One thing you ending up having to do when you become a manager is learn to Interview someone. Hiring is the most important job as a manager and it can have a huge impact on the direction of your company so becoming good at interviewing is essential.
Most people approach interviewing as a “feel” thing. They just talk to someone about their career and try to get a sense of the person. That wasn’t working for me. I wanted interviewing to be more science than art. I wanted to create a process out of it. One that we could continuously improve on. So we did a bunch of research and here are my tips for learning to conduct a good interview:
1. First, know what you are looking for. Spend some time with other people in your company coming up with a list of behaviors that successful people in your company have in common. You are trying to hire someone that will fit your company and be successful there. So you need someone that blends with the organization and will be able to fit in. For example, in our company, we found that the successful people were humble. If you went into Randy Wolf’s office today and asked him to help you with a glass takeoff, he’d jump right in and help you. He is the owner of a multimillion dollar corporation but he wouldn’t think twice about it. You will find that from the COO and everyone else in the firm. No one cares about titles or prestige or the office or parking spaces. We would all sweep the floor or clean the bathroom if that’s what’s required. So you need to know that about your company before you interview someone. List out all your qualities.
2. Now go and grab a few books on behavioral interviewing. Past performance is the best indicator of future performance. So the process works like this. You create questions around what someone has done in the past. If they’ve done it in the past, then they probably would do it in the future working for you. So in our example, maybe your question is: Tell me about a time that you had to do something that wasn’t in your job description. Or: Tell me about a time when you were asked to do something you had never done before. When the person gives you specific examples of things they have done in the past, you can see how they would react to things that they will run into in the future.
3. Create a standard list of questions. Yes, this is a process and not an art form. So you are going to ask everyone interviewing for a project management position the same set of questions every time. As you use the questions over and over, you will be able to see which ones are really working and which ones are confusing or not getting you what you want and you can modify them as you go. As you hire people, if they work out great or even if they don’t work out at all, you can then look back on your interview questions and modify them to address things you may have missed or need to update.
4. Practice interviewing people. Here’s what we did. We had our HR professional give us a class on behavioral interviewing. We set up a group of people that are typically interviewing people and went through the class. We then used our summer intern position for our practice. First, our group interviewed a group of people in the company that we thought were great hires in the last few years. We brought them all in, asked our standard list of questions and listened for how they would answer the questions. We then tuned up our questions and we were ready. We have lots of people respond to our intern ads so we just set up a group of about 8 people to interview. We had all of our team in the room and we picked one person to conduct the interview. One of us would do the interview using the standard questions and the rest of us would take notes. After the interview, we would give that person some constructive feed back on what went well and where they could improve. We each did 2 – 3 interviews like this and worked hard to improve our process each time. The fact is that you rarely get to see someone else do an interview so the experience was amazing. By the third interview, people knew where to probe, how to get the candidate to be more specific and really get to the heart of the question. We learned how to ask the questions clearly and naturally and we really dialed in our questions and our process.
5. Interview a lot. If you don’t do it often, you don’t get good at it. You should be interviewing all the time. You want to have a bench of potential candidates. You don’t want to have to start interviewing after someone gives their two week notice. Hiring should be a process and you want to have months to find good people, not weeks. If you are interviewing all the time and finding good people, then when a position becomes available you will have a list of people to call and you won’t be placing ads for the open position.
6. Interview for fit, not for skills. This is tough. You need to find people with great potential, not just someone who can do the job right now. We will hire a person with the right attitude over a person with years of experience every time. Yes it takes time to do the training, but then you have an amazing person instead of just someone who can fill the spot.
Hopefully these tips will give you some ideas on how to improve your interviewing process.
