Is your interviewing process letting you down?

Are there people in your business who are under-performing or just don’t seem to fit with the team or the company?  Ever asked yourself, why?

Cast your mind back to their interview.  Do you remember what questions you asked?  Were they questions about the core skills and personal attributes you know are important for this role?  If you were to hire for this role again, could you pull up the interview guide you used first time round?

If your answer to most, if not all, of these questions, is ‘no’, you’re not alone. 

Why?  Because you’re busy.  Because you need to fill the role….quickly.

It’s not you, it’s the interview.

Despite being one of the most commonly used selection procedures, interviews are also one of the least valid methods of selecting a candidate for a job.  Why?  Because lots of interviews are unstructured, ‘fire-side chats’.  From our experience working with hiring managers, many ask some questions about the candidate’s technical skills, and then make a number of assumptions about the candidate’s potential for the job.  Worse still, it is not uncommon for unconscious biases to creep in, that is, interviewers often base their selection decision on what the candidate looked like, what they were wearing, where they went to school, and lots of other things that are irrelevant to whether or not they could actually perform well in the job and in the business more generally. 

In short, the interviewing process may be letting you and other interviewers in your organisation down.

And, it could be costing you a lot of money.

The costs of getting hiring wrong are numerous.  From a purely financial point of view, the costs of re-hiring and training can have a massive negative impact on your bottom line.  Research has shown that the cost of mis-hiring can be between 2.5 – 4 times the employee’s salary.  But the costs aren’t just financial.  There’s also the opportunity cost – recruiting takes time!  What else could you be doing?  Then there’s the impact on, and disruption to, existing colleagues who often have to pick up the extra workload. 

Wouldn’t it be better if you had an interviewing process that provided you with information about a candidate that you needed to know such as, how they have secured a major client in the past, how they have handled periods of intense workload in the past, how they have gone about turning an under-performing team around, how they have juggled competing demands on their time in the past? 

An interviewing process where you asked all the candidates for the same role the same questions so you could make comparisons on the basis of important attributes that you know will be important for the role.

There is no denying that the technical skills of a candidate are important.  A financial analyst probably needs to have pretty advanced Excel skills and a merchandiser needs to know about and have experience using Planograms.  But if you think about why people haven’t worked out in the past, how often has it been related to their technical skills versus their motivational fit? 

It is highly likely that their technical skills were okay, but their capacity to deal with challenging personalities, their resilience to setbacks, their capacity to maintain high energy levels for prolonged periods of time, and their capacity to flourish in ambiguity, made it really difficult for them to perform effectively in the role.

The point is that if you just ask questions about a candidate’s technical skills, you are missing the opportunity to find out a lot more about other important interpersonal attributes and competencies that could make the difference between a good fit and a poor fit. 

Research consistently shows that putting some structure around the interview can significantly maximise its predictive power.  Developing a structured behavioural interview helps to overcome the inherent weaknesses in unstructured interviews and improves the accuracy of predictions being made about the person being hired.

Behavioural interviewing is a structured interviewing technique used to objectively assess a candidate’s level of competency in relation to particular skills required for the position.  By asking about a candidate’s past experiences, it helps establish the extent to which the candidate possesses the baseline capabilities and experiences for the position.  It also provides an initial evaluation of the candidate’s style or level of cultural and behavioural “fit” with an organisation and the role. 

Features of structural behavioural interviewing include:

  • Focus on job-related behaviours
  • Comparable information is collected across all applicants
  • Questions and conditions are standardised across all interviews
  • Responses are verifiable (via reference checking, etc.)
  • Questions, and therefore answers, are based directly on the competencies associated with the job
  • Helps overcome the impact of first impressions and other unconscious biases
  • Lower risk of recruiting the wrong candidate
  • Improved diversity in the organisation due to reduced unconscious bias
  • Greater understanding of candidate strengths and development needs
  • Fairness to candidates

There are ways to minimise the risks of mis-hiring and ultimately save yourself time and the business money.