So Much for the Gut Feeling... - [website] Published: 3rd of May 2011 by: (c) Staff Training Reporter
Interviewing job applicants is something most managers will have to do at some point in their careers, if not often...
... and research has shown that managers untrained in this skill make the wrong choices more than half the time.
A 'gut feeling' is one if the reasons cited by many managers as the reason for hiring applicants after job interviews, but this has been proven to be one of the least accurate ways of determining whether a prospective employee will perform adequately on the job.
Furthermore, a study by Lawrence et al. found that when managers were asked to select the factors they thought would be the best indicators of performance on the job, they only managed to select three that bore any relevance to the job the applicants would be doing, four that bore no relevance at all and five that actually had a negative correlation to job performance.
These results show us that although managers are tasked with the interviewing process, without proper training on how to conduct a successful interview they may not actually be the best people to do the job.
It is still, however, best to have the manager involved in the interviewing process as he or she will be the one working with the new employee, so having managerial staff competent in this procedure will be beneficial to the entire company and will, at the end of the day, make for a better manager.
To be truly successful during the interviewing process it needs to be seen as any other project; it needs to be planned for, should have a strategy and there should be contingency plans in place.
In the same way that sellers need to ask the right questions of their prospective clients, managers need to know what the right questions are for their interviewees. In this way the competencies of the job applicant can be assessed.
But before the right questions can be developed it will need to be determined what the actual competencies required for the job are. Now we're getting somewhere...
The way managers would ascertain these facts is by studying the results of the company's best performers and contrasting them with those of the worst performers – this will tell you what the key factors are required for the job.
Then it is important to remember that an interview is a process whereby the interviewer makes a decision on the applicant's ability to perform the job, not simply to get to know the applicant and exchange facts.
For this reason it can be a good idea to have more than one person involved in the interviewing process to broaden the scope of perspective. For example, a manager assesses the interviewee as well as someone of an obviously lower seniority like a secretary (putting the applicant in the position of power) and then seeing how the results and impressions differ.
