Thinking about hiring in a new way

Few things are as precious as hiring new employees. Hiring represents the chance to help the new person, improve the team and grow the organization. However, even though hiring is so important and special, we're not terribly good at it, and we certainly we don't spend enough time training people to be great hiring managers. To be clear, at many mid-sized or large firms there are thoughtful hiring processes in place, designed to gather tons of data through different activities, and tools so that hiring decisions can be as informed as possible.

Having said that, that's a minority of companies, and even in those cases the process can still be improved. And it's not that hard. Let me push you in the right direction with two value-added but inexpensive tactics that address common hiring mistakes. Let's start with one of the most important common mistakes in hiring, which is meeting candidates face-to-face too quickly. While it's true that face-to-face communication is typically the best option, here's an exception. What happens with most humans is that when we meet someone in an interview, we make snap judgments within seconds or minutes.

Due to cognitive biases and our own nerves, we often fail to effectively analyze the person and instead hone in on a few less than vital characteristics. The solution is simple. Save the in-person or even the Skype interviews for the final two to three candidates. Not the final ten or 20. And before you bring them in, screen them with a telephone call. On the phone, both people will experience significantly lower nerves. Have them elaborate at length about what's listed on their resume.

What you learn about them as communicators and what you learn about their real experience, will strongly inform your decision to bring them in. And it will make it easier to dive into a productive face-to-face interview, since you're merely continuing the conversation. Another odd problem with hiring is an over reliance on structure. For legal reasons, we need to follow a repeatable and legally defensible process. For decision making we need to deal with candidates consistently, right? kind of, what you really want is good data and when we put ourselves and a candidate through a highly structured, contrived process, what we're really seeing is an act.

Good candidates know this, and prepare for interviews, and deliver a great act. The solution is to use at least of a third of the interview for unstructured, problem-solving oriented conversations. If they're an engineer, gather three engineers and throw them around a table to get the candidate's views on an actual challenge they're facing. If you're hiring an HR professional, sit them down with a handful of other HR staffers, and chat about trends and talent management. Or maybe what it will take for HR to finally become a strategy-level player in the company.

Watch them interact and listen to the quality of their comments. You'll learn a lot about how they might fit in with the team in a short period of time. Hiring is vitally important, but we don't always get it right. Improve your hit rate by remembering this advice. Bring back the use of a good telephone interview and remove a little structure so you can watch your candidates interact with real people and real issues.