EnticeLabs, whose first product is an online advertising platform, got an infusion of $2 million from a group of investors lead by First Advantage. The company says the money “will be used to accelerate system development, accommodate higher-than-anticipated sales, and build out the infrastructure warranted by the rapidly expanding client base.”

It also gained the expertise of former Monster VP Neal Bruce, who joins its board of directors.

HireVue, which facilitates video interviewing, received a Series A round of funding led by Peterson Ventures joined by The Garber Fund of Penn State University, and others.

The company didn’t say how big the investment is, though it did say the money would be used to expand management, “strengthen market awareness, and make product enhancements.”

Via its Virtual Video Interviews, employers can automatically screen candidates by having them respond on camera over the Internet to prerecorded questions.  HireVue also offers two-way video conferencing for live interviews. Both types of interviews are recorded for later review.

With companies counting pennies, there has been an upswing in the use of Internet video for initial candidate interviews. HireVue says it has grown rapidly — 500 percent — in the last year, adding such Fortune 500 clients as Dish Network, CDW, and Murphy Oil. It also partnered with Taleo to make its video interviews accessible from within the company’s software.

HireVue, which competes in an increasingly crowded market for video interviewing,  was named HR Product of the Year for 2009 by Human Resource Executive magazine just two weeks ago.

EnticeLabs, in part financed by the people who founded web analytics company Omniture, introduced TalentSeekr more than a year ago to positive reviews. TalentSeekr leverages some of the same principles as Omniture, but for job postings. Besides creating a variety of ad types from a standard job req, the program places the ad, monitors its performance, and makes adjustments on the fly. Recruiters can manually manipulate the process if they want, but the strength of TalentSeekr is that it can improve ad performance all by itself. (A more in-depth description of how it works can be found here.)

The most recent $2 million investment follows an initial $1.3 million. It’s not an official A series, and with the company a bit beyond startup, EnticeLabs is calling it a strategic round. Besides money, the company is also getting the benefit of recruitment industry veteran Neal Bruce, who joins the board as the representative of First Advantage, where he is is senior vice president of product management for First Advantage’s Employer Services segment.

The well-regarded Bruce is a former vice president of the global innovation group at Monster.com, where he worked for 4 1/2 years. He previously was a recruiter for Ernst & Young, and later director of global staffing for PTC before joining Monster in August 2003. He joined First Advantage in May 2008.

The typical hiring questions that come up are:

• Who do we hire?
• Where do we find them?
• What should we pay them?
• How do we retain them?

While these questions are important, there are two issues that must be addressed first: alignment and transformability.

Alignment addresses the passion and skills the person brings to the organization, and their fit within the organization. Transformability is hiring the person not for the job as it exists today, but as it will exist tomorrow. Addressing the alignment issue without considering the transformability issue will likely result in hiring the wrong person.

Alignment has three components: passion, skills, and fit. In selecting an employee, gauge their passion for the work and for the challenge it represents. Identify the skills needed to support the continuing growth of the company. It could be marketing, sales, operations, or financial skills. Lastly, evaluate how the person will fit into your organization. Fit essentially is how well the person will cope with the “way work is done around here”: with the personalities, the pace, and the customers.

Alignment is important, but in isolation of the second component — transformability — insufficient to ensure that the right person will be hired. You are not hiring for the job as it exists today; you are hiring for the job as it will likely exist 12 months from today.

Remember, we are talking about a fast-growing company, and one of the characteristics of a fast-growing company is that things change — fast.

Think about the last time you changed jobs. While we all like to believe we hit the ground running, most of us took some time to assimilate into the new job, to the way work gets done, to what is and is not acceptable, and to a myriad of other issues resident in a new organization.

Now consider this: you just start feeling comfortable in your work environment (that is, you have assimilated) and you come to work the next day and the job has changed. Your skills are no longer what are required because what is required now is different. This is a fact of life in fast-growing companies.

So when you are thinking about hiring, and you are a fast growing company, think about how the job will look 12 months from now. Think about the skills that will be required, and start looking for candidates who fit the future, not just the current, job requirements.

When talking with candidates, tell them what the job is today, how you expect it will change over time, and that you are looking to fill the job as it will likely exist in the future, not as it exists today. This way, you are being honest.

Some candidates may seriously wonder if you know what you are doing. Others will be energized by the idea that the job will change and they will not only have a chance to grow, but they will be expected to grow. Fast-changing job requirements are not for the faint of heart or bureaucrats. This kind of job ambiguity isn’t for everyone, but if you consider alignment and transformability as you start the hiring process, you are being honest with both yourself and with your future employee. The probability that you will hire and retain the right person increases significantly.

Here are nine questions to consider when interviewing for a fast-growing company:

1. Did the candidate show passion for the work and the challenge?
2. Did the candidate demonstrate an ability to tolerate ambiguity?
3. Did the candidate possess general knowledge and skills? Were they intelligent?
4. Was the candidate prepared for the interview and did they have interesting ideas about the job, the company, and the product or service?
5. What is candidate’s work history (results) and experience with different roles/jobs?
6. Did the candidate demonstrate an ability to “think on his/her feet”?
7. Is there a cultural fit?
8. Did the candidate present well (read: executive presence)?
9. Did the candidate challenge you and your thinking during the interview with a good questions or another way to look at an issue?

Whatever the case, if you have ever felt as though you might be running into legal issues, the U.S. EEOC’s Assistant Legal Counsel Carol Miaskoff says to listen up to the following basic rules:

Facebook and Similar Social Networking Sites

When you have interactions with people on these sites, keep in mind non-discrimination principles, says Miaskoff.

“If race, gender, or age is obvious, you need to not let that control your reaction to the person; that’s the same skill you would bring to an interview. It sounds so basic, and it is basic,” she says.

Encourage team-wide use of simple procedures when scouting sources like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. For example, provide basic training to your team; institute new procedures; or follow a set of questions that prompt your team to move beyond that “gut-level reaction.”

Blogs

Lots of people have them, and some people will blog about things like a personal illness. What to do when you stumble over this information?

Although ADA rules mean recruiters must assess qualifications first, without asking questions about disabilities, there is a caveat.

“If you inadvertently stumbled upon the information, you have NOT violated the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act], which prohibits pre-offer questions about disability,” she says.

Video Resumes

Although there are no court rulings on video resumes yet, Miaskoff says recruiters must be prompted to look at the same qualifications, despite a person’s appearance.

“In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with them. So have feedback from various, diverse sources on your team who all view the video resume,” she says. “Put checks in there so you don’t have one person discriminating.”

Video resumes are also employment records and need to be retained for two years. This is where reluctance comes in to use them, she says. Because people are concerned about keeping a picture of someone who has been screened out of your company’s hiring process, there is sometimes an added fear of litigation.

Still, “that’s not a good-enough reason; if you have good documentation in place as to what your process was, you will be able to show you gave everyone fair and equal consideration.”

Public Information: Criminal Background Checks

The EEOC has some rules governing background checks as well.

“This is an area where the EEOC policy says it is ok to do a criminal background check; there is no prohibition categorically,” she says. But the check has to relate to the job in question and whether the conviction fairly screens out a candidate and his or her ability to do the job.

“Obviously, there are crimes that disqualify people for jobs,” she says, “so look at the relationship to the job.”

Public Information: Credit Checks

There is not half as much legal authority out there about screening people out on a bad credit score, she cautions.

“Now, you must again ask whether not being ‘credit-worthy’ is consistent with the job in question. It might be with jobs related to access to money. You really have to think this through.”

Online Testing

The New Haven firefighter case is the most prominent recent testing case, she says.

Testing is a tool used to decide who you will consider for a job. “Look at the impact and job-relatedness carefully,” she says. “This applies to all tests, including personality assessments.”

Accessibility

ADA rules require that people with disabilities have equal access to all employment opportunities. Beyond reasonable accommodations, online recruiting means having online software and tools available to people with poor vision, are hard of hearing, or have trouble using their hands.

Think of “simple accessibility” when you use online tools, she says, including “employment web pages, online recruitment, and online applications.”

The Northern Lights have seen strange sights,
But the queerest they ever did see … – The Cremation of Sam McGee

While they may not quite compare to the sight spoken of by the nameless narrator of Robert Service’s famous poem, nonetheless some of the tales I’ve heard lately of interviews certainly give Cremation of Sam McGee a run for its money.

By far the most dramatic was the interviewer who spent the entire interview reading email. When the candidate tried to get the interviewer’s attention, the response was, “We multi-task here.”

The interviewers who ask technical questions and then say, “That’s not how I would solve the problem, so you must be wrong,” are, sadly, so common that they don’t even rate.

I must confess that when I heard the first story, I was left speechless. Here’s an interviewer trying to convince a candidate to take a job at a company and is treating that candidate with a total lack of respect. If that’s how the person behaves when the candidate isn’t working there, how will he behave when the candidate is working there? That’s assuming, of course, that the candidate takes the job.

Now, it’s highly likely that some people are thinking that there must be a mistake in the previous paragraph: shouldn’t it say that the candidate is trying to convince the company to hire them? Sure they are; however, it’s a two-way street. The company clearly needs someone to fill a certain position, even if it’s not that specific person. Conversely, that person needs a job, even if it’s not that specific job.

But wait, it’s a terrible economy! Does the candidate really have a choice?

Surprising as it may seem, yes they do. If one company is hiring people with a given skill set, odds are others are as well. Companies hire because they believe that the value of bringing someone in exceeds the cost: in other words, they see a potential, or actual, source of revenue. Well, there are a lot of companies out there; if one finds a valuable niche, you can bet others will too. Pretty soon, they’ll be competing for the available pool of talent. The best people will go where they are most respected.

Of course, once a company has successfully hired someone, there’s the little matter of keeping the person. Economies have a nasty habit of suddenly getting better. People who feel that they are being badly treated at their current company are the most likely to jump ship when things turn around. The worst time for a company to lose people to the competition is, by a rather amazing coincidence, when business is really starting to ramp up. The company that establishes a huge lead at the start of an economic upswing may not become the dominant player, but that’s the way to bet. The company that lags risks being doomed to second-rate status, if it survives at all.

During the last downturn, the CEO of one midsized technology company told several employees that he wouldn’t give them raises because, “It’s a terrible economy and you have no where else to go.” Within a month, each of those people had found new jobs at significantly higher rates of pay. Although the employees were eventually replaced, the cost to the company, in terms of lost productivity and ramp-up time for the new people, was huge. Their competitors dethroned them from their once dominant position in their market niche. The company now no longer exists.

It is, therefore, extremely important to remember that trying to take advantage of a downturn is penny wise and pound foolish. The hiring process is the first glimpse that prospective employees will have of your company and its culture. Right from the start, it’s critical to present the right image. That means that:

• As obvious as it may seem, apparently there are interviewers who don’t realize that they should give candidates their undivided attention. Would you hire a candidate who spent the interview reading email or IMing?
• The company needs to understand who it’s looking for and know how to recognize that person. Bringing candidates back for one round of interviews after another only sends the message that the company doesn’t know what it’s doing.
• Tests, puzzles, or other problems presented to the candidate to solve must be presented by employees who are capable of understanding answers other than their own. It’s not a battle of wits: the goal is to see if the candidate can solve the problem, not if they can read the interviewer’s mind. Interviewers who will only hire candidates less skilled than they are doom the company to mediocrity.

If you want the best people, you need to treat them with respect from the very beginning. When it comes to treating people with respect, it’s never different this time around.

According to Gartner, Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, more than 25 percent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013.

As of this past February, emarketer.com ranked YouTube as the fifth-most popular website in the United States, eclipsed only by the likes of Google (who owns YouTube), Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting. Used together they create a better candidate experience and raise the likelihood of a better hire. They also enrich recruiters by giving them a much deeper perspective on a candidate, in less time, than has ever been possible.

Video is particularly attractive to Gen Y — those young people between 20 and 29 who total about 70 million people. They are avid users of video and expect to be marketed to, taught, entertained, and recruited by video. Go to an Apple store and watch what young folks are doing: watching videos or movies or looking at pictures using the Internet. I rarely see any of them reading an article or an online newspaper.

They have been raised on television and those in the 25 to 34 age group watch more than 140 hours of it each quarter. The percentage of people watching videos and movies on the Internet has nearly doubled since 2006 and is now over 60% of all Internet users.

Some organizations are already leveraging the Internet and video to give them a competitive edge in reaching the millions of people who regularly use such sites as YouTube and Hulu.

Here is how they are doing it:

To showcase their company
They are creating career sites that are heavy with short videos featuring tours of the company, interviews with executives, candid chats with employees, and day-in-the-life scenarios of what people in particular positions do all day. They may include videos about the local area or videos that have been made by news agencies about the company. Examples of excellent career sites that contain video include those of KPMG, Deloitte, and Whirlpool. These have all won awards for excellence based on the success they have had in recruiting the talent they need using their career site. Companies such as RecruitTV and Thinktalk provide the expertise and service to help you produce these kinds of videos.

An interactive, video-based website is the core requirement for employment branding and may be the single best thing you can do to improve your success in attracting and hiring the people you want.

To post or distribute jobs
It is now possible to make a short video specifically describing a particular position, and then use that video instead of the usual written description. In London, three career magazines now provide this as an alternative to the written word. A Twitter-like application called 12Seconds allows you to make, yep, you got it, a 12-second video about a job and distribute it to a group of followers.

Monster Canada allows you to insert a streaming video into any job posting. And climber.com posts your video job description focused on Gen Y candidates to 45 different video sharing sites.

To hold career fairs
Virtual career fairs have been around for a while, mostly focused on college recruiting. CollegeGrad.com offers this type of virtual careers fair. For a broader audience CareerBuilder, Unisfair, and InXpo. A virtual career fair has much greater reach than a physical one and allows candidates to learn more about the positions you have and your organization. They are cost-effective ways to reach out to a broad geographical slice of people, quickly.

To do targeted marketing
Advanced and emerging uses of video include, for example, having your job video display when a person goes to a particular website or webpage. All clicks on your job display are tracked so that you can see who and how many show interest. This information will allow you to narrow down the sites where you display the ads, improve the content of the videos, and control costs.

Product marketers have used similar technology for a while and are now making it available for recruiting. As this technology matures, it will be possible to greatly reduce the number of unqualified applicants by limiting who actually sees a job ad.

To interview candidates
Interviewing candidates by streaming video is becoming more popular now that more than 60% of Americans have broadband access from their homes. With a simple webcam and a decent Internet connection using Skype, a recruiter or hiring manager or both together can interview a candidate from anywhere. This lowers costs and time to offer and provides a candidate and the hiring authorities an experience that is often as good as if not better than a face-to-face appearance.

Many companies offer video interviewing including Greenjobinterview.com, Clooks.com, and Hirevue.com.

For assessment and screening
A final way that video is being used is in candidate assessment. By creating scenarios and games that stimulate real-world experiences, recruiters can gain insight into how people would potentially react to them. These job simulations have been used by the U.S. Army and by retail stores intent on seeing how potential sales associates might respond to different customer problems. The U.S. State Department has recently started using a game to assess potential Foreign Service officers. It is called American Diplomat and recreates many of the scenes and issues a diplomat may encounter.

Another aspect of assessment is the self-assessment that candidates make when they actually see what it is like to do a particular job. Shaker Consulting does a good job of creating validated job previews that help candidates self-assess, as well as help recruiters and hiring managers.

Video is rapidly becoming core to recruiting success. Organizations that do not start to build video into every aspect of talent acquisition will find that they are at a competitive disadvantage, especially with college students and younger experienced hires. This is the age of video and we all need to learn to use it better.

“I never use data services,” I haughtily told the salesperson.

And then it happened. I palmed (pardon the expression) an iPhone. Sheepishly, I upgraded my plan. I am a convert — to unlimited everything! The iPhone makes handheld technology fun and accessible. (I still get a kick out of the level application. I fire it up to randomly to test the lopsidedness of tables. I also play mobile Scrabble. Hours of geeky fun!)

In addition to entertainment value, the iPhone also provides opportunities for recruiters to improve productivity. Joel Cheesman and Michael Marlatt have written extensively about the coming mobile revolution. Joel, who has launched a mobile recruiting marketing agency, outlines why recruiters should be paying attention to mobile technology in an excellent whitepaper.

Most of the recruiting/job-related iPhone applications were developed for jobseekers. Here are a few apps that will help recruiters save time, allow greater mobility, or improve communication with networks and contacts. You may very well have some favorites to add; please include them in the comments.

Tweetie ($2.99). Do you keep your network informed via Twitter? Tweetie makes communicating via Twitter easy and fast. Tweetie provides all of the functionality of the twitter.com website, such as saved searches, inline web browsing, and the ability to manage followers. In addition, Tweetie supports navigation between multiple Twitter accounts, easy retweeting, automatic URL shortening, and uploading Twitpic pictures. I find Tweetie easy to use when tweeting from conferences. There are other, free, Twitter-for-iPhone apps, such as Twitterific, but I find that the additional features of Tweetie make it worth the small investment.

SearchOnTheGo ($9.99). SOTG is the first iPhone app written especially for recruiters by recruiters! SOTG turns your keywords into a full-blown Boolean search string. SOTG automatically generates search strings for resume searches, blog searches, PDF and Excel file formats, and more. SOTG will also execute web profile searches and public LinkedIn profile searches. After executing the search on the iPhone, users can save the search, email the search, or review results real time. Pretty nifty, especially if you dislike writing Boolean strings. Currently, SOTG returns only Google results. I would love to see other search engines included in future versions.

LinkedIn (free). Can’t live without LinkedIn? Then make sure you download the iPhone companion. The mobile version provides basic LinkedIn functionality — search, status updates, invites and more — for recruiters on the go. When meeting someone in person, try linking in instantly, instead of exchanging business cards. I am especially impressed with the Address Book Integration, which uploads contact info to the iPhone in one click. Unfortunately, there is no ability to receive or manage LinkedIn Groups information.

AgileMobile ($9.99). It was not until I joined Yahoo! that I became a big fan of instant messaging. Used properly, IM can improve the speed and quality of communication. Phone calls and emails are best for initial outreach, but nothing beats IM for quick confirmations and clarifications. AgileMobile is an all-in-one instant messaging service for mobile phones. Agile allows instant chat-on-the-go with MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, and GoogleTalk. This kind of agnostic service is great for recruiters, who can communicate with candidates or colleagues regardless of IM service provider. AgileMobile also enables voice chat and media sharing.

Interview Pro (1.99). Technically, Interview Pro is an application developed for jobseekers. And a pretty clever one at that. This app provides a list of “50 of the most common behavioral interview questions.” Each question is accompanied by an answer that helps candidates navigate the interviewer’s intent and expectations. The questions are divided into categories such as “Team Dynamics,” “Planning,” and “Success Factors.” The interview questions are not all “behavioral” and the app does not come with instructions for the interviewer (such as how and when to drill down to get complete answers). With a few modifications, however, an application like this could be very useful to recruiters and hiring managers. Imagine if your hiring managers were able to download a custom interview guide. Never fear: the makers of Search on the Go tell me that they are working on just such an app.

beamMe (free or $1.99 for subscription updates). Finally, I can feel comfortable leaving the house without business cards! beamMe allows users to exchange vCards by inputting an email address, mobile phone #, or @Twitter id. The recipient is directed to a secure website, where he or she can download a vCard (including a photo or logo, and links to URL or Twitter id). Genius! The only downside is the subscription scheme; so far the free version works well for me. I’m not sure I want to be billed $2/month to continue to receive product upgrades.

There you have it. The future is here!

Recording “Live” Video Interviews Provide Several Additional Benefits
Not all firms choose to record and keep their live video interviews, primarily due to technology limitations, cost, or privacy concerns (no candidate wants to find an embarrassing interview posted on YouTube). However, if you do record your interviews, there are several benefits that can accrue to your firm, including:

1. Documentation — both the questions and the answers can be documented so that you can legally demonstrate what happened (and what didn’t) should a hiring decision be challenged.
2. Later viewing — recording your interviews allows you to show it to others who could not be present during the original interview. This also gives you the capability to take a second look at the interview to see if you missed anything or to compare it back to back with other recordings of interviews that might have occurred out of sequence.
3. Increased consistency — recording interviews encourages managers to follow the script and their prescribed list of questions because they know that the tape can later be reviewed by HR. HR can also review multiple interviews of the same candidate in order to see if they are giving consistent answers. The same process can be used to determine if different interviewers are inadvertently repeating the same questions and boring the candidates.
4. Niche skill searching — video content search tools now exist that allow users to search vast video libraries for words being spoken in the video. Such tools would enable organizations to quickly identify candidates interviewed in the past who mentioned a unique skill that might not appear on a resume.
5. Passing along candidates — individuals who were not selected because a “superstar” candidate was in the candidate slate can be forwarded on to other hiring managers without having to bring the candidate back in.
6. More honesty — you may get a higher rate of honesty because the candidate knows that the interview was being taped (making it easier for the firm to confront their answers after talking to their references).
7. Improving the hiring process — if the newly hired employee prematurely quits or must be terminated, HR or the hiring manager can go back and review the interview in order to see if they missed any indication of a problem. This information can be used to improve interview training or the hiring process.

Potential Problems That You May Encounter
With any process, there are weaknesses and potential problems that you might encounter. Most in-person interviews are fraught with problems as well, so don’t be surprised if the same problems occur in video interviews also occur in traditional in-person interviews.

1. Candidate resistance — some candidates may not like the idea because they are afraid of technology, privacy issues, or because they’re just more comfortable with traditional in-person interviews. Cultural and religious influences might make some individuals averse to having their picture captured. Taken together, these factors could influence candidate performance.
2. Manager resistance — managers have in the past resisted the use of video interviews because they couldn’t find the available time to actually view the video, they disliked having to go to a video conferencing center, or they disliked having to use special equipment like headsets. New remote interviewing technologies remove most of those concerns because they can be done in their office, using their standard computer and telephone. Some managers may still resist because they simply prefer an in-person exchange. Another possible resistance factor is the possibility of having to hold interviews before work, after work, or during lunch.
3. Equipment issues — although it’s rare, modern web cam cameras can malfunction and the loss of an Internet connection or mobile phone service can prematurely interrupt an interview. The facial expressions of individuals with darker complexions might not come through as sharply as others if the lighting is weak.
4. Interviewing from their company facility — for currently employed individuals, it’s probably not appropriate for them to interview while at their current job site. As a result the interviews should be scheduled at a time so that they can interview from another facility or from home.
5. Background noise — office noises and interruptions from the manager’s location may degrade the interview experience. Distractions or what appears in the video background on the candidate’s end (especially if they are at home) might distract from the interview results.
6. Supplying the candidate with video equipment — a process must be developed to quickly provide the interview candidate with a web cam and instructions in how to operate it. Some cameras might not be returned.
7. Possible performance differential — it might be a mistake to automatically assume that remote interviews and in-person interviews produce the same results without at least some preliminary side-by-side testing to ensure that candidates perform the same no matter which approach they are interviewed under.
8. Discrimination issues — when using telephone interviews, physical and diversity characteristics are not visible to the interviewer. However, during both in-person and video interviews, the race, sex, age etc. of the candidate is visible. There is a small possibility that individuals from different diverse groups will appear to perform less well on video than they do in person. As a result, track performance to see if there is a problem.

Improving Traditional Interviews by Changing the “Where and When”
If you can’t adopt remote live video interviewing, the next best thing might be to change the process so that scheduling in-person interviews is easier on the candidate. Remember, the people you’re interviewing might be current or future customers, so taking their needs into account can only help strengthen the relationship. Some new scheduling and location approaches to consider include:

1. Interview at night — Obviously, employed people have more time after work than during the work day, and at night they don’t need to fib to managers about where they are. Often at night, candidates have more childcare options. In addition, hiring managers have fewer meetings and business conflicts, which means that interviews can be scheduled more easily and quickly. Night sessions tend to be more informal and they are less likely to be interrupted by phone calls and urgent business-issue interruptions. Yes, some managers will find night interviews inconvenient, but that inconvenience needs to be weighed with the fact that they will get more currently employed people (the most desirable and the ones that are most likely to be top performers) to interview. You can alleviate some of the resistance by scheduling one or two “interview nights” a month well in advance, while also letting them take the next morning off.
2. Interview on weekends — In addition to night interviews, you should also consider holding them on weekends. This is especially beneficial when a large number of your candidates are coming in from out of town. Offering an “interview Saturday” once a month during heavy hiring periods will not only get you more and better quality candidates; it also sends a message that you really care about applicants and their needs. Incidentally, this demonstration of caring might be extrapolated by the candidate to mean that you will also really care about them after their hired.
3. Rendezvous at conferences — If a large number of your candidates are from out of state or the country, you can reduce the number of “not interested” responses by interviewing at places where a large number of target candidates are likely to be anyway. Some likely common rendezvous events include national association meetings, industry trade fairs, certification classes, alumni events, and seminars. Because these events are generally held in another city, attendees have fewer family activities that conflict, and thus have more free time to talk after the formal event sessions end. Not only do top performers tend to be the ones who attend these events, but the setting itself is more informal, so it lends itself to less stressful interviews. If you’re clever, remember you can develop a pool of names and interview them at conferences before you actually need to fill a position. Once you assess them, it’s unlikely that their skill sets or experience will degrade before you actually have an opening for them.
4. Hold the interview before or after local professional meetings — almost every large city has a number of monthly meetings held by local chapters of various professional associations. If you hold your interviews right before or right after these events, you are likely to improve the number of individuals who can easily make themselves available. Incidentally, you are also likely to improve the quality of the candidates because the very best practitioners periodically attend these monthly meetings. Incidentally, because these are professional events, you give the potential candidate an honest excuse for where they were. You also have to make sure that the people being interviewed before or after the event are not seen entering the interview area.
5. Hold the interview close to where they live and work — Moving the interview location to a more convenient spot in a big city can also be helpful. In reverse, if your business is located in a smaller city or rural area, holding “satellite interviews” in major cities can increase the number of willing interviewees. In cities where most professionals live in the suburbs, consider holding at least preliminary interviews at a suburban hotel or even at the mall. Yes, it’s a little inconvenient for managers (although they might live in the suburbs also), but you’ll get much better attendance from employed people. Hold interviews at hotels or conference centers right before or right after local professional association or network events, which top candidates will likely be attending anyway.
6. “Interview Friday” — Some firms have set aside a designated time each week or month for interviewing in order to help solve the rampant unavailability of managers. Everyone knows that hiring is frequently stretched out over long periods of time (which can mean a loss of top-quality candidates) because managers are “too busy” to interview. This problem can be partially alleviated by setting aside a designated time when no meetings can be scheduled and all managers and interviewers must be available for interviews. I recommend a Monday or a Friday once or twice a month. It might seem harsh at first, but once managers get used to it, it speeds up the hiring process tremendously.
7. Make interview scheduling easy — Hiring takes a long time, primarily because of the difficulty in scheduling interviews. You can eliminate the number of callbacks and the inevitable phone tag required to find compatible times for interviews if you develop a Web-based scheduling system. These systems allow candidates to select and schedule their own interview times online, based on the open slots that managers make available.
8. Limit them to one day — One of the aspects of interviewing that frustrates candidates the most is the multiple callbacks for second, third, and even fourth rounds of interviews. By stretching out the time involved, you not only increase the number of lies employee candidates must tell, but you also risk losing candidates to companies that make decisions faster. Several health-care facilities I work with have instituted a “one day rule” which allows managers to interview as many times as they want as long as all interviews are completed on the same day. Not only does it force managers to be more decisive, but it also demonstrates to the candidate that your organization has the ability to act quickly (something top performers expect after they accept the job).
9. Reduce unnecessary interviews — There are a variety of tools and techniques that can help reduce the number of unnecessary interviews. Some of them include:

• Educating your managers about the dollar costs in salary and lost productivity of having so many employees in multiple interviews.
• Educating your managers about the negative consequences of additional interviews on the quality of hire. Slow hiring means losing top candidates to other firms, so that the more time that you take to make a decision actually decreases the quality of the person hired.
• Setting a target number of interviews (say three) and suggesting additional interviews are appropriate only in rare cases. You might also show them data that increasing the number of interviews doesn’t automatically increase the quality of the hire.
• Track the time to hire, reward managers for fast hiring, and let managers know when they consistently exceed the time limits.
• Consider conducting team interviews, so that all of the managers and interviewers can ask their questions during a single session.

Final Thoughts
The time is right for radical change in recruiting. The easiest option is to rethink where and when you schedule your traditional in-person interviews. Next, you need to consider trying an interview-from-anywhere approach. If you do, the travel cost savings, the reduced environmental impact, the shorter time-to-fill, and the increased quality of hire impacts should be powerful enough to overcome any potential concerns related to webcam interviews. The time to act is now.

Video conferencing is not only a practical nice-to-have capability, it is a necessity for any modern recruiting organization charged with recruiting truly top talent around the world. Remote video interviews provide numerous benefits. One of the most difficult to ignore in these tough economic times is the fact that they are dramatically cheaper.

When it comes to video-conference interviews, organizations still have two options: high quality fixed facility interviews, and lower quality flexible location interviews. The latter requires only that the candidate have access to a decent broadband Internet connection and a low-cost webcam. When purchased in bulk, a number of webcams are available at prices less than $15 per unit. Based on my experience, I predict that within a few years the “interview from anywhere” approach will become the standard practice for all but final hiring interviews.

Literally hundreds of firms have already begun using video interviews, and usage patterns are climbing at a significant pace. While first-movers adopting the approach were predominantly in the high-tech and communications industries, today usage crosses nearly every industry. Organizations like HP, Microsoft, Google, Tyco, Whirlpool, Rio Tinto, E*Trade, PepsiCo, UCLA, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and Broadcom are marquee customers of leading solution providers.

If you doubt that this approach will truly grab hold, just look back at the uphill battle that phone screens had to fight before they became the de facto standard first step in the assessment process.

The Business Case for Adopting the “Interview from Anywhere” Approach
Increasing the number of candidates available to interview and cutting the cost per hire are two major benefits of adopting the “interview from anywhere” approach. In tough economic times, the travel costs that result from flying in multiple candidates for interviews is a highly visible expense, especially when you consider that a majority of the people brought in will not result in a hire. For companies that recruit nationally or internationally, travel-related expenses can easily account for 50% of all recruiting costs.

The second and perhaps the most significant business benefit of remote interviewing is that it dramatically increases your candidate pool. For many organizations, tough economic times limit the talent pool dramatically to local candidates. However, since there are no travel costs associated with the “interview from anywhere” approach, firms with limited budgets will be able to consider top-quality candidates from outside the region. Ease of scheduling is another significant reason why the quality and the size of the talent pool increases; no longer will attending an interview be a major time suck. Even the volume of local candidates will likely increase as remote interviews will not require them to lie to their boss and disappear for a day.

Additional Advantages of “Interviewing From Anywhere”
There are many additional advantages associated with the interview-from-anywhere approach, so if you’re having reservations about the concept, here are some additional points to consider:

1. Interviewee and interviewer performance — because candidates are not rushed to get back to work or fatigued from hours of driving or airline travel, they are more likely to be relaxed and excited about the opportunity to present themselves. The net result is that the candidates perform more like their normal selves. In cases where the interviewers need to travel in order to ask questions during the interview, they too will be refreshed and better able to sell and excite the candidate.
2. Almost-live view — with broadband and the latest generation of webcams, the quality of the video is quite high. Unlike telephone interviews, facial expressions and body language can be readily seen, something that hiring managers rate as a “must-have” feature. Your ability to sell candidates that are in high demand may also be improved because they can effectively see and feel the excitement of the interviewing team.
3. Lower dropout rate because of multiple interviews — if your organization requires multiple interviews on different days, that multiplies the amount of travel and the scheduling difficulty associated with hiring an individual. Allowing the candidate to “interview from anywhere” and after work hours reduces the amount of scheduling and travel stress that routinely builds up over multiple interviews. Taken together, they reduce the likelihood that a currently employed candidate will drop out halfway through the process due to fatigue or their unavailability.
4. Faster time-to-fill — a great deal of the delay that plagues many organizations in making a hire can be associated with the time required for travel and to find an opportunity for the candidate to get away from work without raising suspicion. Requiring all of the interviewers to be in the same room also can delay the scheduling of interviews. If managers are willing to hold interviews at night, on weekends, or on holidays, they may be able to do all the interviews back to back. Holding the interviews closer together or even back to back also makes it easier for comparisons to be made between candidates. Taken together these factors may significantly shorten the time it takes to fill open positions. This can mean less lost revenue (as a result of the extended vacancies). Reducing the delays in making a hiring decision (prominent in traditional interviewing) might also mean that many of the quality candidates that are in high demand will not drop out of the process before it is concluded, because they were not forced by the time delays to accept other offers.
5. An improved candidate experience — most people in recruiting routinely say that they want to improve “the candidate experience,” but forcing candidates to lie to their boss and travel multiple times is not a positive experience. It may impact their willingness to accept an offer and what they tell their colleagues about your firm.
6. Ethical issues — for currently employed candidates, asking them to come in for an interview during work hours (on company time) can cause ethical concerns among the best candidates. In other cases it may force them to use sick days, personal days, or vacation time. They may also feel that they are letting their team down by being absent from work during the time that they are traveling and interviewing. Conducting interviews from home outside of work hours can help alleviate these pressures. Also, because there’s no travel time involved, the candidate doesn’t have to add the travel time to their excuse for not being at work.
7. Green concerns — using technology to reduce travel certainly reduces much of the carbon footprint and the environmental impact related to a job search. For environmentally conscious candidates, this may be a major selling point and an illustration that your company is focused on sustainability.
8. Family impacts — having to travel and be away from their family (with no guarantee that they’ll actually get the job) may discourage even unemployed individuals from applying.
9. Administrative costs — candidates who must physically visit the facility generate an expense because they must be cleared through security. There may also be scheduling issues and a cost associated with using conference rooms for the interview. These costs, although small, escalate as more individuals are physically brought to the facility.
10. Employer brand image — offering this new approach may garner media attention and positive comments on the Internet. Together they may encourage more individuals to apply. By showing respect both for the candidate’s time and the needs of their current firm, you may also build goodwill in your image.
11. Manager scheduling availability — using this approach, hiring managers can also interview from almost anywhere without having to be in the office. As a result, they are more likely to be able to easily find time for interviewing, further reducing a major barrier to speeding up time to fill.
12. It uses available technology — it’s important to realize that the technology involved has improved since the last time you may have contemplated video conferencing. If you use a vendor, there is generally no need to purchase additional software or web-related technology. In addition, because laptops, wireless networks, and mobile phones can generally be used, manager resistance decreases because they don’t need to use new hardware or technology.
13. More are comfortable with remote interaction — because many managers and candidates are now frequent users of online social and business networks, they are now generally more comfortable and experienced than in the past with interacting with individuals who are not in the same room.
14. Global capability — relatively cheap long-distance communications and the Internet allow this process to have a global capability.
15. A recruiting advantage — by being the first to offer this approach, your firm will develop a competitive advantage over other firms struggling to “offer something different.”
16. You can maintain the “physical meeting” option — no matter how many remote interviews you hold, you can still reserve the option to interview the candidate in person for the final interview.
17. Minimal price — even if you use a vendor, the price per interview will most likely not exceed $200. There are also free options if you have your own technology function.
18. Facility tour — in lieu of a physical walk around, virtual tours and team member introductions can still be provided to the candidate via a web video.
19. Vendor availability — most early adopters of the interview-from-anywhere approach are using a vendor to facilitate the process. While most support video from anywhere, a few focus on higher quality video experience and require the candidate to visit a studio. Some of the vendors to consider include: GreenJobInterview, iViioo, HireVue, and Candidate Quality Management.
20. Additional uses — in addition to using the interview from anywhere process for external hiring, it can also be used for internal transfers and vendor selection.

Next week: Part 2 will cover more advantages of live video interviews, some potential problems, and ways to improve your in-person interviews by changing the “where and when.”

If you look at the roots for the business terms company and corporation, you find a common theme. “Company” shares its root with the word for companion, while “corporation” essentially means to unify in one body. At its simplest, the message that these words intend to convey is one of coming together. What complicates things is the purpose for which the members come together. For example, in most cases it’s a lot easier to come together for a party than it is to come together for something like jury duty. Now let’s apply this idea to interviewing.

When most people find themselves in the job market, their first thought is to get another job as soon as possible. They’ll think about what it means to be a part of the company later. Little do they know that this mentality is actually doing them a lot more harm than good. Without intending to, they could be sending out a message to recruiters and their potential employers that more or less says, “You are just an obstacle between me and my money.” As recruiters, it’s in our best interest to help candidates put their best foot forward and remind them of what companies are looking for.

What they are forgetting is the fact that the company has needs too. That’s why they hired recruiters. This is important to remind candidates whenever they are brought in for an interview, and especially so in this economy. Companies are not sitting around saying, “Wow! What are we going to do with all this money? Let’s find someone who needs it and give it to them for eight hours of their time a day.” And this takes us to the second word clue — the word hire.

To hire means, “to engage the services of one or more individuals in exchange for compensation.” This means that the hiring company, while conscious that candidates have certain salary requirements for their services, puts the actual service part first. That means that recruiters and candidates should too. When interviewing, one should always keep in mind that the company is speaking with people because they believe that they could offer a potential solution to their challenges.

This understanding is the platform upon which the relationship with a company begins and is sustained. And ultimately, it is the cardinal rule for interview success.

Articles about how to navigate through an interview are in no short supply, but without following this first rule candidates are reducing their chances for success.

The following tips, when combined with the above understanding, will enhance the interview experience for candidates and ideally reduce the interval between interviews and making a placement. Advise candidates to:

1. Study the website and job description and write down any questions that arise.
2. During the interview, listen for the needs of the company and be ready to discuss how they can offer a solution.
3. Ask the question, “What has been your greatest difficulty filling this position?”
4. Ask for a business card(s) from the person/people interviewing them and try to agree on an appropriate timeframe for following up.
5. Offer to open their network to the organization.

Helping our candidates to cultivate these habits benefits all parties involved. Recruiters are relationship managers and solutions brokers by trade. So doesn’t it make sense to get potential employees and employers on the same page?

Do you ever ask yourself how a person got into the position they occupy? I know I do. I constantly hear the overplayed and overstated “people are our most important asset” cliché — yet actions seldom back up this widely accepted ideology.

Recruiting great talent, even in a down economy, isn’t easy, and we’re not even going to talk about retaining them once they arrive. We make it hard enough just to get candidates to take us seriously during the interview process. Down economy or not, great people always have options.

So, for those of you who still need some help in figuring out how to completely sabotage your recruitment efforts, I’ve compiled a quick guide of six easy steps that will get you there faster then you ever thought possible.

Step #1: Beat up your recruiters about the lack of “qualified” candidates and then decline candidates based on your “gut” feeling about the resume.

Excuse me, but what does “overqualified” mean? Or, what does “not the right fit” mean? Often, I’ve found that the term “overqualified” means one of a few things. But usually it’s either the hiring manager is afraid the candidate could take her job, or she is discriminating based on some other assumption that lacks any evidence whatsoever. “I just think this candidate would be bored here, so I’d rather not talk to them.”

As your recruiter leaves your office, please disregard the pounding sound on the wall outside your door. That’s just her head repeatedly meeting the drywall.

Step #2: Once you finally find someone that passes the “fit” test and set up an interview, don’t make yourself available to interview.

I’m reminded of a recent example where a hiring manager had a very difficult, highly specialized position that had been vacant for almost 11 months. Finally, a candidate surfaces who meets all the requirements and is greatly interested in the opportunity. The catch is that this candidate is on the market and other organizations are also aggressively pursing her. Does your hiring manager care? Of course not! She’s not available, and won’t do anything to make herself available, to see the candidate for three weeks. And, despite your best efforts to convince her that she needs to move quickly, she responds with, “well, if the person doesn’t want to wait to see us, then he must not want to work here, so it’s probably ‘not the right fit.’” I’m starting to hate that line.

At this point, please remove all sharp objects from your recruiter’s office.

Step #3: Be late for your scheduled interview time. Or better yet, just don’t even show up. After all, if the candidate doesn’t want to wait to see us, then he must not want to work here, right?

It’s 10:00 a.m. and I’m standing outside the office of a vice president with a director-level candidate. At 10:20 a.m., we decide that we’ll just be early for the next person on the itinerary. What message does this send to the candidate? We are disorganized; we don’t care about how we are perceived; we aren’t interested in how top talent views us; and we really don’t give a squat about the candidate’s time. These incidents are usually followed by the explanation that some blip in the matrix or wobble in the space-time continuum caused a random IT error that removed the appointment from the VP’s calendar. You’d be amazed at how many IT errors are responsible for missed interviews. I wonder if IT realizes how much it gets blamed.

Scratch that — I’m sure it does.

Step #4: Don’t prepare for your interview. After all, you have more important things to do — like the work of the employee you are trying to hire.

How many times do we have to send you the resume? How many times do we have to come to your office with the candidate only for you to tell us, in front of the candidate, that you never received their information? How many times do you need to embarrass yourself, your recruiter, and the organization before you take just a few minutes to be responsible for yourself in the recruitment process? Your lack of preparation for the interview speaks louder than any words ever could about the level of importance you place on hiring the best talent.

And your recruiter really enjoys forwarding you the e-mail he sent you last week with the candidate’s information just to prove a point. We’re passive-aggressive like that sometimes.

Step #5: Ask stupid questions.

Why is a manhole cover round? I’m sorry: are we dealing with manhole covers in the Accounting department? If you ask any hiring manager whether or not they consider themselves a good interviewer and predictor of talent and success, most will sing their own praises from the mountaintops. Most hiring managers have no formal training and, subsequently, not a really good grasp on how to conduct a successful interview. Especially when you ask questions like, “if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”

I’d be an oak tree. And I would fall on you.

Step #6: Don’t make a decision.

It’s three weeks after your candidate’s final interview and your hiring manager still needs to “get feedback” from the team. Um, what? How is this possible? And then we are hit with the dreaded, “well, if the candidate doesn’t want to wait to hear from us, he must not really want to work here.”

Kill me now.

So, there you have it. Six sure-fire ways to ensure your organization never hires the best and brightest talent and you continue to fill your ranks with people who don’t care and just want a job. The best thing about this instructional guide is that you only have to do just one of the six steps to lose your top candidate. But, if you’d really like to make sure you drive talent away from your organization like deer from a burning forest, make sure you do them all.

Happy sabotaging! Feel free to add to the list!

(Editor’s note: Sometimes we see great blog posts on ERE.net, and when we do, we publish them here with the permission of their authors.  This post was originally on Brenden’s blog.)

Unfortunately, the questions are rarely asked, resulting in inefficient, ineffective practices.

Do not pose these questions periodically; incorporate them into your approach to build an engaging candidate experience, a more compelling offer presentation, and ultimately, a more productive hire.

Questions for Candidates (Aimed at Improving Offer Acceptance)

• What criteria will you use to evaluate and rank offers you receive? When you’re targeting currently employed individuals or talent likely to receive multiple offers (I would argue that is the only talent you should be targeting), it’s important to focus your recruiting process not only on assessing the candidates skills, but also on determining the factors that will weigh heavily in their decision-making when the process is complete. By identifying the decision criteria early on, you can improve how you position the opportunity you are recruiting for by maximizing the talking points around factors you can realistically deliver and readjust expectations around those you cannot. Too many organizations push through the process only to make a generic offer according to a template that doesn’t address the candidate’s expectations.
• What three things would make this job superior to your current one? If you are truly targeting top talent, chances are a good percentage of the candidates who make it to the offer stage in your process are going to get a counteroffer from their current employer. Failing to identify what factors would make the new opportunity better than their existing opportunity is setting the stage to focus solely on money should an offer battle ensue.
• Who will you consult prior to making a final decision about an offer? Research shows that individuals generally don’t make important life decisions without consulting close friends, colleagues, or relatives. Not knowing who will have your candidate’s ear makes it nearly impossible to predict what issues the candidate’s advisors may bring up. This makes it even more difficult to provide relevant information throughout the process that arms the candidate with positive information to remedy any possible negative issues that could arise.

Questions to Ask During Onboarding and Orientation (Aimed at Improving the Recruiting Process)

• Can you list the most compelling factors that led you to accept our offer? Once the deal has been signed, candidates, now new hires, have less motivation to couch their responses to questions in an effort to improve their chances of getting what they want, in essence, they are more honest. One of the best questions you can ask during this phase of the relationship deals with identifying what about the company, the job, or the benefits was so compelling that the candidate accepted the offer. Identifying what is and is not compelling (the next question) can help you refocus how to communicate about opportunities moving forward. You can talk up the good stuff, while minimizing focus on the not so good stuff.
• Can you list your concerns and any reasons that almost led you to say no? Again, this reversal of the previous question helps you identify what elements need to be either addressed or dropped altogether from your sales approach.
• What part of the process worked the best? What part was frustrating? If you want to improve the candidate experience, identify the aspects of the recruiting process that both engaged and frustrated candidates. Use this information along with statistics about candidates dropping out of the process voluntarily to determine what steps in your process need to be refined in order to convert more talent.
• What caused you to apply for the position? If you want to identify how best to allocate your sourcing spend, you need robust metrics to tell you what messages are driving people to apply and where they came into contact with the message (i.e., the source of hire and branding points that led to interest). Many organizations attempt to collect this information via their recruiters, but the data is often corrupted by lack of adherence to source coding policies.
• What other firms did you seriously consider or receive an offer from? This question is important for two reasons. First, it helps you identify your talent competitors, which often includes organizations that do not compete directly with you on the product or service front. Second, it helps you identify offer elements from other organizations that talent of interest to you find compelling.
• Who else should we recruit from your previous employer? Truly great talent loves working alongside other great talent and generally leverages some influence over colleagues they respect and value at their previous employer. Asking this question not only helps you target future recruiting efforts, it subliminally prods the new hire to actively position the organization as a great next step when they talk to former colleagues. If they’re enthusiastic, you might also ask for their help in recruiting the top individuals via the referral program.

Questions to Ask During Onboarding (Aimed at improving the Management of New Hires)

• Why did you quit your last few jobs? If you want to reduce future turnover, learn what was frustrating enough to cause your new hire to start looking for a new job and eventually quit their previous job. Once you identify these reasons, it’s wise to make sure their current manager knows what they are and develops a plan to prevent similar issues.
• Help me understand what motivates you and what your manager could do to help you be as productive as you can be? Asking new hires early on what motivates and frustrates them can provide you with an arsenal of information a manager can use to manage workforce productivity 1:1. While it would be great if managers would accept ownership for doing this naturally, numerous studies show they don’t!
• Where would you like to be career-wise in three years? This question helps you understand early on what expectations and future job aspirations may influence on-the-job behavior and likely tenure. By identifying what timeline a candidate/new hire has in mind, you can work to make sure you deliver career advancement opportunities in line with their expectations (i.e., before they start looking for someone else to deliver them). Also, ask what they would like to learn, which can be used to structure development and retention efforts.

Questions to Ask Candidates Who Dropped Out of the Process Pre- or Post-Offer

Delaying asking these questions for a period of three months significantly increases the likelihood of hearing an honest answer. If necessary, use a third-party vendor to capture this information as former candidates will have even less motivation to lie.

• Why did you drop out of the process? For those who dropped out of your hiring process early, ask them to list the reasons why they dropped out. Frequently, you will find that your recruiting processes are too slow or too frustrating to engage top talent.
• Why did you reject our offer? Most candidates will provide an answer to this question when they turn down the offer. More often than not, that answer has to do with money. Saying it is the money is an easy out — it doesn’t require as much courage as saying the hiring manager was a jerk, the job sucks, or the company doesn’t provide the right resources to enable employees to do the job they were hired to do. Several studies that have compared offers ultimately accepted by talent who turned down other offers reveal that rarely is the money difference significant. Other studies reveal that if you delay asking the question for several months, you are more likely to get an answer that doesn’t focus on the money.

Final Thoughts

The single-most important activity recruiters can do to improve recruiting effectiveness is to gather information that helps explain why the process is working when it is, and why it is not when it isn’t. By embedding these questions in your recruiting process, you can gain the information needed to radically improve the effectiveness of your efforts.

This is a fine strategy for making friends, but absolute nonsense for a recruiter (I had another word in mind, but it would have been politically incorrect.)

After some initial chit-chat, the only interview questions a recruiter or hiring manager should ask are ones that provide trustworthy and reliable data about whether the candidate has the skills for the job.

Canned Questions and Pickled Answers

Why do so many people miss the obvious? Anyone involved in hiring knows there is a big difference between acing an interview and acing a job. Furthermore, as we all know, working in a job we neither like nor have the skills for is a painful experience. I can understand this kind of clueless interview recommendation coming from an inexperienced hiring manager; but, should we accept this advice from someone who either passes himself off as an expert or who recruits for a living? After all, screening applicants based on job qualifications is the recruiter’s job, isn’t it?

What Do You Know and When Did You First Know It?

Asking the right interview questions requires knowing first what to look for. And, if recruiters have to resort to qualification questions like, “What is your greatest accomplishment?” or “How would you describe yourself?” or “What is your greatest strength or weakness?” it’s a sure sign they neither have a clue how to identify specific job skills nor how to measure them. Any determined applicant will rehearse answers to questions like these. Any experienced recruiter knows, at best, they serve as knock-outs.

I once worked with a “professional” recruiter who claimed he had a better way to ask interview questions. He drew close, looked around to see no one was listening, and whispered, “How would your best friend describe you?” (With great difficulty, I choked back a description I really wanted to use to describe him).)

I can just envision the flood of nasty-grams I am about to receive from recruiters in angry disagreement; but, I did not invent this stuff any more than Newton invented gravity. Best-practice interview techniques are supported by thousands of peer-reviewed investigations conducted by hundreds of experts. So, if anyone wants to argue, here is a list of roughly 200 universities. I’m sure they would love to hear your opinions!

Knowing What You Need

If knowing what to look for in an applicant seems so simple, why do so many people get it wrong? For one thing, it’s not as simple as knowing the results you want to achieve. Results do not tell you how a job was done — or even who did it — they are the scores at the end of the game. They do not tell you what the player did, when or why the player did it. Just knowing results leads to assumptions about the skills used to achieve them. You need more; otherwise your assumptions will lead to hiring mistakes. Let’s use Tiger Woods as an example.

Woods’ objective is to use the least amount of strokes to put a little white ball into 18 little holes. These holes are inconveniently located amid trees, sandy pits, hills, ponds, and grassy patches. The total number of strokes is the desired result; but, Woods is only partially in control. Between his first whack and last plop, Woods has to confront temperature, humidity, wind, clubs, lawn maintenance, equipment, other players, onlookers, physical conditions, and a host of other factors out of his control — any of which can affect his score. The same is true of job-holders.

Although we treat other people as if they are in total control of their performance, we reserve the right to make excuses for our own behavior. Psychologists call this fundamental attribution error. That is, you are totally responsible for whatever happens to you … but I am entitled to blame others for whatever happens to me. Attribution error interferes with hiring decisions every time we hear a candidate tell us he was unsuccessful. Fundamental attribution error addresses only one part of the human condition; halo is another.

Humans tend to use snippets of information to make sweeping assumptions about other abilities. This is called the halo/horns effect.

What? You misspelled the word disenfranchise? You must be a complete doddering idiot who needs help tying his shoes!

What? You reduced the overall consumption of paper clips in your last job? You are obviously qualified for our presidential suite!

How often have you heard someone suggest the first two minutes of an interview make or break a candidate? Do you honestly believe someone’s entire career-skill set can be measured in two minutes? The halo/horns effect causes us to make errors both for and against every candidate.

To summarize, there are many insidious forces actively at work whenever applicant, recruiter, or hiring manager meet: silly interview questions; fundamental attribution error; halo and horns; unclear expectations; and, assuming results and skills are related. It’s a mystery why more hiring decisions aren’t disasters!

Systems and Solutions

Think of job performance this way. Every employee has to confront certain kinds of situations. Generically, these situations require a combination of one or more of the following abilities: cognitive ability (e.g., mental horsepower); planning/organization; interpersonal skills; special skills/abilities; and, specific motivational components. It gets confusing when you try to evaluate more factors than these.

For example, if you have been trained in behavioral interviewing, you probably noticed that after four or five questions, you start getting the same answers. Or, if you asked a candidate separate questions about solving a difficult problem, making a tough decision or analyzing data, you begin to hear the same story. That’s because problem solving, decision making, learning, and analysis are often so entwined that it’s difficult if not impossible to separate them. Being impossible to separate means it is almost impossible to measure them individually. Instead, it’s better to look at them as a package called cognitive ability.

Ever hired a psychologist to administer tests to an applicant only to find the report awash in personality factors and character evaluations? Well, unless your psychologist has been trained in how to evaluate job skills, he or she can only do what they were trained to do: provide mental-health evaluations. Evaluating applicants’ mental health takes you right straight into conflict with the Americans with Disabilities Act. All you really want to know is whether the person has the skills for the job.

And another thing: avoid fuzzy concepts like business savvy, budgeting, tough mindedness, or drive to achieve. Fuzzy terms and hiring mistakes go together. One rule of thumb is if you cannot measure a job skill in a few minutes, then it probably is so complex that it cannot be accurately measured until the person is on the job a few months. Take leadership. Has anyone ever seen a “leadership”?

Leadership is the ability to bring a collection of individual skills together at the right place, the right time, and under the right conditions. More often than not, the skills vary with the situation. Sometimes they might require interpersonal ability, sometimes they might require analysis and correct decision making, and sometimes they might require planning. Leadership is not something you can see in a few minutes. It is a result of many things happening over time. Even the traditional leaderless group discussions that so many assessors are so fond of suffer from halo (e.g., extraverted people tend to perform better than introverts).

Interviews as Tests

It helps to understand that every problem has three components: 1) a stimulus; 2) an employee response; and, 3) a result. If you have tracked this article so far, you should understand that learning all three components are important to knowing whether the applicant has the job skills you need.

Vendors who sell behavioral interviewing programs often train participants on how to ask for background information, to probe specifically for what the candidate did or said, and to verify the results. These activities go by many acronyms (BEI, BBC, STAR, ABC, and so forth); however, regardless of the term used, the most important goal in behavior interviews is gathering sufficient information about all three components so applicant faking is minimized and specific applicant skills are clarified. Accuracy leads to better hiring decisions.

Simulations, pencil and paper tests, case studies, planning exercises, and the like, follow the same stimulus-response-result pattern. The main difference is you control the stimulus and know the result you expect. That improves accuracy.

Conclusion

The recruiting field is awash in nonsense and bad advice. This leads organizations to hire too many wrong people and reject too many right ones. Experts estimate this cost ranges anywhere between 20% to 50% of base salary. Being passionate about a hiring methodology and knowing it is valid and reliable are not the same thing. If a product or report seems off-target, ask to see studies proving scores actually predict job performance, look at the vendor’s professional credentials to see if they belong to the right associations (SIOP), or simply ask if the product was specifically developed to predict job performance. A vendor making claims that sound too good to be true are no different than the emails announcing your lottery winnings. A little common sense and education makes a world of difference.

InovaHire is the latest offering in the crowded job board market. It’s a traditional job board except that job postings and employer profiles are free. The company generates revenue on a pay-per-view basis for display ads and links back to advertiser websites. For now these reside in two resource centers: one for candidates that offers things like resume writing and office supplies, and one for employers offering drug testing services and office furniture.

There’s also the usual employer profile enhanced with a clever Amazon-like feature that shows job-seekers what other sites people who visited that employer also viewed. That works both ways. Employers searching candidate profiles get to see who else other employers looked at.

What sets InovaHire apart is a sort of Instant Interview request. When you come across a candidate interesting enough to talk to, InovaHire enables you to contact them and schedule an online interview. Both of you need to have a microphone and webcam, but these are so ubiquitous — and so cheap — that it’s almost a non-issue. Of course there are other online interview solutions out there, but InovaHire’s solution is free and doesn’t require anything special in the way of software or connections.

In other ways, InovaHire is fairly standard, perhaps a touch dated. Resumes have to be entered manually in the fields the company provides. Jobseekers must provide a date of birth, but are told it won’t be displayed, so we have to assume it will eventually be used to target ads based on demos.

Founders Eric Schifone and Tanya Willette hail from New England, in the Boston area. Schifone has experience in high tech recruiting, while Willette, recently out of Southern New Hampshire University, has been working as an independent consultant to small firms for several years.

Originally published August 6, 2008.

Dating and recruiting have a lot in common. Learn how to improve your recruiting efforts by applying the most common dating rules.

Dating rule #1
First impressions are critical.

Recruiting application:
Differentiate yourself. Resist the “I have a great position for you” especially if you have never spoken to them.

Dating rule #2
Don’t believe everything you see. We have all heard stories from people that signed up for an online dating service and were shocked when their date was two feet shorter and 10 years older than the profile.

Recruiting application:
Candidates exaggerate their strengths and skills and down play their weaknesses. Do not assume anything. Prescreen, interview, administer assessments, and call the references before you present the candidate to your hiring manager.

Dating rule #3
Play hard to get. Desperation is the world’s worst perfume.

Recruiting application:
If you make a huge fuss over the candidate and beg them to interview, you will diminish your negotiating power.

Dating rule #4
Be selective. You can not change people.

Recruiting application:
Look for the red flags; don’t avoid them. It is better for you to uncover any candidate weaknesses or issues than your hiring manager discovering them. Your name and reputation is all you have in this business.

Dating rule #5
Prepare for the date.

Recruiting application:
If your candidate has spent 20 minutes on the phone with you and takes time off work to come to interview, and then you ask them “so, tell me what you want to do?” — you are wasting the candidate’s time. You should have notes on the candidate’s resume that you want to clarify, and if appropriate, the company profiles that best match what your candidate’s needs.

Dating rule #6
Don’t talk too much. People who express the “enough about me, what do you think about me?” attitude sit home alone, a lot.

Recruiting application:
The candidate should be doing most of the talking. Assess what the candidate has to offer, what they need, and then set expectations of how you will work together. Let the candidate talk about the interview before you disclose the hiring manager’s view. If you blurt out “they love you, you are the best candidate they have ever met!” — what do you think happens to the candidate’s salary requirements?

Dating rule #7
Follow up with your date.

Recruiting application:
As an industry, one of the biggest complaints we get from candidates and hiring managers is the lack of communication. No news is still considered news to the candidate; make sure you keep your candidate in the loop.

Dating rule #8
Don’t be afraid to end the date early.

Recruiting application:
Prescreen carefully, ask the hard questions, and always tell the candidate the truth. If they are not going to fit into your recruiting focus (skills, salary expectations, location, etc.), coach or make suggestions regarding who may be able to help them in the market.

Dating rule #9
Improve your odds by hanging out where (like) people hang out.

Recruiting application:
If you are recruiting technology talent, sign up and participate in technology activities in your market. Volunteer at association meetings to check members in: you will meet every attending member, every meeting.

Explain to people you meet that there are two types of people you would like to be introduced to: those who are leaders in their field and are looking for an opportunity and those who are leaders in their field and are not looking for an opportunity right now. You are an expert in your market, so people who are not looking now would still benefit from knowing you and the people in your network.

Dating Rule #10
They will not buy the cow if they are getting the milk for free.

Recruiting application:
When you agree to represent a candidate, you are entering into a business agreement. You need to set clear expectations of how the process must work. If the candidate will not agree to the terms, they are not committed to you, so turn them loose.

We rely more and more on pictures, graphics, and videos to display data, deliver the news, give us instructions, and keep us up-to-date with our families. The facts are amazing. Using Quantcast as my source, here is a rough idea of what’s going on. The online version of the New York Times, for example, has a monthly readership that averages about 14 million people in the United States. And that’s the largest readership of any print media I could find. The online Wall Street Journal does a paltry 4 million and even the prestigious Economist does only 3 million globally and most are seeing declining readership.

On the other hand, YouTube averages about 71 million viewers monthly — just in the U.S. And its rivals are also doing well and growing. Veoh does about 23 million, Hulu about 19 million, and Break about 15 million globally.

This indicates a decisive trend: more and more of us are getting information and education from video, rather than from words – whether in print or online.

We have already seen video slowly gaining in popularity and importance in recruiting. All top-tier career sites incorporate both pictures and video. Usually the videos are of employees talking about their jobs, but some include campus tours or chats with the CEO or a hiring manager. Many recruiters have received a video resume, and chat rooms have buzzed with concerns over the legality of such resumes and whether they should be accepted.

I don’t believe there is any serious legal issue in using video resumes, as long as your organization has a policy about how they are used. They are no more discriminatory than a face-to-face interview and may actually help to showcase communication skills and other positive traits. They can speed up the pre-screening process and may even eliminate the need for the number of interviews we subject candidates to.

Younger candidates, who are just entering the job market, may prefer to create a video resume as it reflects the media with which they are most comfortable. I can also easily imagine a time when the face-to-face interview is replaced with a live, virtual interview, perhaps with the hiring manger and several others also present virtually. The use of video lowers costs, expands the number of people who can participate in an interview, allows asynchronous viewing, and makes it more convenient for a candidate.

Here are just four of the ways organizations are using video.

1. Branding and position promotion. Many organizations are including videos that showcase the organization or promote a specific job or group of jobs to prospective candidates. For example, KPMG, Starbucks, and Nike all incorporate at least one video on their careers’ homepage. Many other organizations include clips of chats with employees or even take you on a guided tour of the company, as does Tivo. Just as the Internet allowed sites such as Amazon to provide more product information and user ratings, candidates are now starting to expect the same from career sites. The practice of incorporating videos about the organization and about available positions will expand over the next few years as candidates expect a much higher level of information and awareness than they did even two years ago. Several companies produce these types of videos. One is a Dutch company, C-Looks, which is able to provide videos for a variety of purposes, including promotion. Another is RecruiTV, which allows you to make and embed videos in your career site. Still another in this expanding arena is Vipe, an organization that serves both the corporate marketing effort as well as the candidate.
2. Screening or interviewing candidates. Another growing use of video is to screen candidates. Sites such as InterviewStudio and FaceHire allow a recruiter to set up an online interview easily. InterviewStudio was founded by Colleen Aylward who is the author of a fabulous white paper that I recommend you download a video called “Unmuddying the Waters.” Here is an example of a tool that allows a recruiter to video chat with a candidate. Candidate screening via Skype or other webcam service seems to be inevitable and a great way to expand the limited capabilities of a telephone.
3. Resumes. The practice of candidates submitting their resumes as video clips is just beginning. From as far back as the first CD/ROMS, candidates have been intrigued by the idea of submitting their resume in a video format. Video has advantages – it allows candidates to show their communication skills and it is often easier for a candidate to be expressive about past achievements when telling a story to a camera. Although these are not a substitute for an interview, they are a way to pre-screen candidates and develop a more complete picture than one gets from a written resume. If you are doing a lot of college hiring or are looking for entry-level people, the video resume may be a good way to differentiate candidates and a way to get more qualified people to apply. Many younger people who lack in-depth experience but feel they have other qualities might rather put together a short video than write a resume. The Dutch site C-Looks allows candidates to easily make their own short resume using a webcam. John Younger, President and Founder of Accolo, a San Francisco-Based RPO provider, says, “While I don’t think videos designed to replace a complete resume will ever take off, short videos where a candidate answers one or two particular questions will become very popular and useful.”
4. Outplacement. Videos are a wonderful gift to outgoing employees as part of their severance package. A creative organization could provide the tools and coaching to help each person create a video summary of their experience and capabilities that could be circulated to organizations that are hiring. A copy could be given to the employee to use on their website or as part of en email job-seeking campaign. Once again, C-Looks provides this service as well.

Over the next few years, all recruiters will come to embrace and more effectively use video to brand, inform candidates, receive resumes, provide information to candidates and hiring managers, and provide onboarding for new employees. Are you ready to join?

Listen here

Yet in our annual recruiter survey, 50% of most hiring problems are attributed to the lack of assessment, interviewing, and recruiting skills on the part of the hiring manager.

Taming this 500-pound gorilla is the big problem that should be addressed, not seeing more candidates who won’t get hired by anyone. From this cynical perspective, here are some ideas on how to tame your personal gorillas:

1. Make sure you and your hiring managers know the job. Don’t start looking for candidates unless you know what the person is actually going to be doing on the job. To uncover this, just ask your hiring managers what they’ll be telling your candidates when they ask, “tell me about the job, some of the big projects and the growth opportunities?” If they can’t answer this question, you’ll wind up hiring the best of the average candidates. Require a list of the top 5-6 performance objectives describing what the person will be doing as part of the req approval process as a first step in the taming process. Here’s an article on how to prepare these performance-driven job descriptions.
2. Don’t sell the job, sell the next step. The best people want to explore opportunities in bite-size chunks. So if you rush to push a specific job in a specific location with a specific title and specific comp, you’ll only attract those who are actively looking. Instead, set your processes up with the idea that they’ll use each step in the hiring process as a means for your candidates to get more information about the job and whether it’s a good career move or not. This means hiring managers must be willing to meet people on an exploratory basis. Great managers do this anyway, so by making it part of your hiring process, you can tell every other manager this is a “best practice” benchmark. Here’s an article on how to implement this type of “sell the next step” process.
3. Use a structured performance-based interview that directly assesses on-the-job performance. A comprehensive interview can be conducted using two core questions in combination with a detailed work-history review. The first question focuses on digging into a candidate’s major accomplishments and is then repeated to evaluate consistency and performance over time. Comparing these accomplishments to the performance expectations of the job is a major part of the assessment process. The second question involves a give-and-take dialogue around a real job-related problem to assess thinking, planning, and creative skills. This type of interview is scalable with different interviewers using the same questions, but digging into different accomplishments and looking for different job success factors (e.g., planning, team skills, managerial fit, and motivation). If you don’t have some type of structured interview process in place that assesses on-the-job competency and motivation, managers will do their own thing and focus on what they believe to be important to them.
4. Be a juror, not a judge. Errors due to emotions, over-valuing intuition, bias, and lack of preparation can be reduced just by eliminating the yes/no voting system. In its place, implement a multi-factor assessment process where interviewers formally debrief and evaluate each job success-factor independently. This way, no one makes a hiring decision until all of the evidence (facts, details, org charts, test results, etc.) is shared and discussed. HR must implement this process and ensure it’s being followed. This alone will tame your gorillas without having to be in the cage.
5. Increase your close rate by creating an opportunity gap and getting the candidate to sell you. The best people accept jobs based primarily on what they’re going to be doing, learning, and becoming. Unfortunately, telling people these things is not as impactful as them learning it for themselves. This can be done in an interview by demonstrating the difference in their accomplishments in comparison to real job needs. For example, suggesting to a software developer that you think he’s a bit light to handle a major project alone will get the person to sell you on why the person is qualified for the job. This is a great way for managers to present the job as a series of growth and learning opportunities instead of trying to convince the candidate to take an offer. Here is an article describing in detail how to do this during your next interview.
6. Manage and sell time. Time is a critical asset that most managers waste and most candidates overlook. Preparing performance profiles up-front, using a structured interview, conducting a formal debriefing process, and working closely with their recruiters will save managers time during the hiring process by seeing fewer, but more qualified candidates. It will save even more time after the person is hired since the person will be motivated and competent to do the work required, rather than having the manager over-manage them. This idea of managing time can also be presented to the candidate as a recruiting point, by suggesting that the steeper the learning curve of the job the faster the person will be able to move up in the organization. This point alone can offset a 5%-10% difference in salary between one offer and another.

Taming hiring managers is the 500-pound gorilla in the room. Somehow, most recruiters and HR leaders don’t even see it sitting there.

Wrong-Way Thinking

There is a common fallacy among a significant number of people that anyone can do anything: a good-looking applicant will make a high performing employee; a high performing employee will make a good manager; or, a highly skilled employee in Job A will also be a highly skilled employee in Job B.

Sorry, folks. We all know from experience this is general nonsense. Stories are legend about a top salesperson or technical whiz who failed as a manager; or, about a marketing whiz-kid who fast-tracked into the executive suite only to crash and burn on the job.

Let’s put this puppy to bed. The only time that past performance in Job A accurately predicts future performance in Job B is when both jobs are require virtually the same competencies. If Job B is different, requires more competencies or better quality ones, all bets are off. In fact, the only reliable way someone might even guess at future performance is to know the employee screwed up his or her last job.

Consider the Peter Principle. If you don’t know the term, either Google “Peter Principle” or look it up here. In short, Dr. Laurence Peter gave multiple examples of how employees tend to rise in the organization until they reach their natural level of incompetence. His message: every time that job requirements change — or an employee changes jobs — there is a strong probability that they will not be competent in the new role. Although Peter uses corporate ladder-climbing as his examples, his principles apply equally to all people holding jobs. The Peter Principle is a classic must-read for every recruiter or hiring manager.

In the next few paragraphs, I’ll explain why the Peter-Principle is alive and well.

Little Observations = Big Assumptions

The world is a huge, complicated, and unpredictable place. If we had to investigate thoroughly every situation before making a decision, we would run out of hours in the day. So, evolution has blessed/cursed us with an unconscious tendency to make snap decisions based on something we learned earlier. For example, we consider taller people to be more skilled than shorter people (e.g., adults are always bigger than kids); we assume that best-dressed applicants will be better performers than other ones (e.g., we equate attractiveness with skill); or, we assume bad job experiences were the applicant’s fault (e.g., blame the victim).

We call this the halo/horns effect: or, use a snippet of data to form an overall opinion (i.e., a spelling mistake must mean incompetence; a charismatic employee is also a competent one; or, graduating from an Ivy League college is better than a public school).

Little observations often lead to big mistakes.

The Interview Hammer and the Applicant Nail

Ask any recruiter manager who relies on (unstructured) interviews and he or she is likely to swear by their accuracy. Look at any sales manager and he or she will say they are a good judge of character. However, when you look at the employees hired by the same person, you will wonder, “What was this guy/gal smokin’ when they hired the troglodites?

There is a major disconnect between being asking get-to-know-you questions and evaluating job skills; industry-wide research shows it to be about 50%. That is, interviews may screen out blatantly unqualified applicants, but it’s a coin-toss whether survivors have sufficient job skills. Ask yourself, did the person who interviewed/hired you really know whether you could do the job or not?

Any recruiter or manager who is only familiar with interviews (or a silly training test), is doomed to believe to think one tool can measure every job skill.

Job Funnels

Jobs are more than titles. They are more like an upside-down funnel. As a general rule, higher-level jobs need more and better competencies. Take sales, for example. A true professional salesperson has exceptional rapport building skills, is skilled asking the right questions at the right time, only makes presentations that fit the prospect’s needs, and can assist buyers to overcome the fear of making a bad decision.

Now, move the salesperson into a management role. The job requirements change significantly. In addition to individual sales skills, the person must become a coach, a planner, and a sales diagnostician. Skills that came naturally as a salesperson must now be broken down into hundreds of teachable elements. In addition to having the right skills, the new manager must be as excited with the thrill of the coach as well as the thrill of the close.

The following job roles point-out a few of these differences:

1. Individual contributors must have skills to do the job without assistance;
2. In addition to their individual contributor skills, first line managers must also be skilled at coaching, planning, and diagnosing subordinate shortcomings;
3. Mid-managers usually require skills in group influence, tactics, analysis, planning, and mentoring; and,
4. Executive managers are usually required to be strategists, navigators, and motivators.

We can’t always rely on job titles to describe job functions. I have seen occasions where a fancy title disguises an individual contributor, as well as complicated jobs with simple titles. The key to successful performance is to know what exactly what skills are required; then, use a variety of structured interviews, pencil and paper tests, and simulations that accurately evaluate them.

Instead, consider successful recruiting more like a well-planned football drive, where time of possession is key. If you’re not into football analogies, the idea here is that top people don’t make critical career decisions on the first call or after the first interview. And if you try to push too hard to get a commitment you’ll drive the best away. This is equivalent to a turnover.

With a great football weekend ahead, here’s what it takes to turn a successful drive into a touchdown:

1. Don’t fumble the kickoff. On the recruiting playing field this is equivalent to the candidate asking about the compensation first, or telling you she’s not interested. It’s also forcing a candidate to apply for the job before she can talk to someone about it, to get a better idea if the job is even worthwhile considering. For better kickoff returns, add a chat feature today to your career website and let your candidates IM a recruiter. Or add a series of FAQs about each job. When calling a candidate on the phone for the first time, whether the person’s active or passive, you must not discuss compensation under any circumstances for at least the first 10-15 minutes! The goal of the first encounter is to switch the conversation to career opportunity and away from compensation, or any other form of “not interested.” (Here’s an article with more on this critical step.) Rather than sell the job, your goal is to sell the next step. In this case, it’s a 10- minute conversation just to figure out if the job is worth getting serious about. A good kickoff return will give you great field position, and this is just as critical in football as it is in recruiting.
2. Get lots of first downs. While you might have a big 30- or 40-yard play now and then, this should be the exception, not the rule. If you’re relying on big plays to score, you’ll lose a lot of candidates who need to move slowly to digest what you’re offering. Force-feeding information at hyper-speed won’t work. A career move requires time for the person to digest the information. Nurturing the candidate along, suggesting another interview or discussion is how this information is best presented in order to be absorbed properly. This is why selling the next step is so important, rather than forcing the candidate to consider the job, the comp, and the location during the first call.
3. Prevent turnovers. Once you begin a drive downfield, don’t do dumb things that cause the deal to instantly fall apart. Recruiters who don’t know the job and managers who over-talk and sell too soon are two examples of recruiting turnovers. Managers who expect top performers to be excited about the job before they know anything about it are the most turnover prone. Turnovers can also be caused when members of the hiring team ask superficial question or are equally clueless about real jobs needs. Lack of professionalism at any step in the hiring process can result in unnecessary turnovers and the loss of some great candidates.
4. Convert your third-downs. Once in awhile you’ll only have one shot to keep the deal alive. For example, if the candidate says she doesn’t like the manager or the job isn’t big enough and wants to withdraw her name from consideration, you’ll have to come up with a big third-down play. In this case, ask the candidate if she’d reconsider if you made the job bigger, or if you could demonstrate that the style the manager used during the interview isn’t the same as his on-the-job persona. Of course, you then have to prove it if the candidate agrees to go forward, but that’s how you convert third-downs and keep the drive alive.
5. Keep the defense honest. Don’t tip your hand too soon. Overselling the candidate, over-talking, and under-listening are equivalent to telling the defense you’re going to pass on every play. This is no way to win a ball game or hire a top performer. Keep the candidate guessing, mention other top candidates, question the candidate’s breadth of experience, and excite the candidate with projects bigger than he’s handled in the past. This is how you keep the person interested throughout the assessment and recruiting process.
6. Time of possession is key. Don’t rush to close. Not only does the candidate need time to evaluate what you’re offering, you’ll increase your close rate by getting the person to invest more time in evaluating your opportunity rather than the competition’s. I suggest more interviews spread over a few days or weeks, rather than pushing them all into one day. Also add a take-home case study and a Profiles International online evaluation for all your candidates once you get serious. (Email info@adlerconcepts.com for information about the Profiles International online evaluation.) The case study allows the candidate a day or two to evaluate a problem likely to be faced on the job with the results presented in a formal give-and-take panel interview. The Profiles is a one-hour cognitive and behavioral style assessment and provides invaluable insight into the candidate. Not only are the results useful, but when candidates agree to participate in these time-consuming tasks, they’re expressing serious interest and increasing their commitment to you.
7. Know your competition. One size doesn’t fit all. Some candidates are interested in security, others want challenging projects, and some want career growth. Customize your approach depending on the candidate’s needs. We suggest a multi-factor close where the candidate rank orders his job requirements. Some of the items to be considered include work content, job stretch, job challenges, growth opportunities, company culture, compensation, security, the hiring manager, and team. (Send us an email, info@adlerconcepts.com, if you’d like to see the whole list.) With this custom playbook you can change your play calling at the line of scrimmage to ensure your candidate gets the information required to make a well thought-out final decision. Of course, evaluate the candidate across multiple factors as well, so stop the traditional series of one-on-one interviews that are both duplicative and exhausting. Instead, consider tours with debriefing sessions, group interviews, some intense one-on-ones, a take-home project, and a business lunch. Then formally debrief using a broad-based selection criteria. (Here’s the 10-factor candidate assessment form we suggest for this.)
8. Maintain a competitive edge throughout the drive. The key to effective recruiting is applicant control. This means staying the buyer from first contact through offer acceptance and final close. As part of applicant control, your job is not only to advance downfield, but recognize that first downs are earned by getting the candidate to agree to something significant at each step in the process. For example, don’t arrange the first interview with the hiring manager unless you get agreement from the candidate that she’ll be looking at the job as a career move with a modest increase in salary. Use the second round of interviews to gain more concessions, like a possible start date and informal agreement on the benefits package. Set the final offer meeting with the candidate agreeing to formally accepting within 24 hours. This is applicant control, and it essential for closing the best entry-level candidates as well as senior executives.
9. Don’t fumble in the red zone. You must score when you’re within sight of the goal line. Make sure you know where you stand compared to the competition on all critical decision factors the candidate is likely to consider. Giving the candidate the multi-factor decision form mentioned above ensures the candidate is looking at the job broadly, and you’re not surprised by their order of importance. This way during the drive to close you can use each subsequent interview step to cover each of these factors. Caution: don’t present the offer too soon or reveal your hand. You haven’t scored yet.
10. Score. Everything has been a waste of time if a candidate says she’s not interested or accepts another offer or counter-offer. Scoring in the game of recruiting means the candidate has accepted your offer on fair terms and shows up on the start date. The best way to score more often is to test every aspect of the offer before you make it. While it’s important not to fumble the kickoff, it’s more important not to fumble on the one-yard line. Before making the offer formal, review the terms in detail and ask the candidate if she’ll accept it on these terms if it’s formally presented without hesitation. If you sense hesitation, side-step the forward progression and find out the concerns. Then ask the person if she’d accept the offer if the concerns were satisfactorily addressed. Uncovering the candidate’s concerns before you make the offer is essential if you want to make more placements. Of course you’ll need to address the concerns to close the deal, but rushing the offer without knowing if the person will accept is naïve at best, and one sure way to lose more candidates than necessary.

Slow down and make more placements. While you want to move as fast as possible, the best people will not move faster than they can absorb the information. They’ll opt-out otherwise. It’s just like being pushed into buying anything that requires some significant degree of comparison shopping and evaluation. Build this slow and steady process into every phase of your recruiting efforts and watch your placement rate soar.

Fumbles, turnovers, incomplete passes, sacks, and failed third-down conversions are all caused by going too fast. Don’t sell the job, sell the next step.

“The successful applicant will have 10 years experience in the widget industry.”

Hogwash!

The end result of this approach is that companies hire the industry retreads.

Perhaps, employers think that this person will bring along valuable competitive secrets — maybe even some clients. While that may occasionally happen, this approach negatively impacts the company. They may as well hang a sign outside that says, “No new ideas permitted” because that is what you get when you focus your search on industry people only. What often happens is that the individual gets hired because they can create the illusion of brilliance by using industry jargon to blind the interviewer. “Eureka! We’ve found our sales manager! She is very strategic!”

Every company thinks they are in an industry that is so unique and has so many nuances that the hire must have industry background. But most industry information can be taught. The company needs to get over its hubris thinking that its industry is so special that it takes an industry veteran to be successful.

Product knowledge is not the main driver in a successful salesperson, nor is it the primary one for the successful sales manager. CEOs bounce from Fortune 1000 company to Fortune 1000 company based on their CEO acumen, not their industry knowledge.

A more prudent approach for hiring the right sales manager is to look for a candidate who comes to the table with the specialized skill-set associated with a sales manager. This is a specialized skill set that is often portable to any industry. The role of the sales manager is to both be a leader and a manager, which are not usually skills developed in the womb; they are cultivated and developed through training and experience as a sales manager. Some of the elements that companies should be focused on when hiring the right sales manager include:

• Recruitment. Whether the company has an opening on the sales team or not, the best sales managers are on a never-ending quest for strong talent. As the prospective employer, you want to understand the candidate’s process for screening sales candidates. How do they prime the applicant pump? Can they develop a profile of the ideal salesperson, and prioritize it between required and desired attributes? What is their process for evaluating candidates against the profile? Ask any company why they miss their revenue targets and most will tell you that having unfilled slots on the team is a contributing factor. Recruitment is a very important arrow in the sales manager’s quiver.

• Onboarding. Rarely can you hire a salesperson, hand them their territory, and send them off with a good luck kiss. Not if you expect them to be successful. Another key skill of the sales manager is their method for quickly assimilating the salesperson into the organization. What is their strategy to minimize the amount of time that the new salesperson is in a non-revenue generating capacity? What is their plan to make them productive in the least amount of time? How do they measure whether or not the neophyte salesperson is going to be successful?

• Process. Many companies have one superstar on their sales team — their rainmaker. That’s not exactly a scalable model. It limits growth and creates exposure for the company if the rainmaker leaves. Scalable sales organizations are based on process. The entire team follows a specified model based on a defined formula. Find out if the candidate can create this process for the company, what experience they have in doing so, and what the results were.

• Metrics. The wonderful aspect of sales is that there is so much data that can be reviewed to understand trends and make changes to the business. While interviewing, scrutinize how the sales manager uses metrics in their approach. See how they have used metrics to affect performance of their team. Learn their approach to scrutinizing a sales pipeline or forecast.

• Compensation. The beauty of sales is that the compensation plan serves as the salesperson’s job description. This can also be a curse for the company if the wrong behaviors are rewarded by the plan. This is another important skill that a strong sales manager should possess. Find out their approach for developing the right compensation plan for the company. See how they determine which behaviors to reward, when, and how.

• Skill development. Sales is philosophy, so no one ever knows everything about it. It’s also very easy for salespeople to develop bad habits. Thus, the sales manager should have a skill development plan for their team. Get to know their approach for developing their team members. Probe how they inspire the overachievers to continue to overachieve. Ask they manage the underperformers and lead them to either perform or deselect from the company.

• Leadership. The first six items fall into a management category. However, the strong sales managers are also leaders. Their sales teams will run through walls for them. Their salespeople not only want to be successful for themselves, but also for their manager. Determine how this sales-management candidate creates an environment where others are inspired to follow them and their teachings. Leadership skills and sales force retention work hand-in-hand. Strong leaders keep their strong players on the team for the long haul.

In addition to cultural fit, these are the seven key elements that a company should use to make a decision to hire a particular sales-management candidate. What the employer will get with this hiring approach is a strong, scalable organization with fresh ideas.