Better interviewing by design

6 steps to excellent hiring

Interviewing excellence takes time, training and preparation. World-class teams are assembled at considerable effort, from strategic planning and talent identification, to bespoke processes which allow excellent talent to flourish. One of the quickest ways to destroy this preparation is to interview casually.

Casual interviews create casual and biased hiring. Hiring for who we like, rather than what the business needs.

If you're just starting on a process to improve your hiring skills, here’s a quick primer of six steps* - each larger in scope than the last - that will help you start building interview discipline, lowering hiring risk, and ramping the quality of hire.

* There’s a step zero too. If you’re not fully reading resumes before interviewing (and I’ve witnessed plenty of hiring teams do this) please do. Prepare as though your candidate were an investor.

If you only have time for one step

Be genuine in your interviews. Talk openly about your company and culture, be honest about the good and the bad of the place. Don't over promise what this role will be like. Don't overdress a role with possible opportunities. The goal is to bring an authenticity to the room to encourage the candidate to be authentic and honest themselves. "Selling" the role leads to them "selling" themselves. How many times have you been mis-sold?

The job for leadership is to create the conditions for happiness as well as the indicators for success. The hiring team's role is to be very upfront in describing both to potential candidates so that they can self-select honestly for the environment. This transparency is designed to lessen the number of miss-hires and works best when the whole company is aligned around ways of behaviour, values and mission. "This is how we do things here to make people happy whilst delivering on ambitious targets".

Practice listening to listen and not to to trap. You're not trying to catch the person out, find the lie, or lay on the pressure (no matter what TV Shows like The Apprentice may lead you to believe). The goal is to listen in order to understand. We are all more than one mistake, one omission, one win. The reality of your interviewee is extraordinarily complex and your job as an interviewer is to understand whether this person can add value to the business whilst having a good time doing it.

Two steps

Design questions that serve a purpose. Stop asking oddball, esoteric questions. Stop asking questions you've read about in articles. Ask questions that you are able to judge the answer to empirically and measurably and that have specificity to this role. Asking where someone wants to be in five years tells you nothing useful (almost no one knows, most people's answer will change in six months or with new opportunities, no one can answer honestly because they don't want to over or under reach). Don't ask trick questions at all. Don't try and make the candidate uneasy unless they are genuinely going to be uneasy working for you, in which case see note 1. If in doubt, describe the process of the role (or get someone to join you who can) and ask them to work through that process to improve it. What the candidate did in their last role is only marginally relevant given the differing dynamics, teams and challenges. Don't ask them what animal they'd be, ever!

Three steps

Clearly define the need. Why are you hiring? What problem does this hire solve? It isn't the same as the last hire to this team, even if the job title is the same. Every hire modifies the team’s strengths and weaknesses and the nature of the role shifts each time. The last hire was good with people, helping customers and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration, but not that good at organisation. Do you need more of the same or does the next addition to that team need to enjoy helping with that organisational burden? Spend time with the team to see where the strengths and weaknesses are now, and work on the job description template to identify changes specific to this hire. Not only will you be building a more capable team, but the discovery process will help you design better questions for step two above.

Four steps

Think about values. Hopefully your company values are more than just posters on the wall. There is a way that your team works together, some guiding principles for how we interact with one another, what we are all here for and how we excel. These values arise organically whether human beings collaborate, but they are accelerated in environments where a big goal needs to be accomplished. Values are like gardens; some version of a garden will grow in any open space, but combining the organic with some planning, creativity and hard work can produce something magnificent. Taking care of your values, creating a shared mental model and rewarding excellence around key behaviours are keys to truly high functioning teams. If your values are well established it makes sense to look for new hires who will complement that values set and whose shared passions mean they will enjoy the working style. If your values are unkempt or in need of refining then it makes sense to identify candidates who can help (and have the authority to) steer the approach into a new direction.

Five steps

Invest time in training your team in how to interview. Work out an overall strategy for the process ensuring you cover all the areas from your role discovery piece. Make sure the interview process attracts everyone but that your efforts to "sell" during the interview don't detract from your efforts to evaluate. Put in place scoring cards and be sure to count both experience and affability as categories (so that these measures can be assessed) but make sure those two categories are not weighted any higher than your other categories (in order to avoid bias on likeability, or on social proof (others hired this candidate, they probably know what they were doing)). Send interviewers in in pairs with specific agendas to cover and make sure one of the pair is taking notes. Make sure the note and wisdom format is standardised too to keep the evaluation fair across applicants.

Six steps

The mission is central to everything your business does. Defining the why of your existence is crucial. Orbiting this why like a moon is the impact your people have on the ability to deliver this mission. Like a moon because the mission keeps the people in the orbit and the people influence the conditions around delivery on that mission. What kind of people can have the biggest effect on that mission? How do you find them, making sure you're attracting the highest possible calibre at each stage in your company's journey? How comfortable are you hiring smarter and more talented people? How comfortable are you in rewarding them well, giving them challenge and autonomy and the freedom to be creative without fear of failure? What is your tolerance to letting go? What systems have you built to engage, develop, stretch and challenge anime you hire? Ideas, financial backing, cashflow are all vital signs for a company, signs that a company pays extreme attention to. Make sure you're as focused on delivering for your people and committed to finding and developing greatness.

Conclusion

Imagine these six steps as ever widening concentric circles. Each step outwards takes more time, energy and commitment. As your team's capacity to identify need, to translate that need into jobs that matter, and to perform interviews that predict success in that job, increases so does your business' capacity to outperform its competition.

Truly great teams are an act of extraordinary creative effort. They do not happen by chance or by hoping the next hire will be better than the last.