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Among the myriad mistakes a hiring manager can make, what is THE BIG ONE that flies under the radar?
Interviewing Is Little Better Than Flipping A Coin
Hi, I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter and I coach people and organizations to play big, to be more effective, to do things that will yield greater success. Now, this is a video for hiring managers, business owners, anyone who’s involved with the hiring management process and can wind up affecting the decision. And it’s about the mistake I see way too many hiring managers make.
HR makes them to some degree, but the hiring manager is really on point for making this mistake. And the mistake is comparing the individual who’s sitting in front of you with the one who is leaving this role or the one that you’re trying to replace. And, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what this person was like.
Because I want to remind you of something. When that person joins you, the finished product they are today, you have to remember them as they were on day one, when they walked in the door, nervous and uncomfortable and didn’t know what to do in the role that you assigned them for. And by comparing the person who’s sitting in front of you with the finished product, you’re providing an unfair benchmark.
You see, you need someone who could do the job. Sometimes, you hold out for a higher level of skill that is necessary and wind up causing someone . . . well, creating the conditions that cause the frustration that so many job hunters feel. You know, there’s a statistic that says within 90 days of a new hire, I think it’s half of all hiring managers experience buyer’s remorse.
Well, the same is true for job hunters, as well, that they start to have regrets about the decision that they made to join. And I think the statistic I saw there was 60% of them do. You miss hiring people doing it the way that you’ve been doing it all along.
And you may think that you’re getting a bargain, a discount. After all, you’re getting so much more. But what you’re also doing is getting new headaches that you’re going to need to address.
The cost of hiring is expensive, whether you’re paying someone like me a fee or all the man hours that go into the evaluation assessment process, the approval of the rec, the meetings to discuss what went wrong, you know, the postmortem for the hire that left after two months because it wasn’t the job they expected. Well, it wasn’t the job that they expected because you oversold it. Stop comparing people sitting in front of you with the one who has left or you need to replace.
It’s not the right strategy. Just look at it from the standpoint of, does this person do the job? And do they have upside? That last person had upside. You want to see what their upside is.
I’ve made a suggestion in another video for one of the tests that you can give. And I commented, most interviews are kind of like game shows. You put people in an isolation booth.
You ask them a bunch of questions. Watch how they perspire. They get all kinds of nervous.
And all you’ve done is create a quiz show. Instead, I suggest and have fun with this one. Invite people to bring a resource with them that they can call upon during the next interview.
It can be their computer, you can give them access to a computer, whatever. Just encourage them to bring something with them. I’m just going to disregard that for now.
Bring something with them. Fab! Unreal! So, bring something with them in order to evaluate this, to contact individuals or to get some advice. Give them an incredibly difficult problem in 15 minutes to solve it.
And then talk with them afterwards about how they went about resolving that problem. It will go a long way toward helping you evaluate people. I’m Jeff Altman.
Hope you found this helpful. Have a great day!
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a career and leadership coach who worked as a recruiter for more than 40 years. He is the producer and former host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 3000 episodes. He is a former member of The Forbes Coaches Council. “No BS JobSearch Advice Radio” was recently named a Top 10 podcast for job search. JobSearchTV.com was also recently named a Top 10 YouTube channel for job search.
Are you interested in 1:1 coaching, interview coaching, advice about networking more effectively, how to negotiate your offer or leadership coaching? Schedule a free Discovery call.
JobSearch.Community offers great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Watch my videos on YouTube at JobSearchTV.com
Jeff’s Kindle book, “You Can Fix Stupid: No BS Hiring Advice,” is available on Amazon.
