Several years ago I
walked into my favorite bookstore and was fascinated by a book on the shelf.
What caught my eye was the bright orange cover and the band of duct tape across
the cover. The book was Chip and Dan
Heath’s first book titled “Made to Stick.” Since then I have been looking
forward to reading their other works. It is no different for their newest work
titled “Decisive.”
In Chapter 7 titled
“Ooch”, they talk about a company which scheduled interviews for an open
position. After the interview each candidate was asked to present an example of
their work for review. In order to remove any sense of bias on the part of the
interview team, the work examples were numbered as to disguise the source. When
all the work examples were submitted the management reviewed the collections
and made a judgment as to who would best fit their open position based on the
works alone. The candidate that was ultimately chosen was the individual that those
conducting the interviews, felt were least likely to do the job to company
standards. They were dead wrong in their assumption based on the interview. The
Heath’s make the claim that our interviews are less predictive of job
performance than work sample or even peer ratings of past performance. They
even state that if we provided our candidates with a simple intelligence test
it would predict performance levels better than the interview.
So here is the
question. As HR professionals we tell our managers, our sourcing vendors and
the organization that we can adequately evaluate prospective talent based on
our prowess as interviewers, because we know we are right. We know we are right
because that is our job. But what if we are not right? What if we have underserved
our organization because we turned away the very talent the organization needed
because we did not think based on the interview that the candidate fit?
I have been through
interviews during my career which in looking back made no sense as to whether I
could do the job. I have to confess in my management roles when I was doing
recruiting I fell into the trap of thinking my interview skills were proficient
enough that I could make the right decision. Part of our tendency is to
consider who we like or who we feel we can trust when we interview candidates.
However if we don’t like someone does not mean that we will always find, locate
and attract the diverse skills we need for the new marketplace. Some of my
consultant colleagues suggest that the behavioral interview might improve the
success rate but those too can be based on our views of the responses.
Email
me at dan@dbaiconsulting.com and let me know how
accurate are your predictive skills in interviews and are you short
changing your organization by eliminating skills you might need for the future.