by Sheila Barr, Director, Barr Performance Coaching
It’s important that you begin by reviewing the balance of skills and competencies in your team to determine what is needed in the team as a whole. Many managers focus on the long-established list of skills and competencies required for the role, which may be out of date, rather than looking at the current team needs and the needs of the wider organisation.
Once you have identified the key skills and competencies needed, write the job description clearly in a manner that will be compelling to potential candidates.
Time For the Interview
Attitude, Attitude, Attitude!
You can teach people about your processes, products and services, but having a positive disposition is very difficult to teach. You can’t teach people to want to smile or to want to be warm and welcoming. You can’t teach someone to want to serve the customer in a way that will leave a positive, lasting impression; so it is imperative to hire individuals with an optimistic positive attitude, and a personality and working style that suits the role. This might mean a disposition to work collaboratively with others on the team, or on their own initiative, if appropriate – or both!
Positive attitude can be infectious in a team, but similarly a negative attitude can have a destructive impact on team morale. Your questions in the interview should focus on getting an understanding of the attitude the candidate will bring to the team. Is there evidence from their CV, or in their responses to questions, that they will contribute positively as opposed to always relying on direction from others?
Aim High
Do not be tempted into hiring somebody on the basis of potential alone, as there is always a risk that the potential may not be fulfilled or it may take a long time before the individual reaches their potential. Your benchmark should be to hire someone that is better than you! Someone who will raise the performance of the team. You should be looking for evidence of good performance in the competencies that you have deemed necessary in the role. The best indicator of good performance in the future is good performance in the past!
Your success as the hiring manager will be heavily dependent upon the calibre of the individual you hire. If you hire a low performing individual, it will reflect poorly on you as the hiring manager.
Do Not Hire Yourself
As humans, we are positively disposed to individuals who share our likes/dislikes and have similar views on life. We find it reaffirming of our own position, and as a result we are attracted to hiring mirror images of ourselves.
If you think about organisations you have either worked for or worked with there is probably a set of characteristics that are common to most of the individuals who work there. That is no accident: companies try to recruit people who they think will fit in with the culture of the organisation, and as humans we have a habit of hiring ourselves (i.e. people who share our views and perspective). Over time, a cohort of like-minded individuals is recruited into the company which can give rise to a lack of diversity of thought.
Your key objective is to hire someone who will excel in the role and bring some fresh thought and a different perspective to you and your team. You want someone who will challenge the status quo and get you and your team to think differently.
Conduct a competency-based interview:
Having established the competencies, experience and behaviours required to be successful in the role you need to construct interview questions that will help you establish if the candidate has what it takes to succeed in the role.
A competency-based interview will include questions phrased in the following manner.
Competency: Integrity
Q1 Tell me about a situation when others had to place their trust in you? How did you know that others perceived you as trustworthy?
Q2 Tell me about a time when you had access to confidential or sensitive information, and you were being pressurised to reveal it. How did you deal with the people who were pressurising you?
Q3 Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision, and the consideration of fairness was important? What did you do? What was the outcome?
Competency: Drive for Results
Q1 What results are you trying to achieve in your current role?
Q2 Tell me about a time that you achieved a result that you’re particularly proud of.
Q3 How do you decide what to work on each day?
Q4 How do you prioritise?
Competency: Goal Setting
Q1 How do you hold team members or peers accountable for results?
Q2 Describe a time when you had to make trade-offs in the priority setting process?
Q3 Tell me about a time when you had to delegate an important assignment. How did you determine who you would delegate to? How did you set that person up for success?
Tips, Tricks and Takeaways
❖ Delegate: Look at aspects of your role that you either dislike doing or are not good at and look to see if you can recruit someone into the team who could take that type of work off your plate.
❖ Get a Second Opinion: Get peers or colleagues with no vested interest in the role to interview the candidate. You may be under pressure to hire if your team is overloaded with work or you are afraid that you will lose funding for the role, and as a result you may be tempted to take the first good candidate that comes your way rather than waiting for the best candidate. Your colleagues will prevent you from falling into the trap of recruiting someone who “has potential” and you think you can train up. Inform the colleagues of what you want and they can take a dispassionate view. Involving others in the interview process also brings a more diverse perspective to the process and will help minimise the impact of your unconscious bias.
❖ Avoid asking trick questions: Some people advocate asking the candidate trick questions just to see how they react under pressure. Examples of such questions would be “Why are manholes round?” – however, there is no evidence to suggest that asking trick questions results in a better quality hiring decision. The interview situation is, by definition, unbalanced; the candidate may already be under pressure, so there is no need to add to the pressure.
❖ Keep your questions relevant to the role: Do not ask personal questions (even in the small talk before or after the interview) about age, sexual orientation, marital status, children or religion. A question on or reference to the aforementioned topics could be construed as discrimination, and won’t help you make a decision anyway.
❖ Culture & Values fit: Ensure that you are focusing some of your questions to elicit whether the candidate will make a positive contribution to the culture and values of the organisation/team.
Quick pre-interview process exercise:
Before making a short list complete the following:
Undertake a gap analysis i.e. make a list of the skills and competencies required for the team to be successful in the future, compare the list to the existing skills and competencies within the team to identify the gaps.
Having identified the gaps make sure the job description calls out the need for the skills and competencies that are missing so that you can attract individuals with those competencies.
Take time to identify new perspectives or competencies that should be brought into the team to give your company a competitive advantage?
Before interviewing complete the following;
Look to identify your unconscious biases?
See if you or your team have recruited to a stereotype in the past?
Does your organisation have a stereotype?
Solicit an external perspective to answer the questions above.
