Hiring Without the Guesswork

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The strategy at Advanced Network is to market the position to applicants -- "We really make them fight for the job," says Wiegand. When a candidate walks through the door for the first time, he or she is handed a piece of paper that describes the multifaceted hiring process. The list of hoops that applicants will have to jump through is introduced this way: "As you may know, the selection process at Advanced Network Design is tough. If you are up to the challenge, then here are the steps to take. . . ." They include an application form, a basic math and filing test, a 10-to 15-minute meeting with the president, and an in-depth interview.

Think, too, about the variety and texture of your interviews. Tom Garrison includes a home interview in the lineup. Coming at the end of the process, this meeting with the candidate's spouse isn't so much an interview as another window into the applicant's soul. "I don't care what the house looks like," explains Garrison. "I just want to know that the husband or wife is supportive in this move."

Of course, interviews with the candidate are what are most critical. Doing a good job here is tricky because of one unalterable fact about those presumably polite interchanges: you want to get under the applicant's skin, and he doesn't want you to.

Because you're in the position of power, you can take your pick of techniques that encourage the truth to surface. Time is a key ally. Tom Garrison's main interview lasts two to five hours and contains carefully timed peaks and valleys. After reviewing with candidates the results of a personality quiz, Garrison asks them to start with high school and describe their experiences up to the present.

"When you're talking about yourself, that's an upper," says Garrison. "Then we take the candidates on a downhill portion of the roller coaster." He will express concern with certain of the quiz's findings. The applicants must defend themselves. After a bit of that, Garrison says, "Let me tell you a little more about the job." That sends the applicants' spirits soaring again, because they figure they might get an offer.

After a few ups and downs, says Garrison, "you'll see their role playing come down. They'll say, 'Let me tell you the truth about something." Advanced Network's Wiegand, who says interviews must last between 45 minutes and 90 minutes to scratch the surface, concurs. "Once they hit that point, you can ask incredible questions about their job history and they'll just tell you."

Your other key interviewing tool: listening. In order to do that well, you need to know in advance what you want to hear. This is where your carefully crafted job description comes in, becoming a blueprint for the interview. Take your script of questions or list of behaviors into the interview and pose follow-up questions until the trait is uncovered. Don't concentrate on candidates' descriptions of their actions as much as you listen for the attitude or preference you're trying to uncover. Where possible, ask for examples from the past. It's too easy to make up wonderful responses about a hypothetical case.

Millard Manufacturing's Ron Parks is one of the most disciplined listeners we found. He first devised a list of questions that uncover behavioral traits and are also hard for applicants to see through. Then he trained himself and his managers to listen for linguistic patterns, as well as content, in their answers.

For example, to discover an applicant's chief means of learning and relating to any task, Parks will ask, "How do you know if a coworker is doing a good job?" There's no right answer. Parks simply wants to find out what kind of "proof" is offered. If the applicant says she can simply see the results of a good job, she is dominantly sight-oriented, as most people in the world are. Others are hearing-oriented, and still others are reading-oriented.

To find out whether a person enjoys a lot of detail in a job or prefers a more general, big-picture orientation, Parks listens to the specificity in a response. Asked what part of a job gave him the greatest gratification, one fellow said, "Installing chicken cookers." Then he corrected himself and said, "No, installing big machines." To Parks's ears that means: "This is a very general guy. Even though installing a chicken cooker is a very broad description of a job, it was too specific for him. He's going to make lots of detail mistakes if we force too much of it on him."

Remember the purpose of interviewing: to get and give information. The process you construct should aim to collect data on what some call horizontal and vertical planes. Horizontal information, such as a candidate's schooling and background, isn't very hard to discover, but you need a sizable amount of it to begin to make your decision. Vertical information plumbs the depths of a candidate's personality, and it will determine who gets the job.

Step Four: Do Use Personality Tests

Personality testing is one tool that some of the best hirers use to probe vertical, or soft, data. Yet it's probably the most controversial issue in hiring. Understandably, too. No one likes the idea of his or her dazzlingly unique self being reduced to a test score or personality type. Tests of hard skills, such as typing, spelling, carpentry, and machine operations are fine. But our predispositions? "There's a constituency that feels it is un-American -- a breach of privacy," says Infincom's Koether, who asks candidates to fill out an "interest analysis."

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