Zero Defect Hiring

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Against my recommendation, the man was hired for an operation in Arizona. Predictably, his relationship with female employees was an unmitigated disaster. Threatened with litigation, he lasted less than a year.

Postinterview Strategies

Half the battle remains after the candidate leaves your office. If you stop observing behavior after you've completed the interview, it's like hooking a fish but neglecting to reel it in. If you keep your eyes and ears open during this crucial postinterview phase of the selection process, you'll learn more about the candidate's behavior and track record than you ever thought possible.

Travel with Finalists for Executive Positions. If one picture is worth a thousand words, then one trip is worth a hundred interviews.

Rather than evaluating information he might collect in the course of more interviews, the founder of a growing restaurant chain set up a series of postinterview tests with a finalist for a vice-president position. One was a trip.

He met the candidate at the San Diego airport for a 7 a.m. flight. The founder was there at 6:15, and the potential VP--also a morning person, as he later explained--arrived at 6:20. With extra time, these executives were able to talk. Later, between planes in Salt Lake City, the founder watched the candidate deal with a crisis by phone.

The candidate appeared focused in the telephone conversation and, as far as the founder could tell, helpful in the situation. When they arrived in Montana, an hour later, their destination was an airport hotel some 300 yards from where they stood waiting for an airport shuttle bus. The candidate suggested they walk and carry the bags the several hundred yards to their hotel. Clearly, the candidate's travel behavior was as important as his interviews in the company's offices, because the pattern continued as the two men traveled from city to city. On time. Good spirits. Problem solver. Great presence with employees and customers. After a two-year search involving a half-dozen finalists and several search firms, the candidate was declared the winner by the end of the trip.

Put Potential Problems on the Table. If you're still interested in the candidate, always have a final interview in which you talk about potential problems. It's never a question of if problems will arise on a new job; it's one of what those problems will be. If you've not discovered any, you're missing something in the candidate's background.

Several years ago I evaluated an executive who was a finalist candidate for a local company. On a scale of one to 10, I thought the woman was a 10. But in the course of our time together, she raised two potential problems. First, her husband was unemployed. How would he feel if she was making an executive salary and he remained out of work? Second, how long would the candidate's future mentor at the new company, the chief operating officer, remain in his post? She didn't want to begin a new job only to have her potential mentor leave two months after she accepted the position.

I asked the candidate to discuss the matters with her husband and with the chief operating officer. Her follow-up was predictable and unpredictable: Predictable because the candidate raised the second question directly with her future boss, who said, "Eighty percent chance I'll stay on." Willing to take the 80/20 odds, the candidate assumed the COO would keep her posted if she accepted the job. Unpredictable because the candidate discussed her husband's sense of self-esteem in a disarmingly candid way. She said, in essence:

"I didn't tell you this during our first meeting, but my husband and I have been trying to have children for several years. I'm 42 years old, and we've had all the tests; I've even taken fertility drugs, but no luck. So we've given up on a larger family, even though we'd love to have children. However, for the past few months we've been reevaluating our marriage and our lives. Do I work? Does he work? Do we adopt children? What's our next step after a very difficult five years? And that's where our discussions led after you interviewed me last week. My husband knows that I want the job, and he thinks it's worth a try regardless of his job prospects. Should we choose to adopt children, it will take six months to a year. Meanwhile, my husband will continue to look for work, and we'll see what the future holds."

It's rare to see such candor, humanity, and intelligence operating in an interview situation with a relative stranger. The candidate was later hired by the company.

Here is another example:

After a two-year search, a college president found the perfect academic dean. Soft-spoken, intelligent, and with a proven track record, the candidate was comfortable with herself and was highly respected in her profession. We discussed stress after we'd spent several hours together.

We all have ways of dealing with stress. In fact, I almost always ask candidates, "How do you release tension?" The answers vary from "meditation" to "I yell at the dog." If we can talk openly about absorbing stress, as I do with most of the perfectionistic people I know, then we can also talk about solutions.

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