KEY POINTS:
So you're about to hire a new employee - what tools will you use? Dollars to doughnuts, I bet that your main decision-making tool will be the interview.
It's ironic that the unstructured interview is the most used tool in the selection process and yet it is the poorest predictor of performance in the workplace. Apart from being poor predictors of work performance, interviews are also the most expensive item in the selection process.
Because no "hard money" changes hands, managers see the interview process as a freebie. It's just amazing that a selection tool that is so poor at predicting performance, and that chews up such a large chunk of expensive management time, is still the most commonly used and most relied on.
Why is it that interviews often fail to meet the needs of the organisation and the people being interviewed?
THE ILLUSION OF EASINESS
Interviewing is a lot more difficult than people think and many hiring managers think they are better interviewers than they really are. The selection interview is much more than a conversation; and good conversationalists aren't necessarily good interviewers.
When hiring new employees, many managers think they can play psychologist. They believe they can "read" behind interviewees' responses and know what they are really saying. But years of research have taught us that we are poor at "reading" people. Research does tell us that managers can identify differences in personality, but they typically don't know how to match the right personality to a particular job. This is where excellent psychometric assessments like ASSESS and Rembrandt Portrait or Prevue really shine.
Another reason people think interviewing is easy is that they do not distinguish between personal judgments and actual assessment of a candidate's competency. People form impressions of each other quickly - usually based on speech, dress or mannerisms.
Initial impressions are not necessarily right or wrong; they are simply impressions. The purpose of the interview, however, is to gather objective information that goes beyond first impressions. As the interviewer, your test is to predict the on-the-job performance of the candidate.
Good interviewing skills are not about judging character. You may think you are good at this from success you have had choosing friends or perhaps a spouse. The big difference is that those choices are based on liking the person.
Selecting a new employee is about basing decisions on the ability to do the job, and not on personal preferences.
THE STRATEGIC APPROACH
The strategic approach to interviewing provides managers with a systematic, research-based approach to interviewing. Camp, Vielhaber and Simonetti, in their excellent book Strategic Interviewing, outline six basic principles:
* Just like writing a shopping list, understand what you need before you go looking. (Do a job analysis.)
* Clearly define performance expectations needed to perform the job successfully. (Build a competency model.)
* Ask questions that seek examples of the candidate's ability to meet performance standards. (Behaviourally based questions aligned to the above competencies.)
* Decide on the answers you want before you ask the questions.
* Conduct the interview in a manner that maximises effective communication and accurate measurement. (Use more than one interviewer, take notes and rate answers.)
* Use behavioural decision-making to predict the candidate's performance on the job. It is very easy for candidates to give opinions during an interview - you need specific behavioural examples.
Interviewing is not easy. Very few managers have been trained, and usually conduct an interview as they have been interviewed - poorly.
THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
The research is conclusive - stop having general one-on-one conversations with applicants. This is not an interview. An efficient job interview is structured. It is conducted by two (or more) people and has behaviourally based questions aligned to specific job competencies.
Here's an example. The competency is customer service.
The question is: "Tell me about a time when a customer complained to you about your company's product or service - what did you do? What was the outcome?"
If you are still conducting unstructured, one-on-one chit-chats with candidates it would be easier to just put six names in a hat and pull one out and hire that person - your odds are the same.
Even if you structured the interview - that is, all candidates get the same behaviourally based questions and you have two or more raters - your odds are at best, a flip of a coin.
However, when you combine a structured interview with a valid, reliable psychometric profile, both aligned to the job position, you get a nice jump in what psychologists call incremental validity. Now you have about a 75 per cent chance of getting it right; a whole lot better than rolling a dice.
Most managers hire people on what they know, but future problems are usually based on who they are. A structured interview will help you with the former but only a validated personality profile will help you see the latter.
* Rob McKay MA (Hons) is a business psychologist and director of AssessSystems Aust/NZ - www.assess.co.nz
