What Does It Take to Interview and Find Just the Right New Hire?

The hiring process can be tedious, time consuming and ineffective…both for the candidates and for the interviewers. But hiring right is well worth your investment. Just consider the wasted time and resources when you hire poorly and you’re faced with recruiting, interviewing, onboarding and training all over again!

The objective of interviewing should be to make job offers only to candidates who are a strong match for the open job, the potential career path and the corporate culture.

Follow these basic steps from proven interviewing skills training, one-by-one, to be sure you hire the best talent for your business strategy and the best attitude for your organizational culture.

Here is our recommended hiring and interviewing process based upon over two decades of experience:

1. Define the ideal candidate in terms of behavioral competencies, personality and potential.
2. Screen applicant resumes and sift through for only those candidates who fit the profile on paper.
3. Interview those candidates on the phone (and 80 to 90% will likely be crossed off your list).
4. Put the remaining 10 to 20% through assessments for the specific must-have skills that matter most.
5. Spend a full half-day with the top 5% who survive in interviews with a representative mix of co-workers, managers and executives depending upon their potential role.
6. Compare notes from the various interviewing groups to find out what they liked and what concerns remain.

Not done yet.

1. Schedule follow-up interviews with each candidate by two company employees (one of whom focuses on body language only for non-verbal clues to their true attitudes).
2. Conduct exhaustive reference checks.
3. Schedule the few who make it this far to come to work for an onsite “scenario test” day.

If they pass this last hurdle, they get the prize…a job offer.

If this seems like too lengthy of an interview process, think about some recent research from Glassdoor by Dr. Andrew Chamberlain and Ayal Chen-Zion in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and France.  They found that more challenging job interviews correlate to higher employee satisfaction across all six countries.  According to their data, the optimal interview difficulty to achieve the highest employee satisfaction is 4 out of 5 on a five-point scale.

So, before you remove rigor from your interviewing process, make sure that the process is difficult enough to adequately determine the level of “employee/employer match” without going overboard.

Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/behavior-based-interviewing-training/