The recent management best-seller Good to Great, written by Stanford business school professor Jim Collins, notes that an organization’s key to success lies in making absolutely sure that the right people are “on your bus.” The most popular test used worldwide to determine who is right for a job—and, therefore, who gets to board your bus—is the garden-variety interview. Often unstructured and undisciplined, this most important decision-making tool can sometimes be no better at choosing the best candidate than flipping a coin!
While no selection technique is perfectly prescient, structuring interviews using the following practices can significantly improve your odds of hiring the candidate who’s best for you.
1. The interview should be embedded in a larger selection system that includes the following:
- Job descriptions that provide a clear understanding of the target role’s requirements—in other words, the responsibilities and critical competencies of a particular job. As Stephen Covey notes in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you should always begin with the end in mind. You need to have a picture of the ideal employee
- A prospecting and recruiting philosophy that locates anddevelops a viable candidate pool (more on this below)
- A disciplined background and reference-checking method
- An orientation program that gets new hires off to a good start
- Research to track the effectiveness of the interview process to ensure that it is reliable and valid
2. The interview methodology itself needs to:
- Be based on behaviorally defined competencies determined by a job analysis
- Employ behavioral episode interview questions thatexplore a candidate’s performance history relevant to the critical competencies
- Be conducted by trained interviewers familiar with thetarget role
- Include a structured decision-making process that ensures objectivity. To help here, I recommend the use of panelinterviews that ensure every interviewer hears the same candidate responses and can reliably judge them (this is in contrast to the nightmare scenario of 2 dozen sequential interviews, which are sometimes driven by the doubt of other interviewers)
Finding and screening candidates An often overlooked key to successful hiring is the identification of a first-rate candidate pool. The classic book In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman notes that IBM’s selection strategy was based on recruiting from solid Midwest schools, not necessarily Harvard or Stanford. The values represented by people attending schools like Purdue and Michigan proved a better match to the work ethic and value system that IBM preferred for its professional staff.
It’s also important to develop a good pool of interview questions that are tailored to a job’s critical competencies and demand specific behavioral responses. These questions should be open (i.e., not limited to yes or no answers) and require specific narratives that include context, actions/decisions, thoughts/feelings and consequences (positive and negative). For example, to explore a candidate’s interpersonal competence, you might phrase a question like: “Tell me about a time when you had to redirect the performance of a direct report who had fallen short of expected standards.” It’s also important to narrow candidate responses to more recent anecdotes that take place in a context similar to the target job. If the candidate can prove competence in those situations, that proficiency is more likely to transfer to your job.
A final thought regarding selecting candidates is the notion of choosing new associates in the context of complete team synergy. A famous duo from history proves the point: When The Walt Disney Co. was in danger of being split up and sold in the early 1980s, Roy Disney led a search for a new CEO. The selection committee ended up choosing two finalists—Michael Eisner and Frank Wells. It was reported that these two actually debated who might take the top job!
It was the expressive and creative Eisner who became the CEO and the disciplined and organized Wells who became the COO. This “fire and ice” combination proved a terrific team as Eisner drove growth and Wells made sure the company was profitable.
Bruce Griffiths is the president of Organization Systems International in San Diego. His company helps select and develop leaders for such clients as the U.S. Coast Guard, Nike, Disney and Dow Corning, among others.
