Speaker 1: Hiring the right person for the job is the first step to ensure good performance and teamwork. In this video, I'll talk about how to conduct a good first interview to make sure you hire the right person. Hello, I'm Stephen Goldberg of Optimist Performance. I'm a facilitator and coach helping businesses improve their hiring, performance, leadership, and teamwork. Have you ever hired the wrong person for the job? I know I have, especially in sales positions. Salespeople are really good at selling themselves for the job, and they interview well. In fact, today, many people looking for jobs have been trained better how to conduct an interview than the person interviewing them. So it's crucial that you know how to conduct a first good job interview. The first step is planning and preparation. Just like any other project, you need to be well prepared for the interview. So that means preparing good interview questions that you will ask during the interview is crucial. Of course, as you conduct the interview, you will diverge from the questions because you may want to probe deeper, and that's normal. Interview questions should be structured around three categories. Their work experience, their education, and their personal factors. I've included some sample interview questions in the description of this video and on my blog that you can refer to. You want the questions to be open-ended so that the person needs to explain their answers rather than close questions, which just elicits a yes or no or factual response. You can research the web for sample questions, and I've also put a link to what I consider a good article for finding some good questions. In my previous article and video, I suggested using tests and assessments to help you during the interview process. One of them is the Step 1 survey, and I used this prior to the first interview because it gives me already some detailed answers to questions regarding the person's past. And it also measures their attitude in the area of integrity, reliability, and work ethic. And it also generates interview questions around those topics. So I like to use that to help guide and go to specific issues that may have come out during that assessment. That saves a lot of time. Also, Brad Smart, the author of Top Grading, suggests that you inform the candidate that you're going to be checking their answers with their references. And you do that throughout the interview. This reminds the candidate to be honest with their answers because they know you're going to validate them with their references. I've also put a link to the Top Grading website where you can download Brad Smart's e-book about Top Grading. My goal for the interview, of course, is to determine who would be the best for the job. The interview allows me to see the person and feel how they will fit with the company, the team, and the hiring manager. Studies show that many people make hiring decisions within the first few minutes of the interview. That's because if we like the person or don't like the person, we're highly influenced by our own emotions and subjectivity. That's why it's really important to have other people in the interview with you as well so that you can get different perceptions and compare notes. It's also important to use assessments that provide further data that will increase your objectivity about the person. When starting the interview, my goal is to put the person at ease. I may ask some general questions, maybe ask them about some of their interests that appear on their resume. Because you're the one doing the interview, you should be listening 70-80% of the time and speaking the rest. You want to also give some time to the candidate to ask questions of their own so they can determine if you're the right company for them. I want to form my questions so that they elicit details about what the person did in certain skill areas. For example, if I was asking a salesperson who said in their resume or in the interview that one of the ways of prospecting was to attend conferences, I would maybe formulate the question, tell me about the conferences that you attended and what was your goal? I may add to that, what was the outcome of that? How did you reach your goal? How did you measure it? What was the follow-up process? And since I'm using reference checking, I'll want to then take detailed notes concerning the answers of the candidate so that I can verify that with the references that the person will provide me. To help in the rating of each candidate, I like to use a table where in one column I list the essential skills, knowledge, experience, perhaps attitude that I'm looking for and then I will add some questions, some starting questions pertaining to each of those in the next column. Next to that column, I'll add a column for rating on a scale of one to five. This way each person who's on the hiring team or interviewing team can rate what they feel the person scored in one of those areas. And then we can compare notes and use that as a guideline again to make the process more objective. For the final candidates after the first interviews, I like to have them take another assessment called the Profile XT. Now I've covered this in more detail in another video that I'll put a link to in the description of this video. That assessment is great because it measures what I call the total person, their thinking style, their behavioral traits, and their occupational interests. And then it matches their results to a performance model for the job which can be highly customized for each company and each position. This really helps me predict future performance. I also like to use skill testing from eSkill and I'll put a link to that in the description of this video as well. I like to use eSkill for more of the technical skills. For example, how well does this person know Word or Excel or PowerPoint? But they also have a vast library of tests on all kinds of software and operating systems. Once I've gotten the reports from, in my case, the Profile XT, I'll conduct a second interview with my final candidates. The Profile XT will also generate interview questions around areas where the person does not fit with the performance model. This is very helpful to delve deeper. I will also conduct reference checking either before the second interview or after depending if I want to validate things in the second interview with the references. I'll cover more about the second interview and especially reference checking in future articles and videos. So subscribe to my blog and videos. To summarize, in hiring the best candidate for the job, you want to start with a good plan and preparation. You want to conduct a structured interview. You want to take notes on their answers that you could validate later with references. I suggest using an evaluation table or grid in order to assess or assign points to each person for specific skill areas after the interview is completed. And I also suggest using job testing and assessments in order to get more objective data about the person. I hope these tips and guidelines will help you conduct better interviews to hire the right person for the job in the future. Thanks for listening. I hope you find these tips useful. Here are some videos that are related that you can watch right now. Subscribe to our channel to get news of new videos as they come out. Thanks for listening and talk again soon.