Interviewing or voting: check their track records

As the campaign heats up during the weeks before Canada’s October 19 election, voters are being asked to decide how to vote on the same basis an interviewer uses to decide who to hire: look at the candidate’s track record. Then ask yourself, have they done the right things in the right way? After all, past performance is the best predictor of future performance.

Stephen Harper is running on the Conservative’s track record during nine years in government, while the other parties are basing their campaigns on attacking that track record. It’s either vote Conservative and get more of the same or vote NDP, Liberal or Green to get something different.

The other parties also claim their own track records as evidence that they should be elected as Canada’s next government. Meanwhile, the Conservatives point to those track records for reasons not to vote for any of them.

When they hire, managers should ask themselves whether the candidate’s experience is recent enough and acquired under sufficiently similar circumstance to be a reliable basis on which to predict the individual’s performance if hired. Given how quickly workplaces change, recent experience is a better indicator of what he will do now, than experience gained 10 years ago. And experience in settings similar to your workplace is more valid than experience from an environment that’s quite unlike it.

Luckily for managers, they control who they will interview. The people who managers invite to interviews usually have had recent experience under similar circumstances. Voters, meanwhile, are disadvantaged when comparing the parties’ track records. The last Liberal government was defeated in 2006, which is not particularly recent, and the NDP has never held power federally. The Conservatives have recent experience as the federal government, but have they done what you want your government to have done and have they done it in a way you would want them to have done it?

Prepare to assess candidates by anticipating their responses to questions

How I think about interviewing has evolved since I offered my first Interview Right to Hire Right program more than 20 years ago.

There have been moments of epiphany as I have listened to the experiences of workshop participants, conducted interviews on behalf of clients, or reflected on what experts have written on the subject.

I feel that I have a better understanding of how to prepare interviewers to make hiring decisions and ensure they hire the right people—those who have the potential to be top performers.

I now believe that before meeting with candidates, interviewers should consider how candidates might respond to their questions. What could a candidate include in his answer that would make the response acceptable? What would an outstanding response (the type you would expect to hear from a top performer) sound like? And an unacceptable response?

I suggest going beyond just thinking about what you might hear. Write down what might be included in outstanding, acceptable and unacceptable answers. Use this information as criteria against which to measure the candidates’ responses, using a five-point scale: 1 if unsatisfactory, 3 for acceptable and 5 for outstanding (what you would expect to hear from your top performers). The 5-point scale enables you to give a candidate credit for an answer that is better than unsatisfactory, but still not up to the acceptable standard (score it as a 2) or not outstanding, but more than acceptable (4).

Recently, I began to include suggestions of criteria for assessing responses as part of the regular Briefly Noted feature “A question to help you identify potential top performers.”

Click here to subscribe to Briefly Noted and to receive, every two weeks, a question to help you identify potential top performers, along with other tips, tools and techniques to interview more effectively and recognize and retain staff.

While I hope this advice will be useful, it’s only a guideline. What I think would be an acceptable or outstanding response may not be consistent with your observations of how your top performers respond to circumstances similar to those described. Please adapt these suggestions to fit your organization, its culture and your leadership style. Or ignore my advice altogether.