The problem is that not everyone who responds to your company’s job post is going to be one.
How can you determine which applicants might truly shine working for your company?
Here are some ideas on how you can more easily separate the brilliant leaders from a group of average joes.
You know the drill. The candidates come into a conference room, wearing the only nice set of clothing they own and that they only wear to interviews (and weddings and funerals). You and make some of your senior people ask a set of broad questions along the lines of, “Why do you want to work here?” and, “Tell us about yourself,” and, “What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced and how did you overcome it?”
Then you and your staff pick someone using criteria that might as well have been based on who was wearing the nicest outfit as the answers to any of these standard interview questions.
Studies show that these kinds of interviews not only are a waste of time in determining an applicant’s job suitability but can actually impair your ability to find the right people. The Boston Globe reports that as much as we might feel we are good judges of character, studies since the 1980s show that “an unstructured interview—a changeable series of questions that elicits a somewhat random set of information—can cloud our judgment. Whatever your gut tells you about that job candidate you interviewed, the researchers say, you shouldn’t listen.”
Test Ability With a Real Work Sample
Laszlo Block, a Google senior vice president of People Operations (leave it to Google to come up with a cooler term for HR), cites a study that analyzed 85 years of research on various assessments to figure out which were the best predictors of on-the-job performance. The most effective tool was a work sample in which applicants had to demonstrate they can do something similar to that which they will actually have to do as part of their job.
Block notes that even this won’t tell you the whole story about an employee’s likely future job performance as it doesn’t measure the person’s ability to collaborate, adapt to uncertainty and learn. These, among other characteristics, can predict not only job performance but also how well a person will fit with your company culture.
Let Others Conduct the Interview
Google is famous for its data-driven job interviewing process, what Block describes as a combination of structured interviews and multiple assessments keyed to measure a prospective employee’s aptitude for a specific job role. It also disposes with the “brain teasers” that Google was once famous for.
In a New York Times interview, Block calls these brainteasers, “a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan?...They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
Another key component that differs from the traditional interview: using panels of employees who are not going to be the applicant’s direct supervisor or peers to conduct the selection process. The Washington Post reports that this removes the likelihood of subjectivity (e.g., the hiring manager won’t lean towards a friend of a friend who is owed a favor). Google’s analytics also show that conducting multiple follow-up interviews doesn’t increase confidence in employee suitability for a position.
Consequently, it’s capped the number of interviews it’ll put a candidate through. Some positions may require a faster interview process than others, but the company uses no more than four interview sessions and on average the entire process should take no more than 45 days.
Source by: business
No comments:
Post a Comment