It was just a few short years ago that I couldn’t find qualified candidates for a variety of open positions that we had for our research, advisory and training company based in Princeton, New Jersey (USA). Now, recruiters are calling me weekly to pitch candidates. The employment pendulum has swung 180 degrees in less than 24 months.
Today, employers have the benefit of being able to choose from among a large pool of candidates to interview for the relatively few positions that are vacant. However, the traditional interview process is not a reliable method for evaluating candidates. Brief interviews with candidates are comparable to first dates: the interviewee is inclined to say whatever he believes the prospective employer wants to hear.
Hire Specialists, Not Superstars
The first step in hiring is to make determine the exact mission you want your new hire to accomplish. You should review your business plan and determine which targets are unlikely to be met without recruiting additional talent. Then, you should match the goals spelled out in your business plan with the expectations that will be placed on your new hire. To increase the likelihood that a new hire will meet these expectations, you should only recruit executives that have the specific skills and backgrounds that are conducive to them meeting their objectives. You should be unambiguous in communicating to interviewees what you would expect them to accomplish and what the timelines for such goals would be. Once a new hire comes on board, he is actually more likely to execute according to your expectations since he will not have guess what is expected of him.
While it may seem counterintuitive, it is often damaging to hire superstars. Superstars are unfairly expected to have all of the answers at their immediate disposal. Conducting due diligence or asking probing questions would be an admission that these luminaries do not always have solutions to problems. Superstars would often rather conduct less research and make worse decisions than damage their ego by admitting that they are not omniscient. Highly accomplished people often worry more about acting smart than learning new things. Many highly intelligent people serve up plenty of ideas but deliver few tangible results. There is a big difference between having great credentials and being a great contributor. Further, many superstars are more concerned about using their current positions to catapult into other opportunities in their career paths than to make a solid contribution to their existing employer.
Many companies that cultivated star talent have crashed. Examples include Enron, Arthur Anderson, and Drexel Burnham Lambert. Nick Leeson, a young trader, single-handedly caused Barings Bank to collapse. Not only was Barings Bank acquired for a symbolic ₤1 by ING but ING even dropped the Barings name after one year as the new Dutch owners believed that the Barings name was a liability. As noted author Malcolm Gladwell pointed out “the organizations that are most successful are the ones where the system is the star.” These are typically organizations that have built-in redundancies and are not overly reliant on a few key employees.
Overweight Intelligence
You should make a serious effort to ascertain the raw intelligence that a candidate brings to the table. Intelligence is the single most telling variable in determining an executive’s success. It is intelligence that will equip an executive to make decisions when no precedents exist. It is intelligence that can maximize opportunity and avoid obstacles. It is intelligence that enables an executive to defuse a tense situation. It is intelligence that will enable superiors to effectively delegate authority and responsibility.
The best way to evaluate an executive’s intelligence is to ask them to recommend a solution to a problem that the business confronts. The articulation of the recommendation will reveal their thought process and therefore their strengths and weaknesses. Research shows that an aptitude test predicts performance just as well as a structured interview. (Interestingly, it is more important that executives can express themselves verbally than in writing. Crises require immediate response which can only be delivered through verbal communication. You can’t spend an afternoon writing a memo to address a crisis. Also, verbal communication can better motivate the troops than memos and communiqués.)
Another method for sussing out a candidate’s intelligence is to ask them brain teasers. It is not the answers that are of importance during these exercises but rather the thinking processes that the candidate brings to bear.
Enhancing the Interviewing Process
Now that you know to recruit specialists, seek highly intelligent candidates and avoid superstars, I would like to present you with a few suggestions for adopting a more rigorous interviewing processes.
- Interviewers should listen to what candidates are saying far more than they should speak. Many interviewers try to sell the prospect on accepting the position before they have determined if the candidate is truly suitable for the job. It is natural for people to believe that what they say sounds intelligent. Thus, interviewers who speak too much believe that the interview went well despite their inadequately vetting the candidate.
- When asking open-ended questions—such as “What are your long-term career goals?” or “How would you describe your greatest strengths and weaknesses?”—make sure that you ask these questions before you provide the candidate with insight into the position or background on the company. Doing so will eliminate the possibility of the candidate crafting his responses to the contours of the opportunity.
- In interviews, managers need to focus on specific past experiences and job-related hypothetical scenarios. The idea is to focus on relevant data and squelch any questions that invite the candidate to predict the future, reconstruct the past, or ponder life’s big questions. According to research we have reviewed, one of the most revealing questions to ask a candidate is “What do you know about our company?” Any serious candidate would have conducted significant research about a company that they proclaim to wish to work for. Also, candidates cannot bluff when answering this question.
- When interviewing a potential employee ask yourself: Where is the logic in this applicant’s career path? Is the job a natural progression or is the applicant just looking for an income? If the applicant is just looking for an income, rewarding him with a lavish compensation package will not increase his loyalty. When people join a company for money, they will leave the company for money.
- According to extensive research conducted by Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria, one of the most telling signs of a candidate’s motivation is how far they lean forward during the interview.
- Employers should take measures to ensure that they do not fall victim to the Availability Bias which holds that people base their judgments on information that is either the most recent or the most emotionally vivid in their minds. Thus, candidates that interview last for a particular position often benefit from the Availability Bias. Companies should structure their interview series in such a way that no candidate is the last interviewee for all of the company’s interviewers.
- Here are a few tips for checking references. First, during the interview with the candidate stress the fact that you will (not may) confer with their references. The result is likely to be that the candidate will be more honest during the interview since he knows that his contentions will be verified. Secondly, you must remember that past employers who make uncomplimentary statements about former employees put themselves in legal vulnerability. With these legal constraints in mind, one tactic is to place calls to former employers when you suspect that the reference is not available to speak such as before working hours or during lunchtime. You should leave a message stating that you are seeking a reference. This tactic requires the former employer to make a special effort to speak positively on behalf of the candidate. If the reference does not return the message, he has still spoken volumes about his assessment of the candidate.
Final Thoughts
There are two additional points I would like to make about hiring. First, is the issue of balanced selection which originates from the disciplines of genetics and psychology. Balanced selection means that even though a particular trait in a candidate may be helpful in some cases, it can be damaging when too many people in a division have it. For instance, if a marketing department has an abundance of people on staff who are inclined to develop edgy or risky marketing campaigns, there is danger in hiring more people with similar propensities to take risks. The marketing department could be better served by hiring marketing executives with proclivities to develop more mainstream or traditional marketing campaigns.
The second issue relates to the formula for determining behavior. Many executives hold that the sole predictor of one’s behavior is resident in the personality traits specific to the individual in question. They completely disregard of the impact of situational forces. However, the equation for predicting one’s behavior is individual traits x given situation. Indeed, the Fundamental Attribution Error holds that when making judgments, we tend to over-attribute personal factors and under-attribute situational forces. Thus, no matter how rigorously you scrutinize candidates, you must realize that their behavior—and effectiveness—will be influenced by the environment in which they work.