Perfect those interview skills to hire the right employee

By Dave DeWitte

When it comes to interviewing job candidates, a little management training can go a long, long way.

That’s the view of established experts, who say managers often lack training in such areas as what to ask, how to ask it, and how to gather different perspectives of a job candidate’s abilities. They offer tips to help beef up those interviewing skills so that when it’s time for companies to start hiring again, they’re ready.

Bill Humbert of TheRecruiterGuy.com said businesses often underestimate the financial costs of a bad hire. As a result, they often underinvest in backgrounding and interviewing job candidates.

“Many companies will glance at their ‘hard costs’ of letting someone go, but never even consider their potentially catastrophic ’soft costs,’ Humbert writes in his blog. He said soft costs could include such things as the lost productivity of other team members who must step in to perform work a new hire fails to perform adequately, and customers who take away their business because of a new hire’s incompetence.

If businesses took hiring seriously, Humbert said they would have managers in each department trained and “certified” in their hiring skills, rather than assuming any manager knows how to hire.

Think one interview is enough?

Think again, said Morris Pounds, a professor and career counselor at Kirkwood Community College for 30 years.

“The more times you interview, the more you have a better idea what type of candidate you have,” Pounds said.

Pounds recommends that a candidate be interviewed in several different types of situations. A one-on-one interview is only a starting point, Pounds said. He also recommends interviews with a peer panel, other employees that could help establish how others react to the candidate, and an interview over a meal that might reveal more about the candidate’s social skills.

Too often, Pounds said, interviewers get caught up in asking general questions such as the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, or why they want the job. Such questions can be easily anticipated beforehand, or coached, he said.

“Ask questions that are really related to the jobs they’re applying for,” Pounds said.

Pounds also recommends interviewers drill down on specific hard skills needed for a job. If their proficiency isn’t clear, they should be tested.

“You need to tell me not only what you’re familiar with, but what you’re proficient in. If you say you’re proficient in Excel, you should be able to create spreadsheets and databases in your sleep.” he said.

Pounds is a big fan of “situational behavior questions,” which essentially ask the candidate how they would respond in a given situation. Even if the candidate’s answer is unexpected, it often reveals something important about the logic of the candidate’s reasoning, or lack thereof.

One of the biggest issues Humbert sees in interviewing is the manager’s insistence on rigidly adhering to a list of prepared questions.

When a manager is given a list of questions without training them to listen to the candidate’s response, they tend to focus on the next question instead of understanding and evaluating the response to their last question. By actively listening, Humbert said managers gather more material to probe. Further questioning the candidate about their responses may be more on-target than any list of questions the managers used to begin the interview.

When companies train managers in hiring, it’s often training focused on legal issues. Pounds said most hiring managers by now know they aren’t allowed to ask candidates discriminatory questions such as age, how many children they have, or their religious views.

But some candidates remain intently interested in those matters, and use other “fishing” questions to seek the answers.

“I hear horror stories,” Pounds said, relating one about an older woman who was told the employer needed to see her driver’s license before an interview even began.

Pounds encourages employers to let candidates ask questions and to answer them honestly. He said the questions a candidate asks often reveals as much about their knowledge and interest in a position than the answers they provide.

Even if an employer conducts a good interview, Pounds said many find other ways to screw up the hiring opportunity. Many employers now require applicants to fill out extensive online questionnaires with questions so detailed that many candidates don’t honestly know the answers. They might not know their starting and finishing wages at their last three jobs, but some online forms cannot be submitted unless the candidate has filled out every line.

After the interview, many employers fail to keep candidates informed about the status of their hiring process, even if they have promised to do so. As a result, Pounds said, employers stand to lose interest of the best candidates. Since these candidates often have more options to choose from, they will pursue other opportunities that seem more real to them.

Humbert advises employers hiring for key positions to do a pre-interview telephone screen with the candidate. By asking a shortlist of essential questions, it’s often possible to screen out the candidates who wouldn’t meet the job expectations, and save the time and cost associated with the in-person interview, he said.