat.
