Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012. Its references to Google’s hiring practices, Facebook walls and Twitter reflect that time.
Small businesses lose quite a lot of money through hiring mistakes. When we hire someone and realize after three days or two weeks that they’re not quite what we were looking for, the cost isn’t only the days they worked and their final settlement. We also have to add the time we’ve lost on recruitment and training and, of course, the damage to our company’s image if we make this kind of mistake regularly and there are new faces in our business every month.
The truth is that, more and more, job applicants know the job interview routine inside out, so some arrive perfectly prepared to look like the ideal candidate and hide their flaws. We (usually) only get one interview to try to see that person’s qualities through a questionnaire and a little observation. Other employers hand hiring over to a specialist human resources firm, and even then, as we discussed in a previous article, they often fall back on certain questions that rarely get anywhere. Here are some tips on how to try to spot a bad worker, based on the approach of some large companies and a few ideas of our own.
1. Don’t let hiring depend on a single person.
We could learn from Google’s hiring system. At Google, a person isn’t hired by a department, and there’s no single manager in charge of hiring them. At Google, a person is hired by the whole Google workforce. In other words, the employees themselves decide whether that person has value as a professional and as a person, because at this company they’re a team, and as a team they don’t want a broken piece that can’t adapt to the environment they’ve spent time building.
See also: 10 things good bosses give their employees
For a small business this might waste even more time, so another common piece of advice is to have someone in the room during the interview whom you usually clash with when making decisions. Watching from the sidelines, that person will notice things that escape us. When the time comes, if you both get good vibes from the same candidate, they’re probably a good choice.
2. Always check references.
You’d be surprised how many workers list on their CVs companies they never worked for, positions they never held at a company, or simply companies that don’t exist and never did.
Personally, I’ve never been in favour of calling a company so that the candidate’s former boss can tell me how things went with them. Honestly, I don’t expect a sincere answer either way. I’d be the first to be unable to speak ill of a worker who’s no longer with me, however badly they did, and even more so if I don’t personally know the person calling me.
On the other hand, I also bear in mind that some bosses are very angry with certain workers who left them at a key moment for a better job offer and then, as salespeople for a competitor, did them a lot of damage. In some cases the call might be worth making, although as a general rule its outcome shouldn’t be decisive in tipping us towards hiring or rejecting the candidate.
3. What does the internet say about our candidate?
“We are what we share, we are what we retweet…” is a phrase I’ve been hearing a lot lately. And it’s true. In the interview, a well-prepared candidate will show us only what they want us to see. In a more relaxed setting, where they can be themselves, we can see them in a purer state.
Maybe they’re the kind of person who posts photos of their wild nights on their Facebook wall, or maybe that very serious person sitting in front of us spends their time insulting people on Twitter in a childish way, and so on. The internet will tell us something about that person. And if everything they do online is set to private so that only their closest circle can see it, that also tells us a lot about the candidate.
Note: some people let their hair down outside working hours and are 100% professional at work.
4. Make it easy, make it hard, and put them at ease.
Some interviewers seem to be conducting a police interrogation rather than an interview. There’s no need to create a tense atmosphere; quite the opposite, let the candidate relax. That said, don’t be left with any doubts: ask everything you want to ask so that it’s all clear, and even throw in some questions you know the candidate can’t possibly have prepared for, if only to see how they cope in a new situation, how they improvise and how they get out of an unexpected tight spot.
5. Other ideas for filtering candidates.
If you want to see how your candidates really behave, in a way you could never manage otherwise, go undercover among them. I recommend the experience, and I confess I’ve done it a couple of times. Be just another candidate: talk to them and bring up subjects they’d never feel comfortable discussing with a boss.
After 15 minutes with them, if you know how to “conduct the orchestra”, you’ll notice behaviour that tells you a lot about the candidates. You’ll be able to work out who has leadership skills, who’s the funny one, the clown, the shy one, and so on.
Another approach I’ve used in some selection processes for sales roles is to make the candidates compete with each other in a simple debate. For example, one argues for abortion and another against it, and they have to use arguments to try to convince me to come down for or against.
After all, a sale is a debate between customer and salesperson, full of constant give and take. Some raise their voices and say nothing, while others stay calm and manage to convince you. Why not play a game like this in a job interview for a sales position?
Further reading
Featured image: Blsamue, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
