What Is the Real Purpose of the Interview?
Is
the real purpose of the interview to weed out the weak, or attract the best?
Too many people, including a good
chunk of corporate recruiters and hiring managers, view the interview primarily
as a means to disqualify people. In the process, they miss a golden opportunity
to attract stronger candidates, demonstrate the professionalism of the company,
overcome errors made by weaker interviewers, and most important, hire top
people who are more interested in career growth opportunities, rather than big
compensation increases. Let me explain.
I just read a super-boring 85-page research report
on the effectiveness of the employment interview. While their findings seem
appropriate for active candidates, I suspect the people who wrote this report
have never actually interviewed anyone for a real job. Worse, they probably never interviewed a strong candidate, who wanted
more money than the budget allowed, had other offers to consider, wasn't
desperate to change jobs, was already fully-employed, was recruited vs.
actively looking, and wasn't all that prepared.
When viewed in this light, what's
the primary purpose of the interview? Is it just to assess competency, or is
there more to it? Since my 25-year stint as a independent third-party recruiter
always involved the hard to find, hard to attract, and hard to hire types of
candidates, I have some preconceived notions. The big one: assessing competency
is essential, but not sufficient, and if you’re going to do it at all, you
might as well do it right.
The Four Big Purposes of a
Professional Employment Interview
One: accurately assess competency,
fit and motivation.
According to the research report
cited above, a basic interview requires the following:
- Structure: you need to ask everyone the same questions in a logical order that minimizes the impact of biases and extracts the correct information.
- A job analysis: you need to know what job you're trying to fill if you want to determine if someone is competent and motivated to do it. (BIG NOTE: a skills-based job description is NOT a job analysis. A job analysis is an description of the work the person actually needs to do on the job..)
- A formal rating and assessment scale: specific guidance is needed to convert answers into some type of quantitative performance-based assessment
Two: prevent good candidates from
being improperly assessed.
If
you’re a recruiter you’ve experienced this problem first hand many times. It
happens whenever a fully-vetted candidate you've worked hard to find, gets
blown out because the hiring manager conducted a superficial or flawed
assessment. If you’ve ever been on the interviewing team, you've experienced
the problem second-hand. This happens whenever there is wide disagreement about
candidate competency among the members of the interviewing team. It means most
of the interviewers are using either emotion, intuition, or some narrow range
of factors to determine competency, fit and motivation to do the work. One
countermeasure for this type of incorrect assessment is specific evidence
disproving the false conclusion. For example, assuming that a soft-spoken
person lacks team skills can be disproved by describing the big,
multi-functional teams the person has been assigned to and asked to lead.
Three: clarify real job needs,
demonstrate to the candidate that the assessment is professional, and that the
company has extremely high hiring standards.
Candidates – especially those with multiple opportunities – react negatively to
box-checking, overt selling, superficial assessments and interviewers who are
clueless when asked, “what’s the focus of the job, and what are some of the
challenges the person hired will face right away?”
Four: shift the decision to career
growth rather than compensation maximization.
Long ago I discovered that there was never enough money in the compensation
budget to attract top performers. So I gave up trying. Now I use the interview
to figure out if there is a big enough gap between actual job requirements and
what the candidate has already accomplished. If this “career gap” (e.g., bigger
team, bigger budget, better projects, more impact and exposure, faster growth,
etc.) is big enough, compensation becomes less important. If the gap is too
wide the candidate is too light for the job, and if the gap is too small, or
nonexistent, the job isn’t big enough.
Bottom line, if you have more than
enough top candidates to choose from, I guess an assessment process designed to
weed out the weak would work. But at what cost? As for me, I’d rather attract
and hire the best people available, not just hire the best people who apply. In
my mind, that's the real purpose of the interview.
___________________________________________
Lou Adler http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130729040420-15454-what-s-the-real-purpose-of-the-interview
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