Hire Beyond the Interview
Have you regretted hiring an employee that appeared promising during the job interview?
If you have, then you’re in good company. Many of us in charge of hiring make decisions based on a positive interview, but we may regret it three months down the line.
There’s a lot of ground to cover on the topic of unstructured interviewing, so let’s get started.
Acknowledge Their Point of View
We need to acknowledge that the person in front of us is modifying their behavior to be what they think we want them to be.
This behavior is very similar to how someone acts when dating someone new. The person is “putting their best foot forward” based on their interpretation of the job, their impression of who you are, and what you want. The person is not doing this maliciously. They simply want the job.
Overcome Your Biases
You need to overcome all the biases that we all bring to the recruiting process. There are over 300 biases, but the top 13 to watch during an interview are the following:
- Confirmation bias
- Affect heuristics
- Expectation anchor
- Halo effect
- Horn effect
- Overconfidence bias
- Similarity attraction bias
- Illusory correlation
- Affinity bias
- Beauty bias
- Conformity bias
- Intuition
- Judgement bias
Structure Your Interviews
Our gut is our own worst enemy, and there are many research studies to back this. One such study, shows that our intuition is wrong more than 55% of the time. (Should You Trust Your Gut in Hiring? Arlene Hirsch, SHRM May 1, 2018)
The way to correct this is through structured interviews, which we’ll discuss in a future post. (Skill in Interviewing Reduces Confirmation Bias. Powell, Hughes-Scholes, & Sharman, 2012)
For now, can you think of why you thought your worst hire seemed to be the best hire during the interview process?
As always, feel free to contact me for help in streaming your hiring process or comment down below.