How is your “batting average” on hiring? Well, I am a very highly qualified interviewer, but, I have made many bad hires. Yes, I preach good interviewing techniques, and yet I have managed to be wrong almost 30% of the time. In baseball, a 700 batting average would be outstanding (in fact probably impossible), but, in hiring, it is very expensive to have 30% of your hires fail.
That said, I suspect that if you were honest with yourself, you would probably find that you average is even worse. I believe that there are two primary reasons that you are having trouble making good hires, and I almost guarantee if you would just change two things in your interviews, you would increase your hiring success by as much as 30%.
Here are my tips:
- Stop talking, start listening – most people simply talk too much. Decide that you will speak less than 20% of the time in an interview. If you do this, you will be forced to ask questions, that cause the applicant to talk much longer. Make certain that you ask no simple questions that have, yes or no answers. Make them open-ended questions that encourage the applicant to talk to you. Then ask simple follow up questions.
- As questions that cause the applicant to tell you how they did things. Not what they accomplished, but rather how they got those results. Again ask lots of follow-up questions.
These two things will change your interviews completely. By not talking you will avoid interviewing yourself, and you will avoid giving the applicant the answers to your questions by their picking up on things that you believe in. You need to know what they think, not how they can repeat back to you what you think. By asking how questions; you will force the applicant to explain in greater detail what they did to achieve results. The fact that they can give you results data, is interesting, but not enough. You must know how they achieved those results, and what was unique about how they did it.
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