| CRBJ Charter Member: |
|
|
| CRBJ Home > April 2007 | |||||
What can the candidate do for your organization?Peter Gray
Interviewing is an inexact science - if it can even be called a science. How well can you really know someone after 30, 45 or 60 minutes? To paraphrase Winston Churchill, interviewing is the worst hiring method ever tried, except for all the others. Unfortunately, interview conversations tend to follow a not-very-useful path of least resistance. After greetings and opening banter, the interviewer asks the candidate to "tell me about yourself" or "walk me through your resume." The candidate obliges with a well-rehearsed life story starting with college, meandering through each job and each career transition, and winding up with a full explanation of his or her current employment situation and aspirations. By the time the account reaches the present day, after a few interruptions and side questions from the interviewer, the interview is well past the halfway mark. Then the interviewer provides a brief obligatory overview of the organization and the position. A few minutes remain for the candidate to ask a couple of cursory follow-up questions and reaffirm interest, and then time is up. Sound familiar? The problem with that interview script is that the conversation dwells so much on the candidate's past that it shortchanges the real topic of the interview: the organization's needs. The interviewer's most crucial job is to assess whether and how the candidate can help the organization run better. An interview that dwells mostly on the candidate's past may get only halfway to that objective. Sure, the organization has to collect the candidate's detailed job history at some point in the interview process, but that should not dominate most interviews. It should be gathered once, as a due diligence step by the interviewer who will be conducting reference checks on the candidate. A productive interview is like a consultation session about the organization's challenges and goals, and how the candidate can be of assistance. In this space last month, I advised candidates to steer the conversation in the right direction by limiting their personal histories to a few minutes and then asking, "What are the most important things the organization needs the person hired into this position to accomplish?" Here's a corresponding suggestion for interviewers. Skip the "walk me through your resume" opener and try this one: "I'd like to tell you the three biggest things we'll need our new hire to accomplish. Then please tell me about your experience in those areas, and your ideas for us." One benefit of this approach is it forces the hiring team to define its goals for the position. For example, I recently helped a small, young company hire a head of finance. Before interviews began, the management team reached agreement that the key skills they needed from their new financial manager were 1) day-to-day bookkeeping and financial operations abilities; 2) financial modeling skills, for strategic planning; and 3) good speaking and writing skills, for presentations to the board and investors. They focused their interview time on assessing the candidates' strengths in those three areas, and they made a great hire. This assessment method makes more sense than winging it with an "I'll know it when I see it" approach. That's more likely to lead to the hiring of someone who may be personable and have strong interview skills, but who may not be a fit for your organization's needs. Peter Gray is the head of executive recruiting at QTI Professional Staffing in Madison. peterg@qstaff.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
|
||||