What Part of the Four-Question Interview Don’t You Understand?

As I said in my last article, most interviewers end up measuring candidates’ interviewing skills ? not their ability to do the job ? during an interview. They think that a person with the right skills and experiences and some clever answers to their questions is a strong candidate. But interviewing is as much about recruiting as it is about determining competency. The four-question interview we advocate gets the candidate excited about the job. It indicates that the company has high standards, it validates the candidate by letting him or her describe the details of accomplishments, and it demonstrates that the hiring manager is a person with vision, strong leadership and high standards. Only four questions are needed to determine competency. The questions are easy, but it’s the answers that really matter. In fact, three of the questions are essentially the same. They follow this simple form: Doing – Doing – Doing – Thinking. Doing I Get the trend of individual accomplishments. Ask the candidate to describe 2-3 major accomplishments over the past 5-10 years. From this you’ll be able to determine motivation, initiative, talent, decision-making, and the ability to achieve results. Doing II Get the trend of team accomplishments. Ask the candidate to describe 2-3 major team accomplishments over the past 5-10 years. From this you’ll be able to determine the ability to persuade, manage, and motivate others, and the actual role the candidate had. Have the candidate draw an organization chart for each job during the questions. This will uncover span of control, the types of people the candidate works with, and the ability to lead a group to accomplish results. Doing III Anchor each performance objective. Get a specific example of a major accomplishment that compares to each of the top 5-6 major objectives required in the job. This is why knowing job requirements is critical to an accurate interview. From this question you’ll know if the previous accomplishments are comparable to the real needs of the job, and if the process used to achieve these results are appropriate and consistent with the company culture. Thinking Ask the candidate how they would solve or address each of the performance objectives. Get into a give-and-take discussion. This will demonstrate how the candidate will solve job-specific issues and problems. This gets at visualization skills. We discovered that candidates who can anticipate the needs of the job before starting have a higher likelihood of accomplishing the task. The key to the “Doing” questions is to get specific details about the results achieved, and actual examples of the process used to achieve these results. It takes about 10 minutes to paint a word picture of each accomplishment. It’s the process of pulling the information from the candidate that makes this technique so powerful. What you’ll discover is that many candidates who are initially weaker interviews shine with this type of approach to interviewing. An equal number of candidates who sound impressive in the beginning show their true lack of substance when they are required to substantiate their fa?ade of performance. The “Thinking” question provides an opportunity for realistic, job-related, problem-solving. We’ve discovered that it’s the combination of the Doing and Thinking that’s the real predictor of on-the-job success. While the thinking skills are critical, some interviewers overvalue them, without considering what the candidate has actually accomplished. Success requires a track record of personal growth consistent with the needs of the job, a track record of team leadership consistent with the needs of the job, a series of accomplishments comparable to the needs of the job, and an ability to visualize and anticipate the needs of job. When you put this together with a true understanding of the performance requirements of the position, you’ll be able to accurately measure job competency with only four questions. When you get every else on the interviewing team to do the same thing, you’ll have fundamentally altered how you hire top people in your company. Hiring top people is the goal; interviewing is just a tool used to achieve the goal. When you use the interview to recruit the candidate and assess competency at the same time, you’ve just elevated yourself into a higher level of sophistication and professionalism. <*SPONSORMESSAGE*>