Six Best Practices for Conducting a Team Interview!

As we’ve all experienced the dynamics of today’s candidate marketplace makes it easy for a hiring decision to turn into a hiring mistake – candidates not vetted to achieve the results considered essential to define hiring success; candidates not motivated to overcome the obstacles they might encounter as they attempt to achieve those results.

Small to mid sized employers, in particular, are taking a second look at their hiring process. Many are adding the “team interview” to their vetting process.

We think this is a positive trend for a number of reasons:? ?

• It involves the team in the hiring decision, giving them a say in who they work with. It also expands their awareness of the roles on the team and how they interrelate with each other.? ?
• It ensures that multiple perspectives and insights are considered when making the hiring decision, increasing the amount of information that is available before the hiring decision is made. ??
• It provides a quick and easy way to get everyone on board with respect to the expectations they have about how the new employee will perform and how their performance will be evaluated once hired. In the big picture it affirms a RESULTS FOCUSED performance culture.?? ??

But not all “team interviews” are alike. This week’s featured blog describes a framework for “team interviews” in the context of our RESULTS FOCUSED hiring process.?We believe there are some “best practices” for interviewing that we don’t want to get lost in a team interview setting.? ?

We’ll start with the principles that underlay the structure of a team interview that describes both the what’s and why’s of what we consider “best practices.” ?

Best Practice #1 – Keep the Hiring Manager in Charge!

Keep in mind that involving the team isn’t a way to abdicate from the hiring manager’s responsibility to hire the right employee.?That’s a big part of their job, how they contribute to the success of an organization. While it might seem like a democratic process to allow each participant to bring their own set of questions to a team interview and “do their thing”, if we compromise the accountability of the hiring manager to organize and direct the team interview, we’ve actually opened ourselves up to hiring mistakes. The interview can quickly turn into a hodge podge of questions and less than helpful candidate answers without a specific goal or purpose.?

An open, unstructured team interview also invites all kinds of “selection biases” to creep into the hiring decision. The candidate’s ability to handle freewheeling interpersonal interactions is what will stand out for most members of the team; input is often based on each participants tendency to “like” the way some candidates deal with this kind of scenario, and not others, generating input that is less than helpful to predict which candidate is most likely to achieve the required RESULTS.?

Bottom-line, unstructured team interviews without a defined path or purpose will almost always come up short in their ability to collect evidence about whether or not the candidate has the talent and motivation to deliver the KEY RESULTS the team needs.?

Keeping the hiring manager in charge of the meeting – the person responsible to select the topics to be discussed, asking questions designed to open up those topics and asking the panelists to probe more deeply into the candidate’s responses, is a much more focused and orderly way to assess a candidate’s abilities (and motivations) to achieve what they need to achieve to be considered a successful hire.?

Best Practice #2 – Prep the team to be aware of what you want to get accomplished in the team interview…

….which is not about “getting to know” a candidate, or determining whether or not the team “likes” one candidate more than another. The purpose of the team interview, like all interviews, is to gather evidence about each candidate’s abilities and motivations to deliver the results the team needs them to deliver.?A lot of interview teams are confused on this point and waste valuable interview time finding out what a candidate likes to do after work, rather than discussing how the candidate might help them solve a long-standing problem or improve the team’s overall level of performance.?

A team interview is a perfect time for the candidate to get to know the team and the team to get to know the candidate, but it needs to be in the context of their potential contribution to the team – the most important element in the hiring decision. That’s what allows a team interview to avoid BIAS BASED HIRING – a process set up to avoid the biases that creep in when the focus of the vetting isn’t on predicting performance.

We recommend that going into a team interview setting, each participant be given a list of what the employee is expected to accomplish once hired, a list of the topics that will be covered, and come prepared to dig into the candidate’s answers to ensure they fully understand the candidate’s past experience, abilities and likely motivators that are relevant to what they will be asked to do once hired.?

We think all interviews, including team interviews, should be considered opportunities to collect EVIDENCE that a candidate will be successful once hired.

Best Practice #3 – The team interview is structured/ organized to reveal information relevant to on the job performance!

Team interviews need to be organized to reveal all the components of a candidate’s work history that are relevant to the work and the work environment they will face once hired.?

• Why did they take each job in their work history??
• Why did they leave that job?? ?
• What did they like (or not like) about the work content? The work environment?? ??
• What unique challenges did they face??
• What results of achievements did they have that are directly relevant to the problems or achievements they will encounter if hired??
• What have they learned? How might they apply what they’ve learned??

Being open about and engaging a candidate in how they might address some of the challenges they will face post hire is a way to attract the right high talent candidates to a potential job offer, keeping in mind that high potential candidates love challenges and prefer to know what those challenges are prior to hire.

Best Practice #4.?Use a structured scorecard to allow each participant to rate candidates on the likelihood they will achieve the key results expected of the candidate post hire…

…so that in a group setting, each participant has a chance to share their rating and describe the reasons for those ratings.

Ultimately the hiring decision comes down to the decision maker’s prediction of a candidate’s likelihood of achieving the results they are expected to achieve post hire. Using a scorecard to ask each participant to make that prediction in an organized way and talk about the evidence they gathered during their interview from their unique perspective invites a healthy discussion of who to hire. It also expands the range of perspectives that can be considered by the hiring manager when making their hiring decision, minimizing opportunities for surprises (or error) post hire.?

Best Practice #5.?Limit the number of candidates invited to participate in a team interview. ?

One of the causes of many hiring mistakes is process fatigue.?And that fatigue can set in for both the hiring manager and the team.?The team interview format we’ve been describing assumes that candidates will have already been carefully screened and vetted to have the base skills, knowledge, and experience necessary to do the job prior to the team interview.?The team then takes on the role of helping the hiring manager decide which of the candidates they are considering is best suited to deliver the results needed.?

We recommend that hiring teams consider no more than 3 candidates.?We’ve seen very successful hiring projects end with only one candidate going to the hiring team.? ??

Best Practice #6, Never short cut the pre recruit homework needed to clearly identify the key results a candidate must achieve to be considered a successful hire.?

This homework can be done by a hiring manager acting on the basis of other’s input or by involving the hiring team to collaborate early in the process to establish those key results.?Pre-recruit homework is where a lot of the work is done to prevent hiring mistakes and has its own set of “best practices’ – too many to go into any depth here.?

In summary…the team interview can be a very valuable component of any hiring process, but it has to be organized in a way to keep the interview focused on gathering up information most relevant to on the job performance. It keeps bias out of the hiring process by ensuring that the candidates hired are the candidates most likely to achieve the results expected of a high quality hire. While no step in a hiring process can eliminate all hiring errors, the team interview can significantly improve an organization’s hiring outcomes.