Could You Be Guilty Of Interviewing The Wrong Way? (As An Interviewer Or Interviewee)

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For the first time, I have been interviewing people who applied for our digital marketing position. 

​And I want to share some notes about the hiring process for the digital marketing position (or any position) and hopefully, these notes can either help you understand the perspective of being an interviewee or help you refine your hiring process. 

​What is a good hiring process? 
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Is it the new recruitment software you just bought? Is it a fancy personality test that puts people through the 5th circle of hell? 

I’m not against tools, but they need to serve a clear purpose. 

To me, hiring is about answering these few questions: 

• Do candidates have the skills to do the job? 
• Will they fit in? 
  
• What evidence or proof is there that this candidate would be successful? 

The standard process is that you post a job online (or newspaper if that’s still a thing), people send their resumes, you ask questions during interviews, the candidate talks and you talks some, then you make a decision. 

Based on my admittedly unscientific experiments, this approach has a major flaw: Being good at an interview and being able to do the job well are two completely different things! 

 This is what we should do: 

​1. Understand the goals and KPIs for the role and work backwards to determine the skills required (must-have vs.nice-to-have skills)
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And feel free to take “self-motivated” and “hard worker” etc. out of your job description. I mean, really, these are people's outlook in life, not skills. 

People can come across as “impressive” based on their resume, but it doesn’t tell you how well they will perform in a job function, the quality of their work, nor their thinking process. 

So we run some experiments to cut through the BS! 

Instead of asking “So tell me about your last job as a digital marketer at Winterfell…”, we asked a series of questions to get lots of facts, like: 

• What were the metrics you used to evaluate the conference you hosted in King’s Landing? 
  
• Here it says 20% increase YoY, what was the baseline? 

By asking these questions, we were able to get a much clearer picture of the person’s skills and experience than we would have if we asked the usual generic questions. 

2. Ask for specific examples of candidate's skills
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Instead of taking candidate’s word for it (who would say bad things about themselves on a resume or during an interview?), we decided to run another experiment. To prove whether or not candidates have the skills they claim they have.

For example, if a candidate listed “Salesforce reports” as one of their skills and it happened to be our must-have skill, we’d get our own Salesforce account and ask them to create a “Lead Report” for us on the spot. (Testing a candidate's skills “on the spot” can be a very effective method for determining what skills the candidate does or doesn’t have as well as their proficiency level)

By running this test, we achieved two things: 
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• We can find out how a candidate thinks or communicates if the instructions we give aren’t clear.
• We obtained the proof (or not) that candidate is indeed capable of doing what they say they can do. 

Any thoughts or comments? I'm all ears.