Place job candidates in roles the position calls for. Try and figure out ways to see how they react to different kinds of situations, how they react to a question that elicits stress, like, ‘Why did you do that?’
We tend to ask things like, ‘Can you describe to me a situation where you’ve been given an objective and a time frame but no particular sort of road map on how to get from A to B? Have you been in that situation, and if so, tell us about it. Tell us whether you were successful. Tell us how you went about it.’
When we think about what we’re really looking for in managers, (it’s) the ability to get from A to B, to be kind of a self-starter to a certain extent.
One of the most important things to us, both internally and externally, is to make sure that there’s an honesty and a trust — and the employees can trust the management and the management is honest with the employees and, in particular, with our clients.
Since we put such a high regard on that, we might also ask them, have they been in a situation where they had an ethical dilemma in their prior employer, and if so, how did they resolve it. And then maybe give them a hypothetical ethical dilemma we might face here and ask them to respond to it.
Find out their record of success in similar positions. The best predictor is they’ve been in that situation before.
That doesn’t mean that if people haven’t been in that situation before they can’t succeed. But obviously, if people have been in that kind of environment or that kind of situation before and have been successful, then it’s obviously an indicator they might succeed. The second easiest way is … talking to people that they’ve worked with or for before and find out how they’ve performed in other situations.
Seek employee input. One thing that is really important is having them talk to other employees in the company, other people of various levels in the organization, about what it’s like working here.
It really comes down to two things. I stress so strongly the need for people to understand who we are, what we do and how we do it, and what it’s like to work here. The one thing that I do ask everybody to do when they’re interviewing a prospective employee is to give them as realistic as possible view of what life is like here — both the good and the bad.
Of the other employees here that might interview a potential manager, we put value on all of the responses we get. We have a set questionnaire that each person fills out after they’ve interviewed a candidate. Part of that questionnaire is very specific questions, part of it is always the general: Tell me everything you haven’t already told me about your interview.
You get a lot more information, and you get a lot more specific information if there’s a couple of pages on broad questions you ask each person to respond to. Otherwise, it’s too easy for people to just say, ‘I like him,’ ‘I didn’t like him,’ or ‘Hire him.’
How to reach: Influent Inc., (800) 856-6768 or www.influentinc.com
