Interviewer
Behavior
As a
celebration of our updating of Premium Content into Individual Licenses
and the release (finally!) of the Interview Creation Tool™,
we’re going to produce our Newsletters weekly for August and
September this year. Hopefully more guidance from us is a good thing
;-).
The
reason we're so excited about the Interview Creation Tool™ is
that we're painfully aware that hiring is the most important thing that
managers do, and yet most of us do it poorly. Not for lack of trying
– there's even less good guidance out there on being the
interviewer than there is about being the interviewee. This
is one of
those items that prove to me how bad management training is. How can
there not
be thousands
of well-known ways to learn about interviewing?
It's the most important part of the most important thing managers do.
Argh.
Take
one small element of interviewing: no-one ever tells hiring managers to
be excited about meeting candidates. We’ve seen managers
rushing around before interviews, trying to make sure their day job can
survive them being gone for an hour or 90 minutes (the fact that they
can’t leave their desk for 90 minutes without an explosion
happening is a whole different problem). Their focus is on
what’s going on in production or test or accounts.
Then
the candidate arrives and the manager has to switch gears quickly to
being an effective interviewer. Since they don't know what that means
in terms of THEIR behavior, they
don't. They can't. They carry
over the
rushing, stressed, frantic energy. Candidates pick up on that, and
don't relax themselves, don't feel welcomed and don't feel good about
the company.
Now,
that might not matter if you're not interested in the candidate. But
you are (right? You're not interviewing people you're not interested
in?). You want the candidate to be relaxed, happy and excited to be
with you. You want them to think this is a good place to work. You want
to develop a rapport.
That
means going into the interview excited to meet someone who might be the
new member of your team. Before you go out to meet them in reception,
or go to the interview room, just give yourself two seconds to shake
off the mood from your morning and get into an excited, welcoming mood.
Smile. Calm your heart rate. Think of something you like about this
candidate. Remember what it's like to be interviewed, and resolve to be
kind and pleasant even as you're asking tough questions.
THAT is effective interviewing.
Individual
License
If you
have signed up for an Individual License, look out for another email
from us today, with details of how to sign up for our next Licensee
conference call - it's next week.
Please
Forward This Newsletter
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