How To Hire Talent: Effective Alternatives to Traditional Interviews

In the last two parts of this article, we showed why interviews, as they are usually conducted, are useless for making hiring decisions.

In fact, interviews are no better than tarot card reading, astrology, or handwriting analysis for picking the right candidate. Unstructured interviews are poor predictors of on-the-job performance.

First thing first. The best method for hiring high-performing candidates is to ensure that you have a good pool of candidates to select from. If every candidate is a good choice, hiring managers cannot go wrong in their final selections.

There are many research-backed methods for ensuring a good pool. One of them is to take referrals from your high-performing employees. Research shows that, on average, referred candidates perform better than those hired from general pools in terms of both loyalty and effort. However, paying employees for referrals is not a good idea. They should be motivated by the idea of strengthening the organization by bringing in strong candidates.

Social psychologist Ron Friedman shows how companies like Google use unconventional advertisements to attract candidates who share their values and traits. For instance, one of their ads simply read (first 10 digit prime found in consecutive digits of e).com.

The correct answer (www.7427466391.com) took users to another complex puzzle, whose winners are then taken to the hiring page.

Indeed, research unequivocally supports the use of simple intelligence tests over interviews. After a comprehensive review of eighty-?ve years of personnel selection research, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter concluded that general mental ability was the most reliable predictor of on-the-job success, except for low-skilled jobs.

Job-knowledge tests will also work equally well. Another method to capture a pool of good candidates is to obtain peer ratings of past performance.

Once you have a pool of good candidates, you can move to other measures that substitute for unstructured interviews.

Work Samples

In this method, the hiring company examines a sample of the candidate's work. It can be samples from past performance, for example, portfolios of work done by the candidate. However, as organizational psychologist Adam Grant points out, viewing the performance outcomes does not give any insight into the journey taken by the candidates. For example, the same outcome can be produced by two different candidates pursuing entirely different paths and encountering entirely different challenges.

So, researchers suggest asking candidates for a real-time sample of work. You could ask the candidates to solve a typical problem you face at work. A wealth of research supports the value of real-time work samples in predicting who ends up performing well at work. For example, HopeLab, a healthcare company, gives potential employees a three-week consulting contract. The exact nature of the assignment will depend on the position and the skill sets relevant to that position.

Structured Interviews

If you cannot do away with interviews, then making them structured, just like a checklist, can make them effective, research suggests. Structured interviews replace casual conversations, overall evaluations either by a single interviewer or a group, and decision-making by consensus among the interviewers. A structured interview is a disciplined method of collecting predefined data. The skills to be assessed for each position are defined ahead of time, and questions to be asked for each skill are scripted in advance. The same questions will be asked of every candidate being interviewed. The interviewers are trained to ask those questions and rate the answers on an established scale. There are no subjective judgments and no chit-chats.

For example, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, while being employed as a psychologist with the Israel Defense Forces, designed an interview regimen to recruit soldiers for combat duty. He asked the interviewers to assess each candidate on 6 traits, including ‘responsibility,’ ‘sociability’, and ‘masculine pride,’ using the set of questions he supplied and using the scale he suggested. A computer then calculated the final scores using a formula Kahneman devised giving appropriate weightage to the trait scores. This means that the interviewers did not know who was finally selected. IDF found that the final scores were significantly more closely matched to the recruited candidates' actual combat-duty performance than previous interview scores.

There are normally two types of questions that can be used in a structured interview- behavioral response questions and situational judgment questions. In the former, questions center around how a particular situation was handled by the candidate:

“Tell us about a significant change that you implemented in your organization. How did you go about doing this?”

“Share with us any instance of your having a conflict with your manager. How did you go about resolving it?”

In situational judgment, the candidate is invited to share how they will handle a hypothetical situation in the future:

“You and your peer in the organization are competing with each other for the same customer’s pie. How will you handle this situation?”

“You are being appointed to head an important overseas mission. What are your immediate priorities?”

Please note that these questions are not asked in a seat-of-the-pants manner, impromptu. The questions are to be crafted in advance, depending on the trait being evaluated, and the same questions are asked irrespective of who the interviewer is.

Interviewers are asked to note down the answers then and there so that their memory is not swayed by undue psychological influences. For example, people are more likely to remember what transpired at the beginning and at the end of an interaction. The interviewers are also trained to avoid asking irrelevant questions and minimize the use of spontaneous follow-up questions. Such questions open up the interview to biases once again, cautions another social psychologist David G. Myers.

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‘Experience Sample’ interactions

In this method, a candidate is taken through some real-life experiences other than the interview setting. While a candidate has to ace the one-to-one interview process, whatever the type, working life demands that people be comfortable in a variety of settings, including interacting with groups and informal situations such as dinner parties. For example, management consulting firm Grant Thornton evaluates applicants not just in the office but over a cooking class after traditional interviews are through. It is because, as Friedman points out, the more settings you expose the candidate to, the more accurate your assessment of the person’s behavior can be.

Decision Making

Daniel Kahneman is clear that decision-making regarding hiring shall not be done by the same people who are interviewing. The interviewers are only allowed to share with you their scores on the questionnaire they have used in the interview. In fact, they are also not allowed to cross-check their own ratings with those of other interviewers. It is now up to the decision-maker to aggregate the scores and, if required, seek clarifications individually and only later in a group setting, if at all this is warranted.

Setting people to win

Interviews can be set up for people to win. Grant quotes the example of therapist Gil Winch, who devised an interview program that goes the extra mile to bring out the best in people instead of intimidating and stressing people to bring out their worst. Winch asks the candidates to fill in a questionnaire about their passions before they come for the interview and then ensures that the interviewers take them around the office, offering them drinks and making every effort to make them not only comfortable but also help them shine their light during the interaction.

This is then followed by asking the candidates to demonstrate their strengths. For example, if you say you are great at persuasion, you are asked to demonstrate it live. The company knows that people rarely succeed in one attempt, hence candidates are given multiple attempts to demonstrate their skill, including opportunity to ask for help. Instead of the interviewers rating the candidate based on this ‘work sample’, the candidate is asked to rate themselves. And if they are not happy with the experience, their suggestions are taken as to how the company can get to know them better. Winch’s company, Call Yachol, a call center staffed entirely with people with disabilities, has shattered many industry benchmarks for performance, beating their counterparts without any disabilities.

Call Yachol, incidentally, means ‘able to do anything’.

Real recruiters help figure out what people do well when they are at their best and then go on to ensure that their organization keeps them at their best.

(This is a modified excerpt from a chapter in my book, The Last Skill: The Science of achieving success and a fulfilling life with skills that matter.)

This is the third and last part of the article on the subject of interviews. Please do read the previous two parts.

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