The Interview Process That Guarantees Great Hires

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We’ve all been there. You spend all this time hiring and training someone to join your company only to realize a few months down the line that they’re not going to make it.

Maybe you start to see an inability to collaborate effectively on meetings. Or maybe the deliverables you get back are just subpar. Regardless of how it happens, the sinking feeling in your gut as a manager is the same. This person is not going to cut it.

This is not only incredibly frustrating, but it’s really expensive to spend so much time training somebody only to have to fire them and go back to recruiting months later. Apart from the chaos, it’s also incredibly discouraging as a leader. You start to resent the people you’ve hired, the team you're trying to build, and you just generally end up unhappy at work.

You can avoid all of this by having a more systematic recruitment and hiring process. Specifically, a systematic interview process can give you near certainty in knowing someone will be a rock star.

Although it will take a bit of extra time upfront, it will save you the hassles and frustration of having to replace a new hire a few months down the line. As you start to replicate this across multiple hires, you’ll become far more confident in your hiring decisions, capable as a leader of a truly effective team, and just generally happier not hating the process of finding good people.

In our businesses, we’ve hired nearly 1,000 people. Hundreds of these have been to work directly on our own team, but a big chunk has been hiring for our clients.

We are extremely process driven and know how to hire well regardless of the role or the business. We have distilled this down to a process and in this article, we will walk you through the interview process we use to make great hires.

By the way, if you want help hiring rock star employees with extensive experience for a fraction of US rates, we can help. We help businesses hire middle and senior level managers from the Philippines, including client facing team members. If you’re curious about doing this for your business, schedule a hiring strategy call here.

But otherwise, let’s get into it. Interview strategy nerd mode [on]…

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Screen Applicants Automatically Up Front

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Assuming you’ve done a great job promoting your job post, you will end up getting a lot of applicants. If you don’t, go back and solve that. We will have a post live on that topic soon.

The first step you need to do is efficiently filter out obviously bad fit applicants so you can spend your time on potential rock stars.

But how do you do that? The answer is a mix of a strategic question or two and a fast filtering process.

• First, you need to filter out the people that are just bulk applying for jobs but not reading the full job post. Deep within the job post, tell applicants to start their application with a unique phrase such as “balloon”. For anyone that applies without including them, to skip their application altogether.

• Second, ask them to describe in two or three sentences max why they are the best fit for the job mission as you described it. If you’ve done a good job defining the role, there will be a clear mission of what you want this person to accomplish (we'll write about that soon too). Include this in the job posting and ask for a concise answer on why they think they are the best fit. This will help you filter applicants that have potential by reading just a few sentences.

At this point, you will have been able to filter down to the specific applicants that were detailed enough to read the entire post and seem like they have the right experience for the role.

Next, you can move into a full review of their application and decide which ones to move forward to a brief conversational interview.

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Have a Brief Conversation to Gauge Fit

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Take the applicants that look promising and schedule a brief 15 minute phone call with each one. Explain to them that you have a few quick questions to discuss to determine if the role is a fit, and that you will then move them forward to a full interview after that.

Set aside 30 minutes but only schedule 15. This will enable you to cut bad fit interviews short while eating space to go deeper with promising applicants.

The flow of the call is simple but strategic…

Start by explaining that you have a few questions to understand if they are a fit and will then schedule a full interview at a later time once you’re done with similar calls with other applicants. This brings the conversation as low pressure and informal, and also sets expectations that you will not be making a decision on moving to the next step today.

There are three questions to ask:

• “Regardless of whether you get this role or not, what does success look like for you 1 year from now?” - what you’re looking for here is someone that has a clear direction in life, they’re working towards what is also aligned with the mission of the job. Consider it a red flag if they are vague about their goals, or if their goal is directly in conflict with how you see this position evolving over the next year or two.

• “What are you really good at? What would your coworkers say you just really excel at?”- what you’re looking for here are specific skill sets that align with capabilities required for the job mission. Not only that, but a self awareness on skill sets is also a good determinant of success.

• “What are you not good at, or just frankly not interested in doing? Maybe you can do it, but you really don’t like it?”- this one may take some digging or shares from you in order to get them to open up. But what you are looking for here is things they don’t want to do that will be important to do within the role you’re hiring for. For example, if they feel really uncomfortable in sales conversations but you know the role you’re hiring for will require them to motivate outside stakeholders to work with your company, this could be a red flag.

This process can take us a little as 10 or 12 minutes, so you can expand it to dig deeper with certain applicants. The open ended nature of the questions put you in a position by the end of the call to have a good understanding of the applicant's fit for the role on some of the softer skills and aspects of how they work.

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Deep Dive to KNOW Before Hiring

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Once you’ve done initial calls with a number of different applicants, you will start to know which ones are a "hell yes" and which ones are a "maybe" for the role.

Only move forward to the next steps with the "hell yes" applicants. The process you’ll go through next takes a long time but will bring you to a near point of certainty in knowing that someone will be successful in the role.

Here’s an overview of what to do in this stage. We’ll do a deeper post in the future on just this interview step.

• Schedule a three hour on-site interview, or video call if on site is not doable.

• Explain in advance that the interview will be a conversational discussion walking through their entire career experience thus far. The only preparation they need to provide is a sequential list of their job full time job positions over their career by name title and year.

• During the interview, ask the same sort of questions for each role from oldest to most recent.

• The first question is “what were you hired to do?”. Goal is to understand how that job aligns with what you are expecting them to accomplish.

• Next, ask “what are you most proud of in that role?”. Look for clear and specific answers about successful outcomes that ideally align with what you want them to accomplish in your role.

• Next, ask “what were some of the low points?”. This may require some digging, but what you are looking for here is a well rounded view of their experience at that company. After asking this related to a number of different roles, you will get an understanding if some of their low points in their career were self inflicted or the result of a poorly run company they worked for.

• Lastly, ask “how did you end up changing from that company to the next company?”. This is an intentionally open ended question to get an understanding of whether they left for a new opportunity, were let go due to performance, or some other reason for the change. Again, by asking the same question related to each role you will get an understanding for their performance and the sentiment of companies that have hired them previously.

This process is extremely detailed and takes a lot of time. But by going through it you will end with a much deeper understanding of what this persons capabilities are, what makes them tick, and frankly what you’re going to know after 3 to 6 months of working with them.

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Use Reference Calls for Deeper Context

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By going through the deep dive above, you should end up with around three applicants that seem like a really good fit. The next step should give you the final pieces of context you need to make a fairly certain hiring decision.

Reference calls should always be done in the interview process. But most companies use reference calls to simply validate information from a résumé or from an interview. This is a missed opportunity.

By being more strategic with your reference calls, you can gain powerful context that will help you not only make the best hiring decision, but will also help you make the person you hire successful in your company more quickly.

Here is an overview:

• During the deep dive interview, ask for their supervisor's name and how that supervisor would rate their performance. Make clear that you will be speaking with them, which will lead to honest answers for context from the applicant.

• If you do move forward to references with this applicant, ask them for contact information for the supervisors and to let the supervisors know you’ll be reaching out. If an applicant is not able to get in contact with their supervisor or provide contact information, consider that a red flag.

• When you reach out to the supervisor, set a tone that you’ve already decided on hiring this person for the role, give them a bit of context about the role, and then tell them you just want to ask them a couple of questions to make the applicant successful. This will lower their guard in answering your questions since you’re saying you’re not asking them to help you make the hiring decision.

• Give them a bit of context of what the applicant said they are good at or accomplished in the role, and then ask an open ended question such as “can you tell me a little bit more about that?”. This frames the question to a topic for supervisor to have some room to give you context of what is triggered in their mind. What you’re looking for in their answers, in addition to specific context, is a sign of confirmation of what the applicant said, or a hint of skepticism or critique.

• Also ask them about something the applicant struggled with in their role or their career with a similar open ended question. For example, “Joe mentioned he struggled with sales types of conversations with clients at times. It sounds like he improved over time, but can you tell me a little bit more about how you saw him deal with that?”. This will give you the opportunity to hear from the supervisor on how big of a problem this was and how the applicant handled it.

• As a last question, ask something along the lines of “you worked with Joe for quite a while. I’m curious what you think we can do to make him successful in the role? What do you think is something we will realize six months down the road that maybe we can get right upfront based on your own experience working with him?“. This is another opportunity to get open ended context in a low pressure way from someone that has deep experience working with the person you are about to hire.

Well any individual reference may not give you a make or break insight, doing multiple calls with multiple references will help you connect the dots of what it’s going to be like working with this person.

By the time you get to the end of this entire process, you will have more certainty on who is the best fit for the role and how to move forward. Not only does this leave you making a better hiring decision, but it sets you up for success with training and on boarding.

You will feel confident in your hiring decisions, capable in your ability to build an amazing team of producers, and generally be happier in your work and your life without the frustrations of repeated mis-hires.

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Want Help Hiring Rock Stars at a Fraction of Your Budget?

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In addition to having a great interview process, targeting the right potential hires is a key part of building a great team.

Would you be interested in being able to hire middle and senior level managers, including client facing roles, for 80% less and the salary ranges you’re currently planning for?

At RecruitmentFlow.com, we help businesses hire experienced middle and senior level managers from the Philippines, including client facing positions. We can help you find rock star hires from the Philippines that have experience in the role you’re hiring for, perfect fluent English, and frankly, the motivation and work ethic to take your company to the next level.

If this sparks ideas for you, reach out at RecruitmentFlow.com and schedule a hiring planning call.