Tips for conducting more meaningful interviews

The one-on-one interview is a lot like a first date, says Herb Greenberg, PhD, author of How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer: The Five Qualities that Make Salespeople Great.

Dr. Greenberg asks: Have you ever gotten away from the idiocy of the first date? Do you remember the mating dance? Everyone being on his or her best behavior? The point says Greenberg, who has 41 years HR experience and is founder and CEO of Caliper Corporation, which is a psychological testing and HR consulting company, is the interview is set in an artificial environment and by its design is fraught with weaknesses when it comes to really knowing if the person you interviewed is ideal for the company.

Another reason that interviews are often over-rated as a means of qualifying new employees is that employers have placed so much emphasis on the interview process that many candidates have become professional interviewees, says Frank Heasley, PhD, President and CEO of MedZilla.com, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that targets jobseekers and HR professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science.

Experts suggest that interviewers don't spend all their time reviewing job experience. According to Caliper's research, experience is not a valid predictor of job success. Twenty years' experience, may be one year of bad experience repeated 20 times, Dr. Greenberg says.

Instead, employers should focus on determining a candidate's competency to do the job.
A competency assessment, according to Dr. Heasely, must consider both the actual requirements of the position, ranging from the work to the kinds of social interactions needed (which are generally not well defined), to the candidate's abilities to handle them (which are usually not easily quantifiable).

Susan Taylor, vice president human resources of Miami, Fla.-based Kos Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharmaceutical company engaged in developing, manufacturing and marketing proprietary prescription products for the treatment of chronic diseases, says that Kos has developed a detailed interview process, called behavioral or dimensional interviewing. The process is based on the premise that a person's past behavior is the best predictor of his future behavior, both on and off the job. Kos management asks candidates for specific examples of what happened at other jobs and how they handled the experiences. We look to those past experiences as predictors of the future. And look for threads of success within that would fit with the job requirements and the culture of the company, Taylor says.

For the hiring process to be successful, a great deal of skill goes into the processes, such as telephone screenings, before the actual one-on-one, Taylor says. But the face-to-face interview is where the rubber meets the road. And the candidate that looks good on paper might be totally different in a one-on-one interview. Or a candidate that comes in with a so-so resume might really fit well with the job or company.

To Taylor, candidates' personal philosophies about how they do their jobs are just as important as what they do on their jobs. Candidates' personal strengths, such as their attitudes, motivations, innovation, stability and social skills, are critical competencies in addition to job experience, training and education.

Where interviewers and interviewees fall short in the interview process is in their lack of preparation. Interviewees need to learn about the job and the company so that they can ask educated questions. The interviewer needs to look closely at the person's resume but also gather any other kind of information that she can so that the face-to-face time is spend probing into whether or not the candidate really is a good fit.

The most important thing that comes out of the actual interview, she says, is your sense of the person. The interview should reveal such fundamental things as whether you'd like having that person as your co-worker, says Lisa Aldisert, president, Pharos Alliance, a management consulting and leadership development firm in New York City. Aldisert wrote the book Valuing People: How Human Capital can be Your Strongest Asset.

Aldisert suggests asking: Would this person bring value to my organization? For example, if you're interviewing an intensive care nurse, questions to ask yourself might include: Does she appear to be someone who is very exacting? Does she have a keen eye and an ability to absorb a lot of details and manage those details well?

A person who is very poised, polished and is a great interviewee isn't necessarily the right hire, Aldisert says. Interviewers should stay as objective as possible and focused on asking questions that are competency based.

Of course, a company has to first determine what the necessary competencies are for specific jobs before management can structure interview questions around them. Fred P. Lange, an HR professional for more than 20 years and president of HR Architect, a firm that provides outsourcing resources services for small- to medium-sized businesses, says the ideal way to zero in on the right competencies for the job is to identify top performers in each job category and determine traits that are common among those top performers. Predictive profiles available commercially can also help identify key traits among winners in any job description. Then, in the interview, he says, you can ask behaviorally- anchored questions-giving them problem situations and asking them to describe their methodology for solving them.