INTERVIEWING REFRESHER PROGRAM - SHOW ME YOU CAN DO THE WORK

This article continues our series digging deep into interviewing based on the One Hour Complimentary Interviewing Refresher Program I’ve been doing for Vistage Groups over the last 3 months. I’ve now done this program over 40 times in just the last 3 months for Vistage Groups. This is a sub-component of our larger 5-step process for raising hiring accuracy and success called the Success Factor Methodology, which we describe in great depth through our book, You’re NOT the Person I Hired. I facilitate the larger program in a 3 hour in-person workshop (none of which are being done now or in the foreseeable future), for which I’ve done over 1200 presentations with over 30,000 CEOs/Executives in the last 20 years.

Most interviews fail to determine whether a candidate can achieve your desired outcomes, results, KPIs, and metrics because the interview is artificial. You’re sitting across from each other talking about the work, not observing the candidate actually do the work. If you want to significantly raise interviewing accuracy, then you must make the interview resemble real work.

If you go to our website, IMPACTHIRINGSOLUTIONS.com, you’ll see our tag line of 20 plus years in the upper righthand corner: PUT THE CANDIDATE IN THE JOB BEFORE YOU HIRE THEM. The best technique you have is to hire people on a temp-to-perm basis. Over the next few years, you may be seeing quite a few people who are unemployed answering your ads on ZipRecruiter or Indeed - Don’t hire them initially. Do temp-to-perm. Try them on like shopping for jeans at the department store – give it a week, a month, or a few months. If you don’t like them, let them go, and start over. No risk or liability involved if you bring aboard an underperformer or toxic person.

The problem occurs when you’re attempting to hire someone who already has a job. They cannot afford to do temp-to-perm with you. The big question becomes how do we simulate a temp-to-perm experience for a working candidate? The solution is through making 1/3 of your interview a SHOW ME evaluation vs. a TELL ME discussion. Let’s break this down for three different levels of employees.

First, is the front-line, minimum wage worker in your organization. These might include clerks, trade work like nailing, hammering, digging, soldering, or welding, truck drivers, technicians, and warehouse/ manufacturing plant associates. At this level, every job has 3-4 core skills that lead to success. We want to identify the skill and determine what SHOW ME physical (not written) test would illustrate performance of that application of the skill in your environment at a success level (not minimum or average or mediocre) of what a top quartile person would do in a comparable role in a comparable organization.

If you are hiring someone for electronics repair/development and they must have a certain skill for soldering, put them on the bench and make them solder. You’re hiring a junior accountant or bookkeeper, and one of the monthly expectations is the ability to accurately complete a bank reconciliation within X period of time. Put them in front of excel, give them your last bank statement, and stand over their shoulder while they reconcile it. You’re hiring a CNC operator that will be operating your half-million-dollar lathe cutting into titanium rods. Put them in front of the lathe and make them do the numerical control programming for the drilling/cutting operation instead of talking about doing the work.

Don’t accept the candidate’s claims of competency around skills – PHYSICALLY TEST for each skill. Remember from one of my previous blog articles that at least 100 percent of all candidates lie, embellish, or exaggerate. One technique to eliminate this overstatement of their abilities is to physically test for all skills.

Next level job – this is the professional role. These positions include accountants, financial analysts, marketing coordinators, architects, project managers, programmers, developers, and supply chain analysts. These roles are typically professional jobs, requiring a 4-year degree with continuing education or certification. The majority of work in these roles is problem-solving and analysis. These candidates are assigned problems to overcome, tackle, resolve, knock down, and eliminate. They must analyze the situation, develop recommendations, put together action plans, sometimes implement the action plans, and make a variety of assumptions in their analysis or modeling.

The SHOW ME element for this level job is case-studies, role-plays, working interviews, and white-boarding. If the interview is in person, hand the pen to the candidate and send them to the white board. In Zoom, bring up the white board app. Have the candidate take you step-by-step through similar projects to what they would be working on in your organization.

What was the project, how long did it last, who was on the team, what was their role, what type of analysis did they do, what recommendations did they develop, what assumptions did they make? Did they play a role in the implementation of the recommendations? What worked, what required a mid-course correction, and what didn’t work? Then take a recent project within your organization that was completed, but you might have assigned it to this candidate had they been working for you at that time. Ask them how they would go about structuring the project, what data they would need, what problems they might run into, what they’ve worked on that seems similar – real time problem solving together?

The final level is the manager or executive. These roles should have specific deliverables tied to company objectives, such as reducing costs, improving efficiency, implementing process improvements, increasing customer or employee engagement/satisfaction, improving revenue, margin, or profit. For example, if you were hiring a quality manager, one of your deliverables might be to implement a new quality process to improve quality on finished goods from 92% to 96% within 12 months. You would ask the candidate to prepare a Powerpoint presentation of how they would go about achieving this result.

The candidate would come in and present for their final interview in front of a committee of management team members, trusted advisors, fellow Vistage/CEO members, your chair/facilitator. Maybe they present for 30-45 minutes, and then as a group you rip it apart. This is the real world – presenting/pitching internally, to customers, and in the supply chain. Taking criticism or objections, and responding to major business issues in an appropriate, calm, professional manner is a core element of whether a manager/executive will succeed in their job. It’s a radically different approach than sitting across the desk asking the 20 standard, stupid, inane, canned interview questions.

We just reviewed 3 different methods to make the interview resemble real work based on the level of the job. For each role, 1/3 of your interview should be a SHOW ME component instead of TELL ME. I can guarantee that the closer you make the interview to what it’s like to actually do the work, the higher your accuracy and success will be in hiring candidates who deliver on your expectations, results, outcomes, metrics, and KPIs.