THE INTERVIEW (PT 3)

Continuing on from last time, the key to ensuring you find the right person from your interviewing is to ask good questions.

So far we have established the styles of questions to ask and these had five key criteria, namely:

• Ask Historic Questions
• Ask Questions Related To The Job
• Ask Work- And Role-Relevant Questions
• Ask Questions That Are Simple To Answer
• Preclude Waffle

With the styles of question clearly defined, we can now look at the types of question to ask. (In the next issue we'll combine these styles and types to create 'real world' examples of the kind of things to ask in interviews, to ensure you make the best possible recruitment decisions.)

The Right Type

• Ask Factual Questions. These are very straightforward and elicit a response with a fact which can then be questioned more closely with additional follow-up questions.

So, to use my own industry, recruitment, as an example, a factual question I will use to someone experienced in sales will be: “How many marketing calls did you make yesterday?”  There is only one answer - a number! Further questions will establish the truth of the answer and whether it meets the criteria I am looking for.

• Ask Behavioural Questions. Remembering that past behaviours are usually duplicated by your candidates, these are vital questions. From them you can deduce how they carried out a task.

Continuing my example with the answer to the factual question above, my follow up behavioural question might be: “How did you put your marketing pitch together?” I want to understand their thinking and the research they put in prior to the pitch as this will provide the insight into what I can expect in the future.

• Ask Specific Questions. Experience has taught me that most CVs are quite general and 'broad-brush-stroke' as they are supposed to be no longer than two or three pages long.  The candidate's CV will have indicated that they've been involved in various activities and disciplines and this is what made you 'screen them in' in the first place. The second stage phone screening you did then ensured that they were indeed likely to be what was required. Now, in the interview, you should be asking questions which deal with the specific situations they've worked in. These will provide the guidance you need as to exactly what the candidate did in a particular situation and allow you to delve beyond the CV.

For instance, my business has a strong IT focus and when we search for people for clients we see many CVs with the skills required by the client. With a detailed job description to work from, we can ascertain the best possible recruits by discovering the specific tasks they carried out within a project. So when a candidate has stated that they worked on X project doing Y we ask what they were specifically doing and break this down as far as we can.

To return to the recruitment consultant example, a specific question I might ask would be:  “How many marketing calls that actually connected with people you needed to speak to did you make yesterday?” I will already have obtained a good understanding of what it is they sell and would then follow up with: “How many sales did you make?” or “How many appointments did you set?” This is giving me a picture of their success rates.

• Ask Detail Questions. These allow you to gather more information to ensure you know everything you need to know to make the right decision. A cardinal sin is to hear someone talk authoritatively, assume that they will be good in the post and not ask the detailed questions. A sales phrase is “never assume as it makes an ass out of you and me.” It is crass but it is also very true and most mistakes are made through assuming rather than knowing. So, keep asking detailed questions until you are sure that you have made no assumptions. If the interviewee becomes uncomfortable and struggles the chances are you moving away from his/her general answers to specifics and establishing that they might have carried out the roles that their CV mentions, but not necessarily successfully. This is good - it is helping you towards making a decision.

Detail questions I would ask in an interview for a recruitment consultant would include:  “Where did you obtain the information for the pitch?” “What criteria did you use to decide which information to use and which information to exclude in the pitch?”

• Ask for Examples. The examples need to be similar to those that the person will face with the post you're trying to fill, so that you can mirror their behaviours against the requirements for your job. (Learning about behaviours that aren’t necessary for your position is not using the interview time effectively and creates clutter in your mind so that it is harder to establish the right person from the wrong person.) The more examples you can obtain against each of your required behaviours, the more informed your decision can be.

In recruitment I am looking to hire people who can work under pressure and react on their feet to what the clients and candidates throw at them. This is particularly true when on the phone making cold sales calls. Therefore, my questions might include:  “Okay let’s assume it is yesterday, can you now please role-play with me the pitch you used when making sales calls yesterday?” This is as direct an example as I can expect. It does put the candidate under pressure but reacting to pressure and thinking on your feet is a specific behavioural requirement for the position. It also establishes whether the pitch is well constructed and introduces itself effectively. They are all very important in sales. I might follow up with: “What are the three main objections that you encounter?” Then we would role-play these too.

Next Time

Constructing questions 'for real'.

THE INTERVIEW (PT 2)

The key to ensuring that an interview produces the right person for your role is to ask good questions. That might sound obvious, but it's amazing how many interviewers do not prepare as well as the interviewees.

If all's gone well in your recruitment process to date, then you'll now be faced with the task of interviewing good quality candidates who are relaxed and ready for a face-to-face meeting with you. And you can be quite sure that the better the quality candidate, the more likely they are to have prepared well.

If you try asking good interview questions without a detailed understanding of the experience, skills, success measures and behaviours you are expecting, that means you'll be relying on little more than 'gut instinct' about a candidate and whether you liked them or not -   rather than being certain that they can carry out the role you want them to. It's a brave - or foolhardy - person who'd risk the health of their business on the strength of their instincts alone. What's more, it is impossible to rationally and fairly compare multiple candidates if you don't have a very clear picture of what you've learned about them via their interviews.

Fortunately, if you have been following the steps I have outlined to date, you will have a detailed job description with sets out your expectations for the role, that you created at the start of your recruitment process. It is that job description that you can use to help formulate your questions.

A Question Of Style

This week we will look at the style of questions that should be asked to ensure that you know that the candidate is the right fit for you.

(Next time we'll look at the types of questions and then in the following edition we'll focus on actually constructing interview questions you might use 'for real'.)

So, looking at the style of question to ask, there are five key criteria to ensuring that your  questions will be effective and elicit the information you need to make an informed recruitment decision.

Ask Historic Questions. You want to know about the candidate’s behaviour so you need to know how they have behaved in the past. Future-based questions won't tell you how they will do something. You'll just hear about how they think they would do whatever it is you've asked about or, worse, how they think you might want them to do it.

Future-based questions ("how will you", "how could you" etc) should only be used towards the end of the interview, once you've established that the candidate has demonstrated the right behaviours for the role by answering historic questions ("how did you") satisfactorily.

Ask Questions Related To The Job. Questions should only relate to the job. This is what you are interested in and behavioural questions around their previous roles will let you know the behaviours you can expect in connection with the role you're trying to fill. Asking personal questions in today’s litigious environment could easily lead to actions against you. Besides, if you think about it, what would you gain from knowing about their personal life? People often have a work persona and a home persona and the two can be quite separate - hence the tidy, organised work environment and the home that looks like a bomb site. (Maybe that was a personal observation!)

Ask Work- And Role-Relevant Questions. The questions have to be relevant. I have heard of many interviews where a tangential question is asked which is totally outside the requirements for the role, with the pretext that it will test the candidates ability to "think outside the box" or "think on their feet".

Perhaps, for a very few specialist roles this approach might be a useful test of somebody’s creativity but even if that's the case, it moves from the scope and format of the interview you explained to the candidate at the start and will make them wary and uncomfortable. This can result in you not obtaining the most constructive answers to your more relevant questions and might well make the candidate think that you're not offering a working environment they would enjoy. It is better to ask questions that have the express purpose of obtaining information around their past behaviours so that you can properly understand whether they can carry out your role or not. If you want to ascertain whether someone can "think out of the box" because that's what the role requires then that's fine - but you don't have to do so by oblique and difficult questions.

Ask Questions That Are Simple To Answer. You are trying to find out whether the person can carry out the role for you or not. Ask simple questions and the candidate can provide the information you require. Ask difficult or multi-part questions and the candidate has to pause and think and carefully frame a response that might well be verging on the theoretical, as opposed to simply replying about how they've acted in the past. Remember, you are looking for evidence from past behaviour that they are able to carry out your role. A number of short and straightforward questions make it easy for the candidate to provide the answers and make it easy for you to deduce whether they are the right person. Long, complicated questions generate long complicated answers which can easily wander off into areas that don't interest you. That can result in you losing control of the interview as well as leaving you at risk of not obtaining the information you require.

Preclude Waffle.  Ensure that the questions you ask only have one specific answer. Answering “talk me through your career?” could take 10 minutes and leave you grappling with a long and complicated answer through the fault of the question and not the candidate. Open-ended 'invitations to talk' such as "talk me through your career", also mean you can lose control of the interview. They also mean the candidate can tell you what they want to tell you and not what you want to know. So, instead, be specific about the part of their career you want more information about. A question might be "when you were at X Company how did you carry out this (function or activity)?" "What were your results (in this function or activity)?" You are still asking open questions (as opposed to questions that can be answered with a 'yes' or 'no') but you're ensuring there's only one area to be covered in the answer. Subsequent structured, detailed but simple questioning will mean you'll gain the specific information you require and retain control of the interview at all times.

Next Time

With those as the style of question to ask, next time we'll focus on the types of question.

THE INTERVIEW (PT 1)

So far in the process we've made sure we've clearly detailed what we require from our ideal candidate in terms of both skills and behaviours, and we've had brief telephone conversations with the applicants to establish which of them are worth meeting in a face-to-face interview.

It is this face-to-face meeting that's the most crucial part of the process. Mistakes at this stage mean you could lose your ideal employee. Worse, you could make a poor decision and hire the wrong person. And as we've already seen, wrong hires can - literally - cost eight-to-ten times their salary in terms of disruption, lost opportunities and damage to morale.

Preparation Isn't Just For Candidates

You don’t have to look far to find plenty of tips on how to interview well from a candidate’s perspective. The Internet is an excellent source of information to prepare yourself for an interview; there are countless books about it and - if you are dealing with a candidate who's come to you via a  good recruiter -  rest assured, they will have been  prepared by the recruitment company for their interview.

This all makes the process of establishing the best candidate that much harder for you,  whether you are carrying out your first interview or whether you've been doing it for years!

What it all means is that preparation is just as crucial for employers, and even the most successful and experienced interviewers will tell you that the do the groundwork before an interview.

Where To Start?

There are three key points to remember that will really help you carry out an effective interview:

1. People are nervous when they are being interviewed, especially if they are very keen on the role.
2. Earlier, we discussed how difficult it is to change someone's behaviour. Therefore, during the interview you want to learn in as much detail as possible about their past behaviour as this will provide a very accurate guide as to how they will behave if they are to be working with you.
3. The best candidates, whatever the market conditions, will have more than one job option. A hour-long grilling from you that exhibits no warmth towards them whatsoever may well establish that you want to hire them, but it might also establish that there is no way on Earth that they would want to work with you!

The Right Conditions

It is important from the outset that the candidate feels safe in talking to you and that your meeting with them is important to you. The interview should be held in a closed room or at the very least in a secluded area where interruptions are unlikely. Public places or open plan offices do not create an environment where the candidate will feel confident and will not produce the information you require to be sure you are making the right decision.

Ensure that you cannot be interrupted, that your phone is off and that your attention is fully with the candidate and the interview process for the duration of the interview. Ideally, have a clock in your eye line so that you can track time without looking at your watch - this is always a huge distraction to candidates.

When the candidate meets you they will be at their most nervous and least relaxed. This means there's a good chance that they will not be able to demonstrate effectively whether they are a good fit for the vacancy or not: it does you no favours, nor the candidate. Small talk is a very good cure for nerves!  You can focus on anything - the journey to the office, the quality of the coffee, the weather (if you are in the UK) ... whatever. The point is to find something that you're happy talking about, that the candidate can feel relaxed about discussing too.

Once you have established a more comfortable general context and atmosphere, move on to the interview. You can look upon this small talk as a warm-up, where rapport is built so that you both feel comfortable with each other.

Allow Candidates To Shine

After the small talk warm-up, it is important to set the scene. I suggest the next thing should be to explain what will happen. Ensuring that the candidate knows the format you're working removes the tension that comes with a candidate trying to second-guess you, so that they can perform to their best ability.

My opening statements to set the scene are very similar for all interviews and go something like this:

“Okay, well I really appreciate you coming in today. I’ll just run through what we are looking to cover. We will start by looking at your background chronologically from finishing education until now and I will ask questions to make sure we cover all the relevant areas. My aim is to understand how you carried out your roles and the thinking and reasons behind your career development, so please provide as much detail as you can when answering questions.

The (job title) is a key position in our business and it is important that we take on the right person to ensure both that we meet our ambitious plans and that the person who joins us feels that this is the right move for them and meets their career goals. Once we have run through your career we will discuss the position and our company and answer any questions you might have.

I will also be taking notes because this is an important position and I want to be sure that I don’t forget any information. Do you have any questions about the process itself before we start?"

... and then, any preliminary questions (which are very rare) dealt with, I will start the interview 'for real'.

Next Time:

The interview itself.

PROTECTING YOUR REPUTATION AND SETTING UP INTERVIEWS (PT 2)

Last week we looked at how to ensure that candidates felt positive about you and your organisation even though they were not going to be considered for a vacancy and how you can sometimes gain additional good quality referrals at the same time.

Now you have to move on to interviewing.

Unless the role you're trying to fill requires rare skills, you will have a number of candidates to talk to. Presuming this is the case, I recommend that an initial telephone 'screening' is carried out with each candidate. I always do this. Because up until now you have looked for reasons to include people in the group to be interviewed rather than reasons to exclude them, the numbers can be easily become unmanageable for face-to- face interviews. A telephone interview can be short, based around just four or five questions, but it will allow you to establish a short list to move forward.

Generally, it is better to have someone in your department or HR set up the phone interviews but if the numbers are manageable you can set them up yourself. I say it is better to get someone else to do it to avoid you becoming embroiled in conversations about the role and bogged down in coordinating the logistics, which can all prove challenging and time-consuming for an already busy manager.

When I hire, I look to hold three phone interviews an hour with each running up to 15 minutes. This gives me five minutes to write up my thoughts and notes and maybe a couple of minutes to catch up on emails and anything else that is happening in the business. This short conversation means it is usually quite easy to set the interview up for candidates during their normal working day and if it can only occur in the early morning or later in the evening, it is not too intrusive on my own time and can be carried out by  mobile phone if necessary.

Almost inevitably, there will be a number of conversations which will last considerably less than 15 minutes because it's quickly apparent that the candidate is not suitable or that the role is not what the candidate requires. In cases like this, the phone interview stage means both parties have been spared having to pad out a face-to-face interview which wouldn't have been going anywhere!

To allow for this scenario, when conducting a lengthy series of consecutive phone interviews, I always have a number of small pieces of work to do, suitable for any fill-in times. They are not urgent time-consuming tasks, just things that need doing - the kind of jobs that invariably get left on one side. This ensures that I'm not just twiddling my thumbs if an interview is very brief.

So what do you ask during the conversation?

At the outset of the process (and as discussed earlier), you established the core competencies and behaviours that you are looking for in connection with the vacancy. The questions should be based around these. (In the next blog I will explain in detail the type of questions to ask and how to structure the questions.) It is a brief conversation, so focus on two or three core competencies for the job and ask just four or five questions to establish capability. Ask the questions about their most recent or current role, or about the role which relates to the job you are hiring for if their current role is not applicable. The questions are purely to establish whether you want to carry on to the face-to-face interview.

For example, when I am interviewing for recruiters I am looking for the following criteria because a recruiter spends a lot of time on the phone:

• rapport
• good, easy to understand English
• an ability to think on their feet

With my recruitment experience it is easy to establish this just by talking to the applicants and gauging how engaged and comfortable I am with them and how easy it is to understand them.

Once you have established that the applicant is of interest, talk about the opportunities that will come with working with you, their current salary and package and their salary expectations.

Remember: you might want the candidate but they also have to want you to join you. It is important that you to talk about the opportunities and benefits of working with your organisation so that the applicant is interested and places working with you at a higher priority than any other companies they might be talking to or applying to.

When you know you would like to move forward with an applicant, discuss their expectations and any immediate questions whilst at the same time emphasising that all aspects will be covered when you meet. Make sure the applicant knows the phone conversation is all about ensuring that you both feel that it is worth moving forward with the process.  This keeps the conversation duration manageable so that you don't overrun into the next one.

My preference is to let the applicant know that I would like to move to a face-to-face interview there and then, but have someone in my team arrange the date and time at the end of the screening process. I also let applicants know at the time if I will not be moving forward with them and why. As with the earlier selection process, you must deliver this 'bad news' in a constructive way so that they feel positive about your business and know the areas to work on if they're looking for other similar roles.

On The Borderline

There are always some candidates who are question marks - borderline cases. I do try to be inclusive and look for reasons to take applicants forward and in the past I used to invite applicants who were 'borderline' at the phone stage to come to a face-to-face interview. However, after reviewing this I couldn't identify a single case of hiring someone I'd been unsure about at this phone screening stage. Hence nowadays I take an inclusive view up until the phone interview, but from there on in I will exclude anyone who obviously doesn't fit the bill or who I'm not sure about.

In Summary

To summarise,  to carry out effective screening interviews by phone:

• arrange for 15 minute conversations with five minutes between each one;
• interview against three or four of the key hiring criteria laid out in the competencies and behaviours you detailed at the outset;
• talk about the opportunity and options that come with working with you if the candidate seems a good match;
• establish their current salary and package and their salary expectations if they are to take the role;
• either let the applicants know during the phone screening or in writing after the screening if they have not been successful and why not;
• applicants who are borderline remain borderline at best so should be rejected;
• book the successful applicants in for the face-to-face interview.

Next Time:

Constructing the questions for an interview so you establish exactly what you want to know, either on the phone or in face-to-face interviews.

PROTECTING YOUR REPUTATION AND SETTING UP INTERVIEWS (PT 1)

Having screened the CVs and established which applicants you want to move on to the next stage, there are two immediate tasks now facing you: setting up the interviews for promising applicants, and letting unsuccessful applicants know they've been unsuccessful. This second task is often neglected but in my view it is very important, for the applicants and to help protect your reputation too.

As a recruiter I talk to people looking for work nearly every day. One of the largest sources of frustration for them is that their CV was put forward to a role and nothing further was heard.

Now, unfortunately, many recruiters are as guilty as anyone else on this front, treating their candidates badly and not providing any feedback to them. This poor situation is often exacerbated by the recruiter's clients in turn not providing any feedback regarding unsuccessful CVs or simply not reporting that their situation has changed and they no longer need to make the appointment.

I cannot defend the behaviour of the recruiters; it is unprofessional and doesn’t help my industry, which has been fighting hard to shed a bad reputation developed 20 years ago. And it is difficult to defend the hiring company that doesn't provide feedback either. The end result is that candidates become disillusioned with recruiters and with the prospective employers too.

From your perspective, as an employer, we all know that bad news travels fast and good news doesn’t travel anywhere, so imagine what's being said about your company when you don’t acknowledge a candidate who has applied to your role, whether through a recruiter or applying directly to you.

Positive Rejections

I know we are all busy people and time is no-one's friend. Administration which doesn't help us toward our final goals gets in the way and is frequently put aside and ignored. Rejecting applicants can easily fall into this category ... but it's a mistake to let it do so.

The trick is to turn the rejection into a positive process if you can, and to make life easy for yourself along the way.

For example, I've created simple letter and email templates for my rejection responses so every applicant. They are brief, polite but in them I will also try and give enough information to allow applicants to understand why they are not being considered.

To try and make it a positive process, if an applicant is working in the right general commercial environment, I will add a little about the specific job opportunity in question and the referral scheme we operate, so if they know a person who would be a good fit they have something to pass on to colleagues and still gain from us. (As we've already discussed, it is human nature to only refer someone who will make the referrer look good, so offering this to a rejected candidate is still a safe course of action.)

For example, if someone without the right experience has applied for a role at my own company, Osirian, I might write back along these lines if they nevertheless show promise and are coming from the right general commercial background.

Dear ...,

Many thanks for your CV for our position as a (...)

I appreciate your application and would like to retain your CV on our records. We are anticipating further growth in future and would like the opportunity to invite you to be involved if appropriate at a later date.

Regrettably, for this position though, we have received applicants who have carried out (the activity) previously and as such are not able to progress with you.

We will be interviewing for the (...) position next week and we would be willing to look at additional candidates too. We would appreciate your help if you know someone who is looking to progress their career rapidly and has carried out (the activity) in the recent past or is currently doing it. As you are aware from your own application, the post represents an opportunity for the person you might refer to us to (details of some of the ongoing opportunities).

Should you know anyone suitable, as a way of saying 'thank you' we will forward £250 of Amazon vouchers to you if we hire your suggested candidate.

If appropriate, I hope to hear from you with your referral/s in the near future, and I will be in touch with you again should opportunity that's more applicable to you arise in the future.

Kind regards and best wishes in your career.


Colin Lapthorn.
Managing Director.

We don’t receive many referrals via this method but those we do are almost always very good, so it makes it worthwhile to go beyond a merely polite refection letter. (Once you've prepared a letter like this, you can always set it up as a template to base future letters on, keeping the time required to a minimum.)

Even if the unsuccessful applicant doesn't seem to show much future promise and/or doesn't work in a suitable commercial environment so is unlikely to be able to suggest a referral, I will still always make sure we reply. A few simple words such as 'good luck with your search for a job' can go a long way. As they say, it costs nothing to be polite. And, issues of politeness aside, whatever the precise nature of the reply, your aim should be to leave even the disappointed applicants feeling that your company is decent. Doing so will reflect well on you in future - and your reputation as a good company to work for will be preserved.

Next Time:

Setting and structuring the initial interviews.