Building a Consistent Interview Process

Interviewing for A-players

Because candidate interviews are often the primary method for making hiring decisions, they also present one of the best opportunities to improve your success rate for hiring A-players. A best-practice approach to interviewing consists of two parts: clearly defining what you’re looking for in a top candidate, and a consistent, well-designed method for soliciting valid and actionable feedback from all the interviewers.

Studies show that unstructured, seat-of-the-pants interviews (which is what employees will do in the absence of informed guidance) are no more effective than a coin toss at identifying whether a candidate is likely to be an A-player or a C-player.

“The first failure point of hiring is not being crystal clear about what you really want the person you hire to accomplish,” says Geoff Smart, co-author of the New York Times best-seller Who. “You may have some vague notion of what you want. Others on your team are likely to have their own equally vague notions of what you want and need.”

Too often, hiring managers rely on what Smart callas “voodoo hiring.” They cling to their favorite methods, even when evidence suggests those methods don’t work.

“Our experience and our research say [that] in an age in which every other management process has been studied and codified, we find it amazing that people still view hiring as something that resists an orderly approach,” Smart writes. His research has uncovered this list of the top 10 voodoo hiring methods:

1. The Art Critic *
2. The Sponge *
3. The Prosecutor *
4. The Suitor *
5. The Trickster *
6. The Animal Lover *
7. The Chatterbox *
8. The Psychological and Personality Tester *
9. The Aptitude Tester *
10. The Fortuneteller *

Any company can benefit immediately by following a consistent, well-designed interview process that covers all types of jobs. This can be done with a scorecard — an interview feedback form — used across the company, regardless of the interview style or job.

If you already follow a standard interview process for all roles, the next step is to build a tailored scorecard for the specific role you’re hiring for. This technique has a proven 90 percent success record at predicting success in the role. The most effective interviewing technique involves using job- and role-specific behavioral questionnaires.

Using a standard feedback form ensures that every interviewer knows in advance what is expected of them, and provides guidance to steer interviewers away from vague attitudes or opinions as their reason for endorsing or rejecting a candidate. Providing consistent questions or sections for every interviewer to respond to also makes it easier to compare feedback across the interview team.

The Interview Feedback Form: For Faster, More Consistent Hiring

An interview feedback form guides interviewers to ask questions that are more likely to yield the information needed to assess a candidate’s future success and ensure that different interviewers’ responses can be compared meaningfully.

Five Specific Benefits of a Standardized Interview Feedback Form

1. It allows for different interview styles. *
2. It creates alignment across hiring managers, team leaders, and others involved in the hiring and talent development process. *
3. It ensures legal compliance. *
4. It bases each interviewer’s feedback on a fairer, factual set of information. *
5. It provides guidance to less-experienced interviewers. *

To learn more about methods of interviewing, see Interview Considerations at the end of this article.

Example of an Interview Feedback Form

Why Standard Interviewing Fails to Identify A-players

The typical interview process fails because top performers need to be able to adapt their past accomplishments to your company’s culture and resources, and be able to thrive and grow in your environment.

Standard interviewing processes look only in the rearview mirror. They assume that if a candidate was successful in a previous job, they will be successful in your company, too. This is simply erroneous thinking and fails to identify potential A-players for your organization.

Brad Remillard’s Five Interview Questions

1. “Give me an example of where you have demonstrated initiative?” *
2. “Give me an example of a time when you executed a project flawlessly.” *
3. “Tell me about your biggest team accomplishment in a difficult time or situation.” *
4. “One of our critical objectives is [explain a critical problem the candidate will address in the new position]. Can you describe your most comparable accomplishment?” *
5. “How would you go about implementing [pick a project at your company that is important to the position] in our company?” *

A One-question Approach

“What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?”

Why do more than 90 percent of hiring managers identify themselves as good interviewers, and yet rarely reach a unanimous hiring decision with other “90 percenters” in the same room evaluating the same candidate?

That was the question that Lou Adler, a respected thought leader in the recruiting industry for nearly four decades, asked himself more than a decade ago. The realization led Adler on “a quest to find the one interview question that would yield universal agreement from hiring managers,” he wrote in Inc. magazine. “It took 10 years of trial and error, but I eventually found it.”

Then You Dig a Little Deeper

Of course, that question is just the starting point. But as Adler wrote, imagine you were a candidate and a hiring manager asked you that question. How would you respond, and what would your answer say about you?

7 Rules for Job Interview Questions That Result in Great Hires

Regardless of the interview questions you ask, John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University and an internationally known HR thought leader from Silicon Valley, believes keeping seven rules in mind will result in faster and better hires.

“It’s time to rethink your interview questions with a focus on work-related questions that are harder to prepare for and to fake an answer to,” Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan’s Seven Rules for Interview Questions That Get Great Hires

Click here to read the full article at Harvard Business Review.