SuperManager Podcast: Improving the Hiring Process

Christine: You’re listening to SuperManager, the podcast for people who manage people and business with ideas, trends and expert interviews to help you be a SuperManager.

Sam: Welcome back to another episode of SuperManager podcast. This week we’re going to be talking about improving the hiring process and I have a couple of friends with me today, we have,

Katie: Katie Magoon with People Solutions Center an HR consulting firm.

Mary: And Mary Kutheis, MCK Coaching, business coach and confidante.

Sam: And I’m Samantha Naes with CN Video. We do corporate video production… So it’s become so easy to apply for jobs these days. I can remember, I don’t know if any of my listeners can relate, but back when you used to actually type up a resume, you would print a resume on paper. You had to get that nice, thicker resume paper and get that mailed in and now you put your resume out on indeed or one of those types of sites and you can literally look at lists of jobs and just click apply, apply, apply, apply. So people are applying for more jobs and then as the business, you’re getting so many more applicants that you used to get. They’re just more people involved in the process. You have to remember to be considerate to these people because that’s a lot of people that you can have bad will if you just don’t respond to them at all. They don’t hear from you or if they have a bad experience, and then on the other side of things, you have to make sure that you’re making the right choices through all of these hundreds of applicants that you’re getting.

Mary: It’s a tough thing because people who are, they could be inexperienced interviewers and there were, they could be experienced ones, but very often they’ll get this feeling when they’re interviewing. They like them and maybe they like them because they seem like, “hey, they’re a lot like me.” Well, if they’re not doing the same role you are,

Sam: Right.

Mary: Or even if they are just getting a good feeling about someone,

Sam: Right.

Mary: Can really get you in trouble. One, the person can be an expert interviewer or two, you might not be asking the right questions because you just kind of let this turn into a little chit chat and, and so you might not get to the deep answers that you need. There’s better ways to do that. One of which is using assessments for sure.

Sam: I was just going to say I did that and I got some training on interviewing and I remember it was kind of a funny story. He did an assessment on the position.

Katie: Yes.

Sam: And what was necessary for the position and asked a lot of questions about do they need to do this, is this important, rate this on a scale. You know what’s important,

Mary: That is critical. I mean that is just such a smart step to take to benchmark the position before you start hiring.

Sam: And he came back and said, so for this particular position you want somebody who is very deliberate in making decisions and that means when you talk with them about the position, they have a lot of questions. They want to take some time, they want to get back to you. And I said, “oh, it annoys me when they do that,” and, and he said, “well, but yeah, that’s what you’re looking for.” And it was a real eye opener for me to realize that the person that was annoying me was the person that I really needed in the position.

Mary: Yeah. If a per- like if a person is a really direct, I mean maybe a business owner, they’re really direct, they just barrel through things and they’re going to hire someone in customer service. They might be annoyed by the level of amiability or empathy because it’s just like, you know, just get on with it.

Sam: Right.

Mary: That’s exactly what you want in customer service. You want someone who’s going to be able to listen and diagnose and help solve. You don’t want someone who’s going to push people off the phone because they’re annoyed by it taking so long.

Katie: Yeah. You also talked about the hiring from your gut. One of the challenges if you do that is, so there is a ton of science out there around hidden or unconscious biases. And most of the data will say that in the first seven seconds you meet someone, you’ve made 11 judgements about them.

Sam: Wow.

Katie: And when you think about like what have you done in the first seven seconds, you may be shook their hands. You probably check to see if their clothes were wrinkled and you smiled and you’re already at the time you haven’t even asked about the weather yet. So as an interviewer and some of those biases are positive and it particularly your best employee refers this person, guess what impression you go into in that interview? On the flip side, some of them are negative. They look like somebody that worked for you before that you didn’t get along with,

Mary: Or the person who dumped you in college…

Katie: But you made that decision before you, whether you know it or not, you’ve made that decision before you’d even asked a question. And oftentimes, especially on the positive side, that can really lead you to fall in love with the candidate because they like your favorite baseball team or they chatted about the right things in the beginning and the next thing you know you’ve hired somebody, you have no idea whether they can do the job.

Mary: And really accomplished interviewers know to do stuff like that. Look at what’s on their desk, if they have blues memorabilia, talk about it. And that’s okay. I mean there’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to go in with the same level of expertise that perhaps the interviewer has.

Katie: And self awareness too. I mean, if you don’t know what your own biases are, positive or negative, you’ll never take time during the interview process to ask the questions to figure out whether or not this is just, a reaction or response to somebody versus did I actually find out whether they can do the job.

Sam: Right.

Mary: Yeah.

Sam: I think hope and fear are the two biggest enemies of a good decision making process.

Mary: Good observation.

Sam: So processes,

Katie: Yeah, so you talked about the impact on candidate experience and there’s a lot of reasons today that this matters. One, candidates are flying off the shelf just in the last three weeks, I have had three different clients who lost the person that we thought was their top candidate going into final rounds of interviews,

Sam: Oh.

Katie: Because they said, well I had one who canceled their interview for Friday, at the last minute. She’s like, I need to reschedule for Monday. By Friday afternoon the candidate called back and said, I took another job. They just, the unemployment is so low right now that people have options and so if you don’t have a good process, one, you can’t move fast enough to get the best candidate. But also candidates are looking at you now to say this is your best opportunity to show me what it’s going to be like to work here. And so if you have long delays and you don’t get back to me and you don’t respond to phone calls, guess what? That’s probably what I’m going to experience. Or at least I’m going to assume that’s what I’m going to experience. So you have to have a really buttoned up process from the beginning. So when we work with clients from day one, we talk about this is the day we’re going to target to have your final round of interviews. Go ahead and lock it in that way we’re communicating the candidates all along. Here’s the next step and here’s the date. I don’t get all the interviews done and then be like, all right, now we’ve got to find a date on your calendar that’s probably booked up because you’re a business owner and you don’t have any time. So even just thinking through what’s every step in the process you’re going to do from the beginning to end, who’s going to be involved and how do you keep that as short and effective as possible? And then set that expectation for candidates, makes a huge difference on that candidate experience going through.

Sam: I find that just back and forth communication can really affect the candidate experience. One of the most common questions that I’ve heard is, what is the next step? When will I hear from you? How soon are you looking to make a decision? They don’t want to be left up in the air, I’m assuming I didn’t get the job because I haven’t heard from you in awhile.

Katie: And so many companies do just, they interview people and then they never get back to them and the impact, especially if you’re in a B to C business where that person may ultimately be your customer, you need to think about the impact that has because the number of times coming out of the world I was in, we did candidate surveys on every single candidate that we touched in any way and the number of times we would see based on my interview experience, there’s no way I would do business with your organization and it led to a company wide initiative on candidate experience game changing like 10 years of every year. The CEO coming and talking to us about candidate experience matters. And if you don’t, if you don’t live that way, then you’re going to end up in situations where people just aren’t getting returned.

Mary: And companies can’t hide anymore if, for one they need to look at people as people, as human beings as opposed to recruits or filling a seat and you know human beings with emotions and feelings and when you’re hiring for a job, when you’re interviewing for a job, there’s a level of stress even at a really great economy when you want to get the job. But then there’s things like Glassdoor,

Katie: Yes,

Mary: Where it’s out there, how people are treated in the interview process is out there and everything has to be taken with a grain of salt, but behave in ways… Like they used to say don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want on the front page of the paper. I know that’s a very old saw because many people don’t read the paper anymore,

Sam: The paper? Front page?

Mary: But it is, truly behave in ways that you’d be okay if everybody knew it and ghosting people, uncool.

Katie: Yeah.

Mary: It’s just not the right thing to do.

Sam: And that’s actually a good topic for another podcast because it happens on both sides. You get… There is now a problem where people are actually being offered the job and then they’re just not showing up. They’re ghosting the company because they got a counter offer from their current employer or something else happened, so.

Katie: Well, and the other piece is even if I do get the job and I accept if I’ve had a poor candidate experience leading up, there’s a ton of research that says if I didn’t have a great candidate experience, the likelihood that I turn over is far more significant. And it’s because when I walk in the door on the first day, now I’m walking in with the sense of I wonder if this gets better. Now that I’m an employee, I’ll wait and see how I feel about this company.

Sam: Right?

Katie: Versus if I’ve had a great experience and I’m super excited that I got that offer specifically now when I walk in the door and like, wow, they were great as a candidate. I can only imagine what it’s like to work here. But again, your mindset is in a different place and if you haven’t established that from the minute you started working with a candidate, you increase the chances that the first time they’re upset with their leader the first time somebody doesn’t respond to their question or have a great outcome in the first couple of weeks. It just adds to that piggy bank of.

Sam: It’s reinforcing their fears.

Katie: Yeah, is this someplace I want to stay?

Sam: Well, it’s, it’s sad too because if you think about what it’s like to be starting a new job, to be starting a career, the excitement that you have and all of the possibilities, and then have a bad experience during the hiring process and have to come in on your first day wondering if you’ve made a mistake instead of just being excited about your new position.

Katie: I just had a candidate yesterday that we extended an offer to and it was so much fun because she had had such a great experience. So when I called her to make the offer, I, I’m like, congratulations. We were, you know, we’ve got everything done, we’re ready to extend the offer. And she’s like, yes, I’m so excited and I accept. And I’m like, well, do you want to know the salary? She’s like, oh, probably, but I accept any way, so don’t worry about it. Um, and that’s how we want every one of your candidates to feel by the time they get through. And at the same time, I absolutely knew that from a client perspective, I’m like, these folks are getting exactly the right person.

Sam: And that’s a very good point because it’s not just excitement for the person starting the position, but it’s excitement for the team that they’re going to be joining and for the business who’s hiring the person, you know, finally getting that good candidate in place and all the possibilities of what’s going to happen. And you just want to start that off on the right foot and make sure you got the right person.

Katie: Yeah.

Sam: And then Jerry had a note here about hiring and recruiting process that produces lawful and effective results and he couldn’t make it today. But Katie, you said that you might be able to speak to that a little bit. Yeah, so the most important thing in any interview processes that you make sure that not only are you getting to the right pieces of information, but on top of it, nobody’s asking things that are illegal and I will tell you right, most people really don’t know some of the things that are illegal to ask in an interview and we make really innocent mistakes. There is a technology out there that I’ve just recently come across that’s called interview path, and with interview path it was built with small to midsize companies in mind that don’t have huge budgets to spend on robust tools and so forth. But it does a great job of, you can actually create customized behavioral-based interview guides. It takes less than five minutes. I’ve made them from my phone before. It’s that easy to use, but it has a built in competency model and you can pick up to eight competencies per interview guide and for each of the competencies you can pick up to three behavioral based questions. So now you can give that to your managers and they have a set of questions to start to ask that are specific to the job you’re trying to hire for. And now one, you keep out of all the legal trouble because you have people asking questions. But more importantly, you’re also getting information back that really helps people understand whether or not they’re getting the right candidate. The cool part about the packets that they put together is in addition to just the questions, which is obviously useful, there’s sections at the beginning of them that talk a new manager or a new interviewer through what is behavioral interviewing, how do you do, right? And most importantly, there’s a whole page on legal do’s and don’ts. So if you’ve got somebody who hasn’t had called the training that you’d love them to have, at least you can give them a tool that is a good refresher. So it’s a great technology.

Mary: One of the biggest challenges is that you should be letting the people who are going to be working with that person, interview them, though whether the leader and sometimes even the team. But often those people are ill-equipped to interview. That’s just not what they do, so what a great resource to give them all the information that they need. They’re going to go in more confidently as well because many times people just get into social conversations because they don’t know how to interview. It feels awkward. I don’t know what to ask so that it sounds like a great, great tool.

Katie: Yeah, the irony of the social conversation in the interview is 90% of the time that’s where the illegal question comes from. I mean if you think about, you know, for those of you who are familiar with the St. Louis market, the favorite question of what high school did you go to… Actually an illegal question.

Mary: Really?

Katie: Yes. It’s because, think about all the information that you gather from, so in and of itself, not starkly illegal, but everything you gather from that information and in St. Louis specifically, religion, you get information about part of town that they grew up in. Sometimes their ethnicity and their national origin based on where they’ve lived. And all of that gets you right into the middle of the conversation you didn’t want to have and yet it’s the most likely question to get asked in the city of St Louis.

Sam: And talk about, you were talking about bias in the beginning talk, about a question that leads to bias.

Katie: Absolutely. I mean my 13 year old nephew explained to me the difference between, like, who goes to which high school when he, and I was like that is not appropriate, but yet we do it and people ask it and interviewed not intentionally meaning to get to that information, but they will.

Mary: And it’s interesting cause people could be wrong,

Katie: Right.

Mary: I mean very expensive schools have scholarships.

Katie: Absolutely.

Mary: So people could be making assumptions that aren’t even correct based on that,

Katie: Takes you down a horrible path and yet again happening all the time,

Sam: Or making that bond and saying, oh that’s the same high school I went to, really has nothing to do with the job. You might think you like that person more because they went to the same school you did, but,

Katie: Well, and then often the next question after that, once we’ve decided we went to the same high school, the next question is what year did you graduate? Because now we’re trying to figure out where you’ve got that and then it’s right in the middle of, on the list of illegal questions. So it’s the social banter where we lose sight of it and then we ask something that gets us into legal trouble.

Sam: What about some best practices? What are some ways that people can improve the hiring process?

Katie: One of the easiest things to do is just step back and look at your hiring process and try to visualize yourself going through it as the candidate and really look at every part of your process to determine does this leave the experience that I want this person to have? And typically we think of it in terms of how can I get through it from the hiring manager side of the house. But if you flip that scenario, there’s little things that you would change like making sure somebody had water or making sure you set timelines and stick to them. Because if you imagine what you’d be going through, you might act differently. So that can be one of them. The other one that I love is, if you can set up interview days in advance where you say, “you know what, this is the day we’re going to interview everyone and interviewed everybody all at one time.” Because when you try to interview, not in the same room but like one right after another, so that if I interviewed Suzy on Tuesday morning and I interviewed Joey on Thursday afternoon, guess what? My mood is different. I might be distracted. I may not give that same experience. And more importantly I might not think about the candidates kind of comparison wise. And so some of those little nuances to your process can make all the difference.

Mary: And I think you cannot go wrong using assessments both to benchmark a position and then to assess your candidates because I don’t think anyone should be hired solely on assessments. I think they’re a really important part of the process. And when you benchmark, when you sat down in a room and you’ve said this is what this person is going to do, these are the skills that the ideal person filling the job will have and the people who are stakeholders in that position when they’ve participated in that, you’re going to have a much better shot at getting the right candidate for the position.

Sam: Okay. And with that said, it’s now time for our horror story having to do with the hiring process. Katie, I’m going to toss this one on you. You tend to have a lot of these stories in your pocket.

Katie: Yeah, 15 years as a recruiting director and a Fortune 100 will give you a lot of experience. And that candidate survey I talked about gave you lots of examples. A couple that come to mind… I had a candidate who wrote in her survey, she was a female candidate who was rather tall. My hunch was sort of 5’11 ish, came in for her interview and the hiring manager was a shorter gentleman and as they walked back to his office, he was having to look up to have the conversation with her. So for some reason he thought it would be humorous. When she sat down for the interview, he stepped up on his chair and stood on the chair and said, well, now that I’m taller than you, we can proceed in the interview and you’re just go, in what world? In what world did that seem like a good idea? So that one’s always one of my favorite, like really that that shouldn’t have happened.

Sam: How did the candidate respond to that?

Katie: In the moment, I think she actually did all right.

Sam: What are you going to do?

Katie: She’d thrown an awkward, but just kind of went with it. But when she got the candidate survey, she actually wrote in the story word for word. And I remember reading it thinking, “no, that didn’t happen…” And then I made a phone call and I was like, “oh, but it did.”

Sam: Earlier we were talking about assessments and improving the process. And both of you are kind of experts on that topic. If anybody wants to get ahold of you, if they have any additional questions or could use some help, what’s the best way to contact you?

Katie: Actually, if you go to our website, PeopleSolutionCenter.com, there’s a ton of information out there about the work that we do in this space and there’s contact information there as well.

Sam: All right, Mary…

Mary: And, same for me, MCKCoaching.com my website, lots of helpful information there and a way to get in touch with me as well.

Sam: If you’re interested in any custom training videos or any scouting video about the company culture, you can contact me via my website cn-video.com or by calling me at (314) 843-3663 that’s 314 VIDEO ME. Thank you guys so much for being here.

Mary: It was fun.

Christine: Thanks for listening to SuperManager by CN Video Production. Visit our website cn-video.com for additional episodes and lots of SuperManager resources, or give us a call at 314 VIDEO ME.