hiring and conducting interviews

When you have to hire a new employee – how does it make you feel? Are you energized at the prospect of bringing in new talent? Are you scared of making the right decision? Or, maybe, you’re feeling both? Some people seem to have a natural talent for understanding if prospective hires would be a good fit for a role, and others fail to hire for the right skills and get a good read on candidates through the interview process. How can you improve how you approach the hiring process?

Struggling with the skills of hiring and conducting interviews can impact staffing the best possible talent for your team. Managers are often unprepared for the entire hiring process: they don’t have accurate job descriptions posted and they are inconsistent with interviewing and evaluating candidates. 

We all can improve on how we strategically plan and conduct the hiring process through some very simple steps. It takes knowing what you are looking for, being fair to all candidates, and learning how to get a better read on your candidate’s character to ensure you are doing your best possible job at hiring and conducting interviews.

Please note that this short post can’t address the wide range of bias that is so often introduced to the hiring process. However, we can look at ways that we can be mindful of our own approach to interviewing, and ultimately improve on the skill of hiring and staffing. These small steps that help level the playing field for candidates might even help remove some of our own hiring biases in the process.

Identify talent: Know what you’re looking for in a candidate. 

Have you put serious thought into what you’re looking for in a candidate? All of your candidates have the required technical skill set according to their resumes but what will differentiate the perfect candidate from the others? So many people go into the interview process and don’t have a well-thought-out or realistic grasp of what they are looking for in a candidate. 

Before you post a job description, take time to write out what the ideal candidate brings to you and your team for this position. The hard/technical skills required for their role (such as certifications, knowledge in a programming language, a technical degree.), and also the soft skills (such as having led a team before). 

Depending on the role, when hiring, you generally should seek to find skills that complement your own or others on your team. For example, if you are lacking a formal Project Management certificate, you might look for someone with that training in your hiring. When you hire a new role it is an opportunity to fill talent gaps for your team.

Consider if there is someone you have worked with in the past who you can use as an example in your mind as to what you are looking for in this candidate – what are 1 or 2 key skills they brought to the table that you admired and can include for this job description?

This step should take place before you post a job description because you might need to tweak the job description to reflect the outcome of this exercise. There should be transparency in the job description to the skills you are seeking. 

Ask consistent questions: When hiring for a specific job opening, ask the same questions to every candidate during the interview process. 

If you’re using behavioral interview questions: Use the same behavioral questions for every candidate. This levels the playing field for everyone you are considering. It would seem like a very obvious approach to interviewing, but my experience has shown me that this is rarely the case. Have a list ready to go with behavioral interview questions that you plan to ask every single candidate before you begin the interview process. Record every candidate’s answers to the questions so you can refer back to the answers later.  

Behavioral interview questions are those non-technical questions that so often begin with “Tell me about a time when…”

If you’re using technical interview questions: You can use the same approach as above if you’re looking for some very specific experience or skills for the role. But you also might be tailoring your questions to the candidate’s resume. This means your questions will be as unique as your candidates. Consider though, if you talk to Candidate 1 about their experience in a particular software, and this a skill you’re weighing heavily, make sure you ask Candidate 2 about their experience in that software too. Candidate 2 might have experience in that software, but you might not know unless you ask directly about it. There are ways to keep the interview process fair, even when you tailor questions to each candidate. 

Get impactful answers: Determine what questions you can ask in an interview that give you the best read on a person. 

One of the most difficult areas of interviewing is getting a good understanding of a person during a short interaction. This kind of personal understanding is more related to their character and ability to work well with you and the others on the team. If you’ve ever worked with a bad boss or bad coworker (someone who constantly lied to upper management, stole from the company, took credit from others, or screamed at people in the office, as some examples), you know the importance of this step. 

For me, the question I ask any candidate at any level is: “What are the components that make up a good team?” They could answer as being a member of a team, or they could answer as being a leader of a team.

The “correct” answers are wide-reaching: diversity in people or skills, supporting each other, collaboration and communication, and the list goes on.

The “wrong” answers give immediate red flags about the candidate’s ability to work with others. The worst answer I have heard so far: “competency and firing incompetence.” (I did not support this person’s hiring, he was hired per someone else’s decision, and what irony based on his pompous answer – his performance was the worst on the team.)

Think about the important positive character traits you want in the people you hire, and come up with a question that can help you understand if your candidate has that trait. For me, that trait is teamwork and the ability to work with others, so I ask a question about their personal opinion of teamwork. It does not have to be a trick question, it can seem like a very simple question like the one I ask. You will be surprised that candidates will manage to get it “wrong,” while your ideal candidates will easily get it “right.”