The Interview

This post is another in my series of things that corporations do that could be done better.  Today we look at the interview process.

I recently went through a set of interviews with Symetra, and after a phone interview with HR, an interview with the hiring manager (a VP), and a second round of interviews with three VPs (I think there are a lot of VPs at Symetra) and a Director, they decided after each spending 45 minutes with me that I did not have the right personality for the particular job they had in mind.  The HR recruiter sent me an email saying that they were looking for a strong leader to take the group through upcoming changes, leaving it implied that I was not a strong leader, and she asked if she could save my resume and consider me for future opportunities.

I told her no.

That was crazy of course; anyone would tell you so.  Nuts.  And yet...

Let's think for a minute what they were asking me.  I was totally qualified for that position, had already held a very similar job for years, met every single qualification they asked for, including the ones they said were not required but would be a plus.  I spent time filling out their application, applying for the job, and arranging the interviews with HR.  I researched the company and the people I would talk to before each interview, spent hours preparing for questions.  Then I got dressed up and spent about six hours total driving to Bellevue and actually interviewing.  All to be told that, sorry, your twenty years of work history are nice, but after spending a very short time with you, we decided it's not a good "fit", meaning you can't be in our club because, based on purely subjective criteria, we think you have the wrong personality.  But if you want, maybe you can come back later and try again.

Well, sorry, but screw you.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not questioning the decision.  Probably they ultimately chose someone who will do about as well as I would have, or maybe better.  My point is more that they put me, and several other people, through a lengthy process that, in the end, is about equivalent to rolling dice.  I have been on the other end, and I always thought that choosing someone based on an interview was a crapshoot.  I used behavior-based interview questions provided by HR, like you are supposed to.  Didn't matter.  Also, when I have interviewed in the past and gotten the job, it usually seemed just as random.

So let me propose an alternative:  unless you are interviewing for a really high-level position, like a CFO (in which case I really have no idea what to do), pick about three people based on their resumes.  (You need a couple of extra in case one or two turn you down.)  As a courtesy to them (a foreign concept to most companies), interview them on one day, but get a few opinions if you want.  You are looking for two things: First, do they seem OK?  Most people are fine, especially in an interview, but occasionally you will get one that comes off as hard to get along with, or seems stoned, or whatever.  It isn't very common.  Second, do they know the stuff their resume says they should?  It's not terribly unusual to find someone who is a fake; somehow they have held jobs in the past, but they don't really know anything.  Hard to spot in an interview, but worth a try.

Then, hire the one with the best experience.  And here is the important part:  Now you have 90 days to interview them.  At most companies, you can let someone go in the first 90 days without giving them a warning or producing a bunch of documentation.  After that, it's a lot of work to fire someone, but in the first 90 days, it's pretty easy.  Companies under-utilize this free-look period; at Farmers, I can remember two people in the eleven years I worked there who were let go during their probationary periods, and neither was for incompetence.  On the other hand, I saw some woefully incompetent people who sailed through their 90 days long before someone realized something was wrong.  So companies reject perfectly good candidates based on a short, scripted discussion, then can't be bothered to evaluate new employees during their first three months.

Will this method get you the best person?  No, but neither will your long interview process.  Will it get you better people?  Yes, actually it will, because instead of using the interview process as the gatekeeper to decide who works for you, you will be using the work the person does over a few months.  That's pretty much guaranteed to improve the process, and as a bonus, you won't waste as much time and effort trying to make uneducated guesses based on an hour asking canned questions.