Let's get back to our discussion on how to conduct job interviews from the employer's side of the desk.

Questions to Expect from the Candidate

While preparing your own questions, also think about what the candidate might ask you in the interview. According to Georgia consultant Janet Walsh, such questions are likely to include:

• What's your management style?
• Which type of employee do you work best with?
• What major concerns must the person holding the job I'm interviewing for immediately address?
• What's the company's policy on providing seminars, workshops and training for employees?
• Are there any budget cutbacks planned?
• How will my performance be measured and by whom?
• Are there any weaknesses in the department that you're working to improve?
• What's the workload like?
• What's the corporate culture like?

Interview With Your Head, Not Your Gut

Instead of interview questions or assessment tests, executives and managers often rely on their gut instincts in conducting the interview and selecting a candidate to hire. Experts agree that this is risky and often lead to bad hires resulting from bias errors such as:

• The primacy effect - picking the person who is the freshest in your memory;
• The order effect - the tendency to pick the first or last interviewee and discount all the others in-between;
• Subjective weightings - deciding on the basis of extraneous (and often illegal) factors such as gender, race, age, height, school, country club, accent or dress;
• Self-image hiring - picking the person who most resembles yourself in thinking, appearance or background; and
• The halo effect - picking a person on the basis of prior reputation rather than actual interview performance.

Interviewing techniques are the key to controlling these biases. Thus, for example, many interviewers are biased toward personality and apt to favor charisma over substance. This makes it especially important to use pre-determined questions and not allow the candidate to dominate the agenda. In addition, make sure you ask each candidate the same questions so you have an apples-to-apples basis of comparison.

Making Your Choice

When all of the interviews are over, you need to use your results to choose the right person to hire. Although allowing your gut to rule your head, instinct does have an important place in both the interview and selection process. "It's okay to follow your gut especially if you just don't feel good about someone who on paper appears to be the logical choice," says one recruiter. "It will be harder for the person to succeed if you have doubts about them from the beginning."

One of the best ways to choose between good candidates is to use culture-fit questions, advises Massachusetts consultant Louise Kursmark. "Ask candidates to describe something like the best boss they've ever had, the most productive work environment they were ever in or a situation when they were unhappy on the job." Compare answers and choose the candidate who represents the best fit for your organization.

Leila Bulling Towne, an executive coach in San Francisco, suggests creating a rating system of sorts when preparing for interviews (such as a scale of 1 to 5 for the various qualifications of the job). "If you keep data that way, it's easier to compare two candidates side-by-side," she says.

Another thing to consider is how each candidate would fit into the company as it evolves. Does one individual show more potential to grow, adapt and tackle new challenges? The individual who does a better job of learning from experience is generally your best long-term asset.

Conclusion

Learning how to interview better will help you not only make better hiring decisions but manage the hiring process more effectively. Good interviewers know how to shorten the process. The results are increases in productivity and reductions in overhead costs. In other words, good interviewers are a win-win-win proposition in which all sides gain-the interviewer, the interviewee and, ultimately, the company itself.

Wishing you career success,
Lauryn Franzoni
ExecuNet, www.execunet.com

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