John Chambers, the current CEO of Cisco Systems, said: “A world-class engineer with five peers can out-produce 200 regular engineers”.
What he meant was that when we select the right people, achieving great outcomes becomes easier. And the converse is also true: select the wrong people and it is exceedingly difficult to achieve much.
Recurring mistakes tend to be made in the interviewing process. A summary of the major pitfalls are:
- Lack of clarity on what is needed: we tend to focus too heavily on intelligence, experience and skills, and not have a crystal clear view of what the behaviours are that are essential for success on the job
- Following an unstructured process: not following a systematic process that leads to a good decision
- Trying to fill the post too quickly: conforming to organizational pressure to fill the position quickly
- Relying on intuition: making a selection decision based on gut feeling, i.e. evaluating people on appearance and first impressions
- The “halo effect”: making the mistake of hiring people in our own image
- Asking predictable, opinion-based questions: these are questions that tend to be too generic in nature and do not help uncover the behaviours and attributes required for the job
I recommend a 5-step method that greatly increases the odds of making a good decision. One of the steps (step 2 of 5) is the Telephone Interview, which many of you are familiar with – but here are some key tips for you to keep in mind with regards to this step:
- The goal to assess all short listed candidates, so that you may further reduce your list to the top candidates that you’ll request interviews
- Telephone interviews enable you to spend less time with unqualified candidates – once you have someone in a face-to-face interview; you pretty much need to spend 45 minutes with the person
- Another benefit is that it mitigates against gut judgements. A more objective first impression is possible
- Whilst the focus will be on the “threshold requirements”, i.e. skills and work experience; you will also want to spend a bit of time on personal attributes / behaviours critical to the role, like the “ability to build strong relationships”
- Plan to stick to approximately 25 minutes
- Consider asking questions like: “Can you relocate to Calgary? This job pays $60-70,000, is that within your range? Can you travel to Regina 5 days per month?” It is no use continuing the call if they answer “no” to any of these questions
Nic Tsangarakis, Principal
nict@kwelaleadership.com