No Bad Hires by Jay Brennan

You’ve probably interviewed for a job at least once in your life, but if you’re in this for the long haul, you’ll be on the other side of the desk sooner or later: you’ll be interviewing someone for a job.

Conducting an interview requires just as much skill (actually, more) as being interviewed. Just as the candidate is trying to sell you on them, you’re selling them on you and your company. Odds are that if you’re doing the interviewing, your new hire is going to be working with or for you, so part of your job is to convince them not only they want to work for your company, you want to convince them to work for you.

So many managers make the mistake of thinking they can just wing it in an interview. Big mistake. In order for the interview to be effective, you must prepare beforehand. Read the candidate’s resume carefully and make notes about (or even write out) the questions you plan to ask. Make sure you know what information you want to get out of the candidate through your questions. So many interviews start with the statement: “So, tell me about yourself.” It can be an effective opener if you have a strategy, but if you’re just throwing it out there to fill time, well, you’re getting off on the wrong foot. Remember, you want people to want to come work for you, and if your questions are lazy, you’re not going to impress any candidates.

Your HR department or department manager may have guidelines about interviewing, and if they don’t, they certainly will have insight into the process. If you’re new at interviewing prospective employees, talk to HR or your manager. Ask them for coaching and some practice sessions so that when you do that first interview, you’re prepared, smooth and confident.

Since this is a technical blog, and you’re probably technical, you do have a bit of an edge: part of the interview is probably going to be some hard-core factual questions with obviously correct or incorrect answers. Either the candidate knows the answer or he (or she) doesn’t. But those answers aren’t’ going to tell you how easy the candidate is to work with, what kind of work ethic they have, or how they’re going to act in front of senior management or clients. This is where behavioral interviewing comes in.

Behavioral interviewing is the new trend in recruiting circles. Simply put, behavioral interviewing says that past behaviors predict future success. Now, teaching you all about behavioral interviewing is beyond the scope of this column (heck, it would take a couple hundred, at which point, I’d have written a book...and there are some good books out there on this topic.) But here’s the idea in a nutshell: prepare questions that are designed to solicit information about specific past behaviors. For example, you might ask: “Give me an example of a time when you realized you made a technical mistake that had impacted or was going to impact a large group of end users? What were the circumstances? How did you discover your mistake? And what did you about it?” Since everyone makes mistakes, your candidates should all have a good story to tell. What you’re looking for is an honest assessment of a rather substantial error. You want the candidate to be upfront, tell you about their error, and then tell you that they didn’t try to cover it up. They reacted quickly and appropriately, and hopefully, in a way that limited damage.

When the candidate answers, look for them to describe the situation in the format Incident, Action, Outcome. Incident is a description of the circumstances, Action describes what they did about it, and Outcome tells you how it was resolved. Remember, you’re not asking “What would you do if….” questions. You’re asking for factual statements about past behaviors, so don’t the candidate get away with answers that start “Well, I suppose in those circumstances I would…” If they’ve never had an experience that applies to your question, let them know it’s okay to say, “That’s never happened to me.”

It’s also likely that you’re probably not going to be the only one interviewing the candidates. If you’re going to put them through a series of interviews, it’s important your team has a strategy about what you’re going to ask, and who is going to ask what questions. It’s a great strategy to have everyone ask some of the same questions and then compare notes, but that has to be a strategy you decide up front. Oh, and don’t compare notes until after everyone has interviewed the candidate. You don’t want to tell the next interviewer how great or terrible a candidate is, because you are coloring their perception and you won’t get accurate results.

Remember that every candidate you interview, no matter what you may think of them, is going to go out and tell their friends about the interviews they had today (or this week, or this month.) You want those candidates talking about what a great interview they had, and how badly they want to work about your company. You don’t want them referring to you as the jerk that kept them waiting 45 minutes, and was rude, arrogant and condescending during the interview. Treat every candidate, no matter how good or terrible, with respect. They are going to walk out of your office and start marketing their experience.

Lastly, talk to your HR department and make sure you know what you can and can’t say in an interview. There are some legal pitfalls you don’t want tripping you up. Never let anyone who has been coached about these legal issues conduct an interview without supervision…you don’t want a lawsuit on your hands. And make sure you take lots of notes and get them back to HR. They need your feedback not only so that they can refine their searches and get you better candidates, but they need to keep a record of your thoughts in case they ever have to demonstrate the legality of your interview process.

I hope your HR department has a strong strategy about interviewing candidates and can help you out. Business studies show that a bad hire can cost a company anywhere from two to three times the salary from mistakes, morale, credibility and other issues. You can’t afford to make a bad hire, ever.