“How do I get better at hiring?”  That’s the question I’m most often asked.  Here are five suggestions that will dramatically improve your hiring skills:

 

Practice!  Do more interviews.  Interviewing is a skill, and the only proven way to improve a skill is through practice, practice, and more practice.  Don’t expect to make a quantum leap in your hiring skills overnight - you should expect to have at least 20 interviews under your belt before you start to get the feel of any new approach.  It takes that level of repetition before your interviewing skills show major signs of improvement.

 

Stop talking!  Fight the urge to puke all over your candidate with information during the interview.  Listening skills are the hardest skills to develop, and you can’t develop solid listening skills if you’re doing all of the talking.  A rule of thumb that I teach my clients to follow is “no more than one minute of your voice for every ten minutes of theirs.”  You’re interviewing them, not the other way around.

 

The best interviewers are canned.  Have you ever fumbled for the next question to ask during an interview?  Have you found yourself struggling to ask questions that yield good information about the candidate’s ability to perform in the role?  That’s because you weren’t following a pre-scripted interview.  In order to really improve your hiring skills, you should be focusing on listening and not on thinking about which question to ask next.  That means coming to an interview with all of the questions laid out ahead of time.  I’ve developed an entire battery of pre-scripted interviews, which are available for purchase here.

 

Interview with an observer.  It’s the interview Buddy System.  I suggest that you invite another stakeholder into the behavioral interview as a pure listener and note-taker.  You’ll be amazed at what someone will catch when they’re not worrying about what to say or how to say it.  An observer will pick up things that the lead interview has missed, and will also be able to provide feedback for the lead interviewer on their style and process.  For the best results, play the role of the observer a few times - what you’ll learn about your own interviewing style is invaluable.

 

Stop interviewing bad candidates.  No kidding, right?  It sounds simple, but many of us spend countless hours interviewing people who should never have been invited in for an interview in the first place.  This situation leads to weak interviews and frustration on both sides, so instead work on tightening up on your screening requirements up front.  That will lead to more targeted recruiting effort, and, by extension, more meaningful interviews.

 

Use these five tips to begin to build your hiring skills.