Answers About Questions

It’s important to ask the right questions during a job interview, but it’s also critical to understand how an applicant’s answers can predict their performance after you’ve hired them. “Gut feel” isn’t good enough. In fact, an unreliable hiring process not only can be costly in terms of money and productivity, it may leave your company at risk of a legal challenge, says Dr. Angelika Mellema, a Toronto-based specialist in organization and leadership development.

We asked Dr. Mellema for 10 ideas to help you design and carry out a selection interview that’s legally defensible and will help you more easily identify potential top performers before you hire them:

1. Stick to job-related questions. Carry out a job analysis and determine the criteria for excellent performance for the job in question, making sure the criteria reflect behaviors rather than global traits.

2. Tailor questions around each of these criteria. For example, ask for examples of past behavior in a specific situation, or build a scenario around the criterion and ask the applicant how he would react.

3. Develop a well-defined rating scale to evaluate the candidate’s answers. In other words, come up with answers that you think excellent, good, average, and poor performers would give. Remember, these answers should be in behavioral terms-ones that relate to how the applicant would perform.

4. Document the answers the candidate gives during the interview and evaluate him after he leaves, not during the interview. This will lead to more accurate recall and less-biased judgments. Documenting answers is important for potential legal challenges. However, be sure to maintain the flow of the interview.

5. Use more than one interviewer. Each should document the responses and independently rate the candidate.

6. Use the same line of questioning with each candidate, avoiding follow-ups and probes.

7. Evaluate the applicant’s response to each hiring criteria separately, and weight the various components according to their importance. If you use multiple interviewers, average the scores.

8. Sharpen your interviewing skills through training. Learn how to get the right information, how to rate and evaluate, and how to overcome the biases all interviewers are prone to.

9. Most importantly, formally evaluate whether your questions and the applicant’s responses do indeed predict performance on the job. Based on such tests, you can then delete questions that don’t predict performance, add questions, or otherwise fine-tune what you have.

10. Supplement your interview with reference checks, personality tests, and ability tests in order to obtain the most comprehensive picture of your candidate. For all these predictors, you need to show that they are job-related. In other words, they have to have actually been shown to predict performance on the job.