Anyone involved in recruiting and hiring knows how difficult it is to find the best candidate for your position. The last article, I outlined how the candidate and hiring managers are contributing to making hiring mistakes.
The most significant action a hiring manager can take is to prepare more for the candidate’s interview. The most significant action a hiring manager can take is to prepare more for the candidate’s interview. How a hiring manager approaches and conducts their conversation with prospective candidates influences candidates’ impression of the company and its brand.
The interview preparation needs to start with the hiring manager reviewing the job description and the job requirements and prepare behavioral and situational questions to ask during the interview. Not matter how much preparation one does for the interview, they must still deal with the known fact that interviewers make hiring decisions within an interview’s first five minutes and the impression a candidate makes.
Frank Schmidt and Jack Hunter’s study revealed using multi-measuring testing has a high correlation between the test scores and predicted job performance. If you use multi-measure assessments to supplement your interview and reference checking, you are three times more likely to predict a candidate’s success than just interviewing the candidate and doing reference checks. If you think about it, I believe candidates will provide references who will speak positively about their skills, and achievements. In her Harvard Business Review, Whitney Martin outlines four critical attributes for strong personality assessments – stable, normative, candidness and highly reliability.
People like to hire candidates who are similar to them.Having objective scientific assessment information will help interviewers overcome what extensive research has found. People like to hire candidates who are similar to them. This information will assist the interviewer with analytics and an understanding of a candidate’s probability of success.
With the preparation and assessment information, an interviewer is now able to focus entirely on executing a successful conversation with the candidate. The hiring manager being well prepared will enable them to put the candidate at ease, ask probing behavioral and situational questions and listen to the candidate’s responses. Remember to investigate further a candidate’s response as this will help you get beyond the candidate’s prepared responses and learn more about the candidate. Regardless as to whether you make an offer to a candidate or not, you will leave a lasting impression with them because you were prepared and armed with information so you could focus on them and what they can do for the company. You will have demonstrated you want to hire the best because you are the best at interviewing.
You can continue to use your present approach to hiring using interviews, and be checking references which have a success rate of about one in four.
You can increase your hiring success rate by reading the candidates resume and flip a coin which improves your hiring success rate to one in two.
Lastly, raise your hiring success rate to approximately three out of four with the use of multi-measure assessment information to enhance your interviews and reference checks. In today’s world, companies cannot afford to make a wrong hiring decision. Multi-measure assessments will allow you to hire more successfully than before.
