Take the time to ask all the right questions. (This is the third of three posts on how I conduct the IT interview).
THE DISCUSSION
All of my interviews are all primarily behavior based interviews. Sure I ask the “why are you looking for a new job” and “where do you want to be at in 5 years” type questions but trying to determine how a candidate will react in certain situations is to me a key to hiring.
My best discovery was the book High-Impact Interview Questions: 701 Behavior-Based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job by Victoria A. Hoevemeyer. This book offers a great explanation on how to conduct a behavior based interview. But the best part is the author offers hundreds and hundreds of example questions. All questions are broken out by category such as customer focus, decision making, leadership, etc. The book even offers up examples of interview guides. This is something that every interviewer needs in his or her toolkit.
I use these questions in all of my interviews and I have a 100% “great” hire percentage for the ten folks I have hired since I started using this book about four years ago. In fact I have actually not hired about 3 candidates based on their answers to some of these questions. Prior to implementing the suggestions in the book my success rate was only about 75 percent.
Remember only 1 or 2 poor hires is failure and can have a negative effect on the whole team.
THE ACTION
-Download some interview-questions. Notice how some of the questions are broken out in to categories.
-Preview the book on Books 24/7 or Safari Books. If you have an Amazon Kindle or an iTouch with the Kindle app you can download the first chapter from Amazon for free.
-Purchase the book and read from cover to cover.
-Determine the questions you want to ask you candidates. Ask all the candidates the same questions. This gives you a great cross flow of how each candidate answers.
HINT: Purchase this book and improve your interview success.
-DO IT NOW AND ENGAGE-
