What does your hiring process tell candidates?

Over the last several years I have noticed more firms using a format to include multiple participants during the interview process. The reason is usually something like this. “We work in a collaborative organization and need feedback from everyone.”

While I realize the need to make staff feel like their input is valuable this format creates many problems when trying to attract and hire highly skilled talent.

Let’s start with a phone interview as many firms utilize that tool. In my opinion, the phone interview is a tool for decision maker in a firm to articulate their position in the marketplace and some reasons why the candidate should consider coming in for an interview. It can also be used to assess the professional’s verbal communications and to touch upon technical skills, education and experience. The goal of this conversation is to have a general opinion of qualifications and move the process to a face to face meeting. When several people are involved at this stage the conversation loses focus and the candidates walk away not learning enough about the organization to be excited about meeting. Momentum is lost. 

The initial face to face interview should include no more than 2 people from within an organization. Items that should be discussed should revolve around the person’s professional background. A hiring manager should describe a typical day/week/month for the employee’s already engaged in this or similar roles including duties, responsibilities and the hiring manager’s number 1 priority.  A candidate should be listening closely and describe their past experience and success handling those items. Short and long term goals should be discussed including what areas will be evaluated on a 1 year performance review and other metrics for success.   Again, candidate that will be valuable to your company will carefully listen to your statement, ask thoughtful questions and offer past stories of success handling these responsibilities.  The reason for having multiple people from the company participate at this stage is to insure technical proficiencies are examined along with suitability to work with staff. Best practices would have separate meetings rather than have multiple people asking questions at once. Individual conversation place a candidate more at ease and offers a better glimpse into their abilities. 

If an organization truly believes that more people need to be included it should be at a second interview and should be done informally (say during lunch) for everyone to get to know the candidate better or in brief individual meetings.  While I understand that everyone has an opinion and leaders like to validate those opinions I have also learned that larger interview teams create confusion about things like job duties, responsibilities, goals etc. 

Effective leaders identify a problem, develop a strategy to solve the problem, and obtain a sufficient amount of information to make an effective decision.   Decisions don’t get made when waiting for input from too many sources. Establish your plan before you interview including the number of people to be included from your company and what you need from them to make a good decision. In this market of full employment it is vital that decisions are made rapidly before the situation for the candidate changes.