The phone rings. You pick it up and hear a pleasant voice on the other end say, “Mr. Smith, this is Joan from Sterling Cooper. We’ve received your resume and would like you to come in for an interview.”
Excited that your résumé reached the right hands, you grab your calendar in preparation for the next sentence, in which Joan will invariably ask you which of two or three times will work for you.
Instead, to your astonishment, Joan says, “We’d like to schedule a one-hour interview with a few of our managers and employees, after which we’ll debate your answers and scrutinize your résumé, which we have no way of validating, and then decide which one of several candidates will receive a job offer. We expect and hope that the candidate we select will work out for us, and will stay with us as a productive member of our team for five to ten years. Does Friday at 1 p.m. work for you?”
It seems ludicrous, but that actual pattern is the de facto process for 99 percent of companies. Yes, we often base decisions on five hours of employee/manager time (let’s give that a value of $250) and expect a lifetime of return (we’ll call the million dollars paid out to the employee over many years).
To head off dissent, I will cede that some companies bring the candidate back for a second interview, during which even more managers and prospective teammates will sit on a panel and go through the candidate’s résumé and ask variations of the same questions asked before, with perhaps technical or process-oriented questions thrown in as well. While this method seems to work in many managers’ minds, it hardly gets into the level of interaction that is required to make a realistic evaluation of whether the candidate can do the job and would be a good fit.
As a hiring manager for over a decade, and as recipient of both good and bad decisions made by other managers (after all, the employees who have to work with the candidate ultimately bear the brunt of those managers’ decisions), I have found that there are much better ways to determine whether a candidate is a good fit than the standard “phone screen, hour interview, bring the finalists in for a panel” method employed by management almost everywhere. To be clear, the phone screen and standard interview are a great starting point to sift through the flood of applicants for an open position. The payoff, however, is where you go from there.
Here are a few ideas I have found useful:
- Take the candidate—let’s call him Don—on a tour of your team area. Introduce Don to your team after the interview. Leave him with a mid- and senior-level team member for ten minutes each and ask them to show Don some of their work. Then come back in twenty minutes and re-engage him. Walk Don not only to the front desk, but also out to his car, and ask him about his experience. The feedback you receive from your team and your candidates can be a bit different from the reactions you get over a table during interviews.
- Go to lunch with Don, and take a few team members along. If lunch is not in the cards, meet him for breakfast or coffee in the morning. Get out of your work environment and have him interact with those who will be working with him day after day. This simple change in scenery usually strips away the “front” that we work so hard to put on in an interview and exposes us as the people we really are.
- Have Don come in and work for a half-day with your team, if at all possible. While he obviously cannot be up to speed or know what to do, there should be a way to have him work side by side with several team members. This also provides something you need: in this case, time to see what emerges outside of the formal interview.
Regardless of this and other methods that you may use, there are much better ways to find out whether a candidate is a good fit for your team than a standard process that could, in the long run, put you back at square one: having to interview another replacement.