An executive decision

By ASHLEY CAMPBELL

The fundamental problem with most job interviews, says Bill Byham, is that the interviewers don't know what they're looking for.

The chairman and chief executive of international human resources consultancy Development Dimensions International (DDI) sums it up simply: "If you don't have a goal, you don't know when you've met it." Or, if you haven't defined the skills and personality necessary for success, you won't know when you see them.

Job analysis, or defining what those skills and personality traits are, is the first - vital - step in a recruitment process DDI developed and trademarked, called Targeted Selection. Now used by hundreds of companies worldwide, DDI claims Targeted Selection decreases staff turnover - often by more than half - and increases productivity and management confidence in hiring decisions.

The reason, says Byham, is that it's "taken the psychology out" of hiring decisions. Rather than relying on fuzzy interpretations and gut feel, recruiters gather data that helps them to objectively score each candidate. The higher the score, the better the job fit.

But it all depends on job analysis - or interviewers knowing what they're looking for in the first place.

The jargon for what they're looking for is "key competencies" - which basically means the factors that will make the difference between success and failure in a job. And they're really not all that difficult to establish.

At the simplest level, says Byham, employers need only "think of the people who've been successful in this job. What do the people who are successful do that the people who are unsuccessful don't do?"

Then think ahead to how the job is likely to change in the next couple of years and what new skills candidates will need to meet those new challenges. Add the two together and you've got your key competencies.

As well as key competencies, interviewers have to know what personality traits make the difference between success and failure - the jargon here is "motivational fit". And it's just as important as skill.

"There's can do and will do," says Byham. "There's a number of people who can do the job but they don't want to do it and will get out of that situation as soon as they can." And, let's face it, most employers don't want to be interviewing again for the same job in six months.

Once employers have figured out the key competencies and motivational fit, they then have to conduct interviews that will reveal which candidates have what they're looking for.

Again, mistakes are common - one of them being to ask the wrong questions. In interviewing prospective salespeople they might ask "Tell me how you would handle a difficult customer", or "Tell me how you'd like to change our process" for a production manager's role. Wrong.

The problem with such questions, says Byham, is the question is theoretical, so the answer will be theoretical as well. Whether it's what the candidate actually does is an entirely different matter.

On the other hand, by asking "Tell me about a particularly difficult customer you had and how you handled them," or "Tell me about a change in process you've made in a previous job and how that affected output", the interviewer finds out how the candidate has behaved.

And, says Byham, how the candidate behaved in the past is a good indicator of how they'll behave in the future.

"When you go to a race course to bet on a horse, the horses have different odds - because some have traditionally won races and some haven't. The more they've won, the surer the odds."

And so it is with humans - the more often a candidate has behaved in a manner that would be successful in the job, the more likely they are to behave that way in the future.

But it's not enough just to ask such a question - it's also important to get the full story. Byham's Targeted Selection process gets interviewers to collect "Stars", which means for every incident revealed they must find out the situation, task, action and result.

So, for example, when asked about an achievement they are particularly proud of, a candidate might answer they were the highest-selling salesperson in their team last quarter. That's a result.

By then asking "How many people in your team?" the interviewer can start to get an idea of the situation. If the answer is "two" and it emerges the other person was in hospital for four weeks of the quarter, an entirely different picture emerges.

The same line of questioning should be used to discover whether the candidate has a good motivational fit. Out goes "How would you feel if ... ", in comes "Tell me about something in your past job that made you really happy and excited about coming to work".

If they answer that they really enjoyed putting together a plan that took lots of thought and analysis, but the prospective employer operates on the basis of "ready, fire, aim", you've got a poor motivational fit.

Another common mistake, especially in smaller firms, is to have just one interview and one interviewer. Even the managing director of a company with 20 employees should get one of his subordinates, probably someone who will work with the successful candidate, to interview candidates as well, says Byham.

Why? "The biggest advantage is that it keeps you honest." If the managing director is tempted to hire someone because they went to the same school, were recommended by a friend, or have nice legs, it will be clear to the subordinate that they're hiring for the wrong reason.

Likewise, the subordinate will know the boss will look closely at their recommendations and so will focus on doing a good job of interviewing.

But even when there are two or more interviewers, the process often lacks the structure needed to gain the best result. Each interviewer asks exactly the same questions, so the company finds out a lot about two or three key competencies, but nothing about the other eight; or they make their decisions after meeting in the hallway and one interviewer says to the other "What did you think about X? I had a good feeling about her." Decisions are made on the basis of gut feelings and fuzzy impressions.

The thing is, says Byham, the repercussions of bad hiring decisions are just too serious to leave them to chance this way. We've all read estimates of how much high turnover costs companies, but also think of how much managerial time is wasted coaching, and disciplining, employees who just don't fit the job.

Then, of course, there's the human side. "You want to be fair to the people, to be honest," says Byham, "because what are they winning by getting a job that they'll hate?"

Rating candidates using

Targeted Selection

* Each interviewer is assigned key competencies to investigate. There will be some overlap.

* Each interviewer aims to gather three examples (Stars) of how the candidate has shown those key competencies in the past.

* Based on those examples they rate the candidate for those competencies on a scale of 1-5, where 1 is extremely poor and 5 is extremely good.

* The interviewers have to "sell" their ratings to the other interviewers, who may disagree and, based on the evidence, award another rating.

* The individual interviewers' ratings for each key competency are averaged out to give a composite rating.

* A hiring decision is made based on the candidate's composite ratings in all key competencies.

* Training in Targeted Selection is available through Sheffield.

Targeted Selection
DDI