How being a bad interviewer is the BIGGEST hiring mistake you'll make

I don’t know about you, but I always feel the most nervous when my candidate is being interviewed by a client. It’s not because I’m unsure about their suitability for the role or if they’re underprepared for the interview; I’m actually nervous because if the interviewer has no idea how to interview properly, things can go badly, and for all the wrong reasons.

How many times have you met a really strong candidate who has come out of the interview really positive but have been overlooked for that role because the interviewer has made a very surface level assessment? If you sense there’s no real substance behind the decision and that the interviewer hasn’t understood the real value of the talent– it’s time to push back.

Don’t assume that every interviewer is a good interviewer

It takes practice and training to be a really great interviewer. Too often, managers who are screening candidates have little training and development in this area and have no idea what types of questions to ask – and why. In Lou Adler’s The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired, he states . . .

"Hiring the wrong person due to an incorrect assessment, or not getting the job due to poor interviewing skills, is a waste of everyone’s time and effort, worsened by the lost opportunity the bad decision represents.”  

The cost of the hours taken from your (and the company’s) day, the hours (or day) the candidate took off work to attend the interview and the time the recruiter has spent searching for, consulting with and preparing the candidate all adds up. And it’s all completely wasted if the interviewer is essentially going about it all with a blindfold on.

Performance based interviewing

As the interviewer, your job is to quickly and accurately assess the candidate’s competency to do the work, their motivation to perform the work and their cultural fit with your organisation. There are no shortcuts here. The process needs to be thorough and decisions need to be made without emotions being involved. Ignore your first impressions of the candidate too because “more hiring mistakes are made in the first 30 minutes of a face-to-face interview than at any other time” – Lou Adler. Delay your decision on the candidate until the very end of the interview.

To be a great interviewer, you need to REALLY understand the job requirements in order to be able to assess the candidate’s motivation and ability to do that job. Talk to the people or team who do this job, discover the challenges of the role and find out what this person needs to be able to do really well in order to succeed. In performance based interviewing, your questioning techniques will enable you to discover the candidate’s ability to:

• Do the work and get it done on time, properly and consistently

• Work well within the team and have good emotional intelligence

• Understand and solve job related problems

• Stay motivated in that role

• Work well within the management style

• Mesh within the organisation’s environment
  

Most hiring mistakes can be avoided by simply understanding the role you’re hiring for and making fundamental changes to the way we question and assess candidates. As recruiters, it’s important that we push back if we feel a candidate hasn’t been interviewed properly and pull some strings to make sure the right decision is made.

1. Adler, Lou (2013) The Essential Guide for Hiring and Getting Hired, Workbench