Stop the Insanity! Alignment Is Key To Hiring Success
Posted on in Recruiting Strategy
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet, when a company has a mishire, rather than examining each step in the interview process to identify failure points and improve, hiring managers plow ahead and look for talent in the exact same way.
We see it time and time again. While there are likely several contributing factors of a failed interview process, one of the most common things we see is a lack of alignment. The misalignment extends from not being clear on “who” should be hired into the role all the way to “how” interviews are conducted to ensure you are gathering the right data points to make an informed decision.
Here are three quick tips you can use to avoid this insanity in your own organization.
- Create Success Profiles. Success profiles include the baseline knowledge, skills, abilities, and attributes you are seeking in a candidate, and goes one step further to articulate the measurable results your organization will see from an individual’s efforts in the role. The success profile becomes “the guide” used to develop your interview questions and job simulation activity. It creates clarity among your team.
- Conduct Interview Prep Sessions. Your interview process should be designed so that each step in the process builds on the last. By conducting 15-minute prep sessions the day before an interview takes place, you can set expectations, review the candidate’s profile, and answer questions from your interview team. This ensures your team is clear on what’s been discussed to date, what concerns about the candidate exist, as well as what objections might exist in the candidate’s mind they need to be prepared to discuss.
- Facilitate Interview Debrief Sessions. Immediately after each interview, your teams should meet to share the data they gathered. These structured discussions provide some of the most important feedback relative to the candidate and the role. It also provides an opportunity to ensure your interviewers gathered the right information and are evaluating candidates against the success profile and not providing a “gut” read.
Becoming and staying aligned throughout the interview process takes effort and focus. However, if you want to improve your interview outcomes, it is critical that you start here. When your team is aligned from the outset, your ability to identify and source the right talent improves, your team becomes more effective at assessing talent, and your hiring success rate skyrockets.
Learn the ONE thing you must start doing today to dramatically improve your hiring results from our webinar “Nailing the Hiring Trifecta: Assessing A Candidate’s Skill, Attitude, and Cultural Fit.” Sign up to watch a recording of the webinar.
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