Whether you are an HR director, talent recruiter, or the manager at the local burger joint; chances are you will conduct a face to face interview at some point during your career. Making good hiring decisions is critical to not only organizational success, but also personal success. Everyone knows the preceding fact, but despite this, I still find that many organizations do not give the face to face interview it’s proper due. Indeed, many organizations have no structured interview process and those that do offer little to no training on it for the end user.
Face to face interviews are still one the most common and widely used instruments for screening employees. In some organizations, a potential candidate will endure 3 or more interviews before a decision will be made. There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, I believe the face to face interview to be a strong tool that can be used to great effect when screening candidates. The issue is that most hiring managers, and even some HR recruiters, do not have the training necessary to be using such a powerful tool with any level of proficiency. Don’t believe me? Ask a random group of your peers or subordinates how many hours of structured training they have received in face to face interviews.
Why don’t organizations give their hiring managers the training necessary to be successful when using the face to face interview? I believe the issue is one of two things. Many organizations falsely believe that everyone already has the skills necessary to use this powerful tool or they don’t believe the face to face interview has any merit. Which category your organization falls under doesn’t really matter. The result is the same. You are using a very powerful tool for screening employees and not getting the full potential value out of it.
Your interview process should have questions that aid you in uncovering if the candidate has the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to be successful in the position. You determine those KSA’s from the job or candidate profile. If you don’t have a job profile (and believe it or not most organizations will not) then you have another set of issues that must be resolved before creating an effective structured interview process. This article won’t solve all of your recruiting issues, but if you are a hiring manager or anyone that conducts face to face interviews, implementing the following 2 types of questions will greatly improve your hiring decisions.
Experience Questions
Experience based questions, also known as experiential questions, are those types of questions that attempt to cover the “what have you done situations”. They often start with, “tell me about a time when you X.” These types of questions help the interviewer uncover what the individual has done in their past that corresponds with the challenges the individual will encounter in the new position. Do not discount the individual’s past successes and failures; this is the entire purpose of asking experience questions. If someone has been successful doing something in the past they are likely to be able to repeat said performance for you.
The first question is your marquee question and it should directly relate to a specific KSA that you are attempting to uncover. After the original marquee question ask follow-up questions to dig deep into their response. Don’t just ask about successes, ask about failures as well. You can learn a lot about the individual from what they have done in the past and what they might have done differently facing the same challenge again. What they learned in failure might be valuable to you.
Behavioral Questions
Behavioral questions help you uncover what the individual might do in a specific situation. These types of questions give insight into the character, personality, ethics, and sometimes decision-making skills of an individual. These questions ask “what would you do if X happened”. These questions can lead to direct responses or a conversation about a situation that happened just like the one you are asking about.
Just like experience based questions you should create marquee behavioral questions. These interview questions should also be directly related to a specific KSA that you wish to determine if the candidate possesses. A good rule of thumb is that if the KSA is not on the job profile, and the questions don’t uncover a specific KSA, then don’t ask the question. Questions that don’t directly relate to successful job performance are of no value to you, they are bad questions, and you should not use them. Ask yourself when creating questions, or reviewing your current interview process, what KSA does this question give me insight about? If the answer is not clear, create a new question.
Interviewing should be fun, but also productive. The goal is to make great hiring decisions. Many interview processes do not uncover the KSAs needed for job success. Which makes it difficult for the hiring manager to make great decisions. The reasons are usually due to poor training around interview methodologies and/or poor interview questions. Using the two types of questions discussed in this article and ensuring that they are focused on uncovering specific KSA’s necessary for successful job performance, will vastly improve your hiring decisions.