Improving Your Hiring Hit Rate

6 tips

 
Relying 100% on interviewing is risky when hiring since the correlation between interviewing and a successful hire is generally found to be around 40%.
 
This article explores six ways to improve your success rate. 

This is frequently called a job and person specification and whilst this sounds obvious it is surprising just how often this step is overlooked, or inadequately undertaken, when hiring.  Too often we simply try to find someone like the person who was last in the job, not taking into account that when they were first appointed to the role they would have been quite different.  Also focusing on the current job holder can lead to a very narrow definition of the requirements, unnecessarily narrowing your talent pool to people who have the same industry experience rather than people with transferable skills. When producing your person specification for your role think about the role in terms of how you would like it done now, and in the future, rather than how it was done in the past.
 

Consider also those behaviours you see in top performers and the ones that you observe in poor performers (this gives you indicators of success and also contra-indicators which can be very helpful when selecting). Templating the requirements of the role also give you a basis for ongoing coaching and development.  It is unlikely that your new hire will be perfect in every aspect and being able to quickly put together a focused development plan will not only increase their effectiveness in the role but make them feel valued and invested in.  This impacts on motivation which in turn will increase effectiveness.

Interviewing is the most heavily relied upon selection tool and yet it is seldom carefully thought through and planned.  Using a structured, behavioural interview approach will have a significant positive impact on the predictive effectiveness of your interview.  Focus on past experience, not hypotheticals (whilst not perfect, past performance is a better predictor of future performance than anything else you can use in an interview). 
 
Plan what questions you will ask in order to determine the competencies that will lead to high performance in the job. Use the same questions for this part of all your interviews for a particular role; this will enable you to accurately (and as it happens, fairly) benchmark performance and enable good quality decisions to be made. You will want to have some additional questions that explore information specific to each candidate which will not be identical for each candidate, but keeping the core of behavioural interviews the same will strengthen your decision making.
 
To illustrate this a bit further. You should avoid questions that are leading or hypothetical.  Leading questions are ones where the answer is obvious, eg “would it be fair to say that …” or where the interviewer is seeking to be controversial “Surely you agree that all sales managers must be tough and demanding”. As an aside, in my experience you get a much better prediction of future performance if you create an interview environment which enables the candidate to be themselves and avoid game playing and being controversial. Hypothetical questions put people into an imaginary situation eg. “Imagine you were leading a project where the stakeholders disagreed about …”.  The problem with a question like this is that with a half decent interviewee you will get a perfect answer, after all when I imagine what I might do I am usually exceptional, it’s just when I do it that problems occur. 
 
If you have them talk you through a situation they experienced when leading a project with difficult stakeholders and ask questions in sufficient detail you will get to the truth of what actually happened, and from this, you can pull out data about their competencies and approach. This question might run something like
 
Q Can you tell me about a time when you were running a project and the stakeholders did not agree with each other, or were particularly challenging?
A   Yes, this would be …
Q   Tell me a bit more about this
A   …
Q   And what were you thinking?
Q   How did you feel about that?
Q   What happened next?
Q   What did you say then?

And so on

Consider using a suitable psychometric test to assist you in your selection.  In my experience, the earlier you use psychometrics the better.  Not only do they help you screen candidates much more time effectively, but they also give you insights into areas to explore further in interview. Also, if you leave them until after the interview you will find that the bias you have developed through the interview process will hinder your ability to accept the results which, frankly, means that you may as well not use the.
 
Personally, I would never hire without psychometrics. Yet so many people do.  Sometimes it is due to a lack of understanding of which tool to use and how to use it which I understand.  But other times it is because they represent a direct additional cost which makes no sense at all given the cost of the time involved in hiring and the extraordinarily high cost of hiring mistakes.

Obtaining informative workplace references is getting harder than it used to be due to so many employers refusing to provide references other than simply confirming job title, start and end dates.  But if you can talk to the previous manager (easier if hiring someone from a small company) this is well worth the time. 
 
You should also do other reference checks.  Check qualifications properly.  Two reasons, if you need the qualifications for the role and you are hiring based, at least in part, you should do you due diligence and make sure they are correct.  Also, even if you do not specifically require them for the role, which is more likely, it is simply good practice to validate the information you collect on a candidate.  There is so much evidence of embellishments on CVs/resumes and qualifications are one aspect that are easily validated. My recommendation is that you let people know up front, advising them that you always validate any educational qualifications stated by candidates which enables people to ensure that they are being accurate in their application.
 
You should also use social media to obtain information on the candidate. This can sometimes be controversial, but my advice is to always check their open online footprint.  Having said this, with social media, you need to evaluate the information correctly and in the light of its ‘social’ context but it is valuable information and should be obtained.  Just don’t make snap, inappropriate judgements based on the information.  It might make sense for your HR person to do the checking rather than their future line manager.

Assessments centres are time consuming, require a fairly high skill level by the hiring managers/team but are one of the best ways of predicting performance in potential hires.  Typically, they comprise a mix of activities, in a group setting with other candidates.  Activities include structured, behavioural interview, analytical/written exercises, group discussion, presentation, psychometrics, in-tray exercises and role play/scenarios.  Covering all these aspects, having first determined what makes a strong hire for the role, gives you much deeper and more accurate insights into the candidate, their suitability for the role and their longer term potential.
 
They take time and cost money and for single hires may not be practical. It is possible to outsource some of this to consulting houses who will run the assessments, exercises and conduct a detailed interview.  For senior hires this is worth considering since the cost of failure will more than justify the upfront investment in making the right hiring decision.  For roles that you hire often and in numbers it is worth developing an assessment approach which you can run periodically for these hires.  This could be graduate recruitment, customer services, sales, indeed any role where you are hiring more than one person at a time at least once a year.

This is also an area that is often overlooked but quite easy to prepare and use. It is a very powerful predictor of performance. It can be as simple as having the candidate prepare some work on Word, Excel, PowerPoint (assuming these are relevant to the role).  Or to do a bit of coding (for a computer coding role), produce some letters, do some mock phone calls and so on.  Essentially asking them to undertake a key part of the role that you are interviewing them for to establish both competence and approach. 
 
A more detailed approach would be to have the candidate come in to do a day, or possible a week of work experience at the end of which you interview them and decide whether to offer them a job or not.  If you are using more extended work experience as a hiring approach you should pay them for their time and recognise that this might not be possible for everyone and depending on your candidate pool you may have to adjust your plans to fit everyone.  One day is fairly possible for people who have a job (most people can get a day off work) whereas a week might be feasible for grads who are not working, or freelancers looking to enter the workplace.
 
When using these as part of your hiring process you need to think about what is required by the role and run a straightforward test. Yes, put in some challenges to check competence (an example would be that when testing Excel ask them to print a document having pre-set the print parameters to exclude part of it to see if they know about printing and can figure out how to fix the problem) but do not make it false and unfair (e.g. when doing a mock customer service call go to extremes of behaviour or ask lots of questions about something you know they can’t answer (one is fine to test their ability to handle this) but not lots abut the company, its products and services which will simply overwhelm them.  A good way to develop the tests and exercises is to involve the people who do the job already.

Lisette Howlett is author of The Right Hire: Attract And Retain The Best People, a licensed Sandler Trainer located in London Central, and she has fifteen years of global change leadership and business development experience. Lisette is called upon by business owners of small and medium-sized companies for strategy and business development. Her experience includes financial services, technology, pharma/biotech, manufacturing, IT, media, recruitment and professional services. Visit www.sandler.com/sandler-books/the-right-hire