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 also 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. (Click here to request a sample of the Performance-based Interview we recommend that meets these criteria, including a white paper by a top labor attorney from Littler Mendelson validating its use. Here’s the full version if you don’t want to wait.)
• 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 a description of the work the person actually needs to do on the job. Here are some “how to” prepare performance-based job description articles.)
• A formal rating and assessment scale: specific guidance is needed to convert answers into some type of quantitative performance-based assessment (request sample).

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?” Conducting an in-depth performance-based interview using the Most Significant Accomplishment question eliminates these concerns. This structured approach not only clarifies real job expectations (the #1 driver of performance and job satisfaction), but also ensures the candidate fully appreciates the importance of the job, that he or she was properly evaluated, and that the company has high hiring standards.

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.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the creator of Performance-based Hiring and the author of the Amazon Top 10 business best-seller, Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007). His new book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, (Workbench, 2013) has recently been published. Feel free to join Lou's new LinkedIn group and his Wisdom About Work series on Faceback.