Questioning the Process

Written by Jill Barville   

Refined interview techniques can lead to more successful hires.

The success of employee selection has the potential to help or hinder corporate culture and profitability. For each filled position that fails to stick—whether the employee leaves or just doesn’t measure up to expectations—the company loses productivity, increases hiring costs and may even suffer morale setbacks.

Several years ago, John Sporleder, director of human resources at Liberty Lake-based Telect Inc., says it “hit him like a ton of bricks” that hiring decisions were going to be extremely important to the company’s future, and it needed to have a really good process in place.

This perception is supported by the IBM Global Human Capital Study 2008, which surveyed more than 400 human-resources executives. Almost half of the organizations surveyed reported employee turnover has increased in the last two years.

“Given the changes in employee demographics, the ease and speed of switching employers and the differing expectations of the Generation Y work force, we believe that companies will have to become more, rather than less, innovative in the ways they attract, motivate and develop employees,” the report says.

After creating and using his own process for almost four years, Sporleder says Telect now has a hiring success rate of above 90 percent.

Sporleder declines to explain parts of his process; he sees it as a competitive advantage. Still, he offers some interviewing insights that can be applied by companies large or small.

Focus on People More Than Technical Skills

The interview may incorporate questions that verify job skills, but it is a common mistake to focus too much interview time on determining technical skills, Sporleder says.

By the time a company gets to the interview stage of job-candidate selection, all of the prospects should have the ability to perform the job. A résumé review should weed out people who don’t have the proper training, education or experience to perform.

“I have found that when people aren’t successful, they don’t lose their job or leave their job because they are not technically a good fit for the job,” he says. “They leave for other reasons.”

Other reasons may include personality, ethics, communication style, interactions with colleagues or customers or other work behaviors, so the interview should be structured to expose those types of characteristics.

Determine Key Traits

It’s like shopping for quality undergarments. To find employees with the right fit, a company must first know its own measurements. What are its corporate values, goals and strategic vision? What is the essence of the workplace culture? What characteristics do most successful employees demonstrate?

Defining key traits enables a company to create specific interview questions and the foundation for assessing candidates’ answers. Key traits tell a company what to look for.

Develop Probing Questions

“We have a set of tougher questions that kind of get at things a little bit deeper,” says Sporleder, explaining that the goal is to get past the layer of preparation to the candidate’s true personality, motivations, abilities and work behaviors.

One technique that Sporleder incorporates is using behavioral-based questions. These questions follow the philosophy that past performance is a good indicator of future performance. Where a situational question asks what one would do in a hypothetical situation, the behavioral question asks what one did in a real situation. The list of questions is broken down by category, such as the ability to think conceptually, ethical behavior and the ability to get along with people. The categories should be closely aligned with the key traits a company wants to find.

The questions are then parsed amongst an interviewing team, with some questions repeated by multiple interviews, which is a great way to find inconsistencies and probe even deeper.

Team Up

That interview team is crucial to the process, says Sporleder, who adds he uses people who “are really good at sizing people up in a short period of time.” The team is trained to know what traits to look for and how to ask probing questions without straying into inappropriate territory.

The candidates then go through back-to-back interviews with groups of two or three interviewers, an intense process that takes half a day or longer. The more intimate approach works better than a panel approach, says Sporleder, because the candidate relaxes more. It also enables the team to ask variations of the same question and find inconsistencies.

Discuss Observations

Perhaps the most important step in the process is the debrief that happens a couple days after the interviews. Here, the team sits down to discuss its observations and provide information to the hiring manager, who makes the decision.

“This is where the learning and the understanding come out,” says Sporleder. “They are going to tell me a lot of stuff about that candidate that I didn’t pick up when I interviewed them.”

The result, he says, is in the end a company has a more thorough understanding of the candidate, leading to better hires. “We have made better-quality decisions with the process.”

Jill Barville is a freelance writer and technical writing consultant who lives in Spokane Valley, WA. This article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Inland Business Catalyst magazine. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.