Hire With Your Head: Using Performance-Based Hiringsm to Build Great Teams, Third Edition

Chapter 6. Everything Else after the First Interview: Completing the Assignment

	Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.
	--Eric Hoffer

Stay Objective: The First Interview Represents Less Than Half of the Total Assessment

Additional interviews, reference checks, and testing are all invaluable. Frequently, these important steps are ignored or minimized. Once a candidate is on the short list, most managers use the added time to look for information to confirm a “yes” decision. By this point, so much time has been invested in the candidate, and momentum is building for an offer, that a “no” possibility is only passively being considered. In my experience, once someone passes muster during the first round of interviews, there’s better than a 50 percent chance an offer will be made. Positive data is magnified and negative data rationalized away. This is a major cause of bad hiring decisions. Objectivity must prevail throughout the assessment. Negative information must still be sought as aggressively as positive data.

There are some great tools available to increase the accuracy of the assessment. They’re especially valuable when used in conjunction with the Performance-based Hiring interviewing process. As mentioned earlier, an unstructured interview is only 57 percent accurate in predicting subsequent performance. This improves to about 75 percent using a performance profile and the structured performance-based interview. When combined with some ...