Let’s look at how 95 percent of people are hired.
Besides a little variability, almost every person, at some point in their career, has been hired in this manner: Interview someone for an hour. If you like them, you make them an offer.
Sound about right? Sure you might actually add some other steps, like phone screening first, a second one hour interview with someone else later, but your reality is that it’s an hour interview and the decision is made!
We’ve taken the one-hour interview and expanded it with science. We add pre-employment screens, cognitive testing, background screens, personality profiles, etc.
But, we still go back to the one-hour interview: “Well, Tim tested off the charts, all the data says, he will be a rock star, but I didn’t connect with him in the one hour interview. I don’t want to hire him.”
We allow our hiring managers to do this, often.
A much better way to hire would be to have the actual candidate work with you for like four to six weeks before you actually hire them. Yes, an extended job tryout. Pay them to come interview with you for four weeks.
That would actually be a better way, but it would probably limit your options for candidates. It would leave you with people who are unemployed, the under-employed, those working in consultant or temporary type of jobs, or those people who love your brand so much they would be willing to risk it all to prove to you that they are the one you really want.
Or, you can continue on the one-hour interview platform.
But take away all the other stuff. In fact, take away the one hour and just do an initial impression interview. It might take about three minute: “Initially I really liked Tim! Let’s do this.”
You would virtually get the same exact candidate as you do with your one hour process, but you would save so much time, effort, and resources. Your hiring quality and retention would almost remain unchanged.
It really comes down to this:
The reality is that most of us would be more willing to do the “Three minute first impression hire” than the “Extended job tryout hire” even though one leads to actual better hires, and the other does exactly what you have now.
We fear that changing to something we view as “radical” will be worse than what we have — even though we know it won’t. So, we keep doing what we do., scheduling one hour interviews and hiring those people who we “felt” the best connection with.
If I was you, I’d go with the three-minute interview.
It’s simple. It’s the same. And, your hiring managers will actually like the new process.
This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.
