Short Story: Are Your Candidate Interviews a Competitive Disadvantage?

I recently met with a client who asked me a familiar question:   How can I get better at figuring out which job candidates will be great employees?

My advice to her was the same as it’s been throughout my consulting career.  I explained that her best approach was to find candidates who have both the job knowledge she needs and a ‘will do’ attitude.  My advice was to give her candidates a test to measure their job knowledge.  And use an interview process to evaluate their attitude.

Of course, she immediately understood why she needed to give candidates a job knowledge test.  But then she asked me what I meant by an interview process.  After all, what’s wrong with the interviews we do now?

I explained that the single best predictor of a candidate’s job performance is a consistent interview process.  Bar none.  100 years of research has established that fact.  A consistent process is 100% more effective than the inconsistent interviews she was doing.  They tell you which candidates will be successful and which to avoid.  They help identify ‘diamonds in the rough’ that might not be initially recognized as great candidates without using a process.

To help bring the point home, I pointed out that she already uses all sorts of processes to run her business.  Sales process, accounting process, customer service process.  The list goes on and on.

She uses those processes because they make things uniform.  Every employee understands how to use them and what the results mean. If her employees didn’t use processes, the negative impact would be immediate.  Each employee would navigate sales, marketing, and customer service issues in their own way.  Sure, they would have good intentions and try their best, but their approaches would be all over the board.

I went on to give her examples from the inconsistent interviews I had witnessed at her company.  Without a process to rely on, her managers used their conversational skills (which differed greatly between managers) to have free-flowing conversations.  They did most of the talking, asked different candidates very different questions, and spent most of their time trying to sell candidates on the job.  Sure, those interviews helped candidates feel comfortable.  But they offered little in terms of information needed to figure out the candidate’s true work attitude.

I finished our conversation by describing the experiences of two clients in a similar industry who switched to using an interview process.  Their results included:

When you are ready to implement these and other strategies to help your company build and maintain a strong workforce, call us at 505-377-0015