Hiring is a harder process than most people think. Not only do you have to evaluate someone in a short amount of time to see if they will be a good fit for the position but you also have to determine if they’re someone you can handle working with for 8 hours a day.
Originally when I first started hiring people I would ask the most basic of questions. Things like “Why should we hire you?”, “What are your strengths?”, and “What are your weaknesses?”
Learning about someone off of basic questions like this is not easy. Most of the people that I hired in my early days of leadership who had those simple questions in their interview aren’t around anymore due to the fact they should have never been hired and weren’t a good fit.
My questions now are “Give me an example of how you were successful in sales”, “When were you faced with a challenge and were able to accomplish it for your advantage?” or even “I want you to brag to me about who you are and tell me how we would be making a mistake with not hiring you and why?”
In the first interview, you want to ask questions that bring in-depth examples. Find things about them that you can mentally visualize in your mind, and how they can help benefit your company. Let them really sell you on themselves, and learn more about who they are, if they’re a hard worker, and how they adapt to challenges. The initial interview is purely to vet out the good from the bad.
The best tip I can give you is to take your time with the hiring process. We like to host a second interview where other employees of the company conduct it without a manager, which helps the candidate learn for themselves if they would truly like to work with us and also helps the current employees know if they want them around. This interview process not only helps build a great office culture but sets the tone for how we work together.
Third and possibly fourth interviews are more in-depth asking questions and giving the candidate examples of situations that their job would handle. Here are some examples for some different positions:
- Sales – give them an item and have them sell it to you.
- Marketing – give them a product that needs to be brought to market and what their game plan would be.
- Onboarding – have them interact with a stranger and train them on something simple like how to tie a shoe, and see how well they coach the person.
As a manager, you may think you know who would be a good candidate and who wouldn’t be. But you would be surprised! Some people that I’ve hired have surprised me in many ways as far superior workers than expected and turns out interviews just make them nervous.
Good luck interviewing!
