Improve Your Assessment Skills to Improve Your Hiring
By Randy Quarin
While every company covets top talent that produces great results, the truth is that very few have hiring processes in place that allow them to choose from a great short list of candidates in the end. It's because the assessment skills of the recruiters or Hiring Managers are lacking.
Interview competency and candidate assessment is THE most important part of the hiring process. In this economy it's easy to attract more applicants, but the process falls apart if your assessment skills fail to separate the stars from the B and C candidates.
Here's how you can Improve Your Assessment Skills to Improve Your Hiring:
Have a Clearly Articulated Hiring Goal
As with any project, the planning stage is critical if you want to have that great hire in the end – because if you get the planning wrong, everything that flows out of it will be mis-guided as well. It’s at this time that you should be sitting down to define exactly who the person you want to hire is.
The mistake that many companies make in defining the “who” is that they identify that ideal person by outlining the qualifications the candidate should have. Instead they should be determining what it is they want the candidate to do for them and the specific results they want them to produce.
Start by prioritizing what the most important deliverables are in the role and then focus on those. If you can, make the results quantifiable so they can be measured more accurately.
Create a Scorecard for Accurate Comparison of Candidates
A big reason why interview assessment is so inefficient is that so much of it relies on opinion and gut-feel instead of quantifiable results. While it’s important to incorporate some degree of intuition into the process, it’s also essential to have a system in place that allows you to compare candidates against one another using specific metrics.
Start by developing a scorecard that is tied directly to those top deliverables you identified as key drivers for the role. Once you’ve identified the main criteria you want to measure each candidate against, set out a scoring system that allows you to document how they performed against each criteria with a specific value. It could be as simple as a 5-point scale, where one end of the scale represents failure to achieve that goal, and a 5 means they’re a constant overachiever against that deliverable and blow their targets away.
Whatever scoring system you come up with, it’s important for the numbers to represent specific levels of performance or else you allow for the possibility of personal bias to creep back into your assessment. A ‘3’ for instance shouldn’t just be an arbitrary rating, but rather should be a number that represents a specific defined outcome such as “consistently meets expectations”.
In the end, this will allow you to compare candidates against each other using specific scoring that is tied to your business objectives, giving you a much better idea of where each candidate stands relative to one another.
Craft Questions That Reveal Results
In the interview itself, while you want to get a good idea of each candidate as a whole, make the specific deliverables that you’ve set out the focus of your questions, and be sure to pose the same questions to each candidate. Ask each candidate to describe past achievements and successes that relate to a certain objective. By targeting your questions to these areas, you’ll ensure the answers you’re getting are relevant in determining how the candidate has performed against your criteria.
Devote time to each desired objective, probing and asking for specific past results and the steps or process used to achieve them. A-Players will be happy to speak at length about their accomplishments and exactly how they went about achieving them. Candidates who have had less than stellar achievements and may have embellished their resume will have a noticeably tough time trying to talk their way through specific details.
Implement Topgrading to Identify 'A Players'
Topgrading is another great interview assessment technique created by Bradford and Geoffery Smart. It is designed to identify A-Players as well as provide techniques that ensure you get candid and honest responses from candidates.
Topgrading requires you to go through a candidate’s resume chronologically, examining it thoroughly for each position. It requires you to probe deeper and obtain detailed information about every success and failure throughout their career, and avoids allowing candidates to just talk their way through an interview by referencing their characteristics. The Topgrading interview reveals clear patterns of success and how the person evolved across dozens of competencies.
For each of their previous roles, ask for the names of managers and what they would have said their strengths are. This forces the candidate to think about how others perceive them or what it is they actually do best. It also establishes that you have information on which you could now follow up if you choose to – this will help to ensure candidates stay honest moving forward. They call this TORC, or Threat of Reference Check.
Using this interview technique allows you to spot patterns of successful achievements instead of allowing candidates to rely on speaking about one or two lone successes they’ve had in their career.
Improved Assessment Skills Will Help You Hire Better
Assessment is all about finding ways to determine if a given candidate is going to be able to produce the results you’re looking to achieve. The thing to remember is that the best predictor of future success is usually past performance. Take the necessary time up front to carefully determine what your needs are as well as what the profile of the ideal candidate looks like. Once you begin the interviewing and assessment process, make past performance and history of results the focus of your interview, and you’ll identify candidates that can achieve great results for you in the future.
IQ's Top 3 Tips for Improving Your Assessment Skills:
- Dedicate sufficient time in the beginning to defining the role and what the ideal candidate will look like - failure to do so can throw the whole process off, wasting time and money.
- Ensure your interview questions focus on revealing patterns of consistent results and not just one-off successes - probe to get details on the process and thinking that was used to achieve the results.
- Create a scoring system tied to measureable results so that you can compare the past performance of candidates against each other accurately.
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Randy Quarin, Senior Partner, has an intuitive sense of how to solve a client's business issues with the best resources.
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