Interviewing, A Talent Acquisition or A Talent Management Tool?

Friday, September 13, 2013

 

Most organizations would agree that interviewing job applicants is important to the overall success of the business operations of their company.  Likewise, most managers and supervisors would argue interviewing is an essential component of their leadership roles within the organization.  Where disagreement is most likely to occur is in the discussion of the best interviewing method used to select the top job candidate.

 

While not part of the actual interview technique, interviewer preparation, avoiding illegal questions, and the interview environment are important aspects of the overall candidate selection process.  Lack of interviewer preparedness sends a strong negative message to the candidate about both the interviewer and organization.  Even today, there are examples of organizations straying into areas of questioning which should be avoided, and suffering the outcomes.  It is amazing to see some of the locations in which job interviews are held.

 

The purpose of the interview is oblivious; identify the top candidate so the organization can extend an offer, fill a vacancy, and move on to serving its internal and/or external customers.  But how does a hiring manager distill down to that top candidate?  After all, candidates are not homogeneous single dimensional entities.  The highest level of technical skills will not overcome a shortfall of interpersonal communications skills in a role requiring constant interaction, cooperation, and collaboration with others.

 

Candidate interviewing techniques are as varied as the organizations utilizing them, however, they can be classified in two general categories: non-behavioral and behavioral.

 

Non-behavioral interviewing techniques are often lists of yes and no or short answer questions which can be visualized as a check-off list.  Answering “Yes”, to “Do you know how to use Excel?” provides the interviewer with no depth as to knowledge or skill level the candidate has in “using” the tool.  “Yes”, does not tell us anything about the degree of sophistication of the candidate’s experience or the environment in which Excel was used.

 

Behavioral interviewing techniques attempt to dig deep down into the candidate’s past experience.  It gets at the what, when, where, why, and how of how they performed their work and under what conditions.  By restating the Excel question to, “Tell me about the most difficult assignment you ever had using Excel?”, the interviewer can expand into add-on questions.  One possible add-on question might include: “What made this assignment so difficult?”.  From this line of questioning, the interviewer might learn about conflicts with other work assignments, availability of other team resources, time constraints, and whether or not the assignment was successfully completed.

 

No interviewing technique is perfect.  Candidates have been known to “pull one over” on a single interviewer.  When behavioral interviewing is used with multiple interviewers, each focused on a different aspect of the position, it becomes less likely that a bottom rung applicant will be mistake for a top candidate.  Interviewing is both time consuming and expensive.  However, selecting the wrong candidate may prove to be even more time consuming and more expensive.