[Nape_members] Recommended: "Rise of the 12-step job interview"

Sun, 6 Jul 2003 09:30:07 -0400

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Headline:  Rise of the 12-step job interview
Byline:  Eric Schellhorn Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 06/30/2003

There was a time in corporate America when the boss took 20 minutes to 
size you up and skim your resume before leaping to his feet and 
barking, "Kid, I like the cut of your jib. Welcome aboard!"

But today, with employers comfortably ensconced in the labor-market 
driver's seat, hiring decisions based on instinct are practically 
unheard of.

Indeed, it's not at all unusual these days for a candidate to be 
grilled by six, eight, or even a dozen interviewers on various rungs of 
the corporate ladder as part of the overall screening process, say 
human-resources executives, headhunters, and other experts in modern 
hiring practices

"Many companies have made bad hires; now it's their market, and they're 
determined to find the people they want," explains Marie Raperto of the 
Cantor Concern, a New York City recruiting firm. "Even someone seeking 
a mid-level job has to be prepared to go through six or seven 
interviews," she adds. "It's endless."

"It's payback time," adds John Dooney, who advises the Society for 
Human Resources Management on its own hiring techniques. "Companies are 
picky, picky, picky."

Some headhunters and job seekers are skeptical about whether subjecting 
candidates to multiple interrogators increases the likelihood of 
finding the best people.

"Corporate America doesn't know how to select the best person, so what 
they do instead is cast a wide net, then deselect until they're left 
with the least offensive candidate," says Timothy Pickwell, a San Diego 
corporate attorney who sat for several interviews with more than a 
dozen different organizations before landing a position at a southern 
California restaurant company last year.

"You can't even get nine people to agree on where to go for lunch," he 
adds. "How can you expect them to agree on a person?"

But in an age where companies routinely boast about their teamwork 
ethos, nonhierarchical cultures, and commitment to "cross-functional" 
collaboration, it's easy to see why consensus now plays a major role in 
hiring.

Many companies known for attracting top-flight talent say they believe 
that gathering a wide variety of perspectives is essential to ensuring 
that the right person gets the job.

"We've used a group process for many years," says Melanie Jones, a 
spokeswoman for Southwest Airlines, a firm often hailed as being among 
the most worker-friendly US companies. "We're all about people, and so 
we're interested in how [candidates] respond in group environments."

Particularly when it comes to executive positions, "there's a 
likelihood of numerous interviews, because a lot of people need to buy 
into the hire," says Marus Jastrow, a staffing manager for Sun 
Microsystems.

Ms. Jastrow says candidates are often the ones who benefit most from 
multiple meetings.

"When they get here, they'll find it easier to acclimate, and they'll 
be effective more quickly," she says.

Problems with group hiring arise when junior staffers or peers are 
given veto power in the final decision, says Bob Woodrum, a partner at 
executive-recruiting giant Korn/Ferry International.

Recounting a recent incident in which a candidate was dismissed by a 
Fortune 100 client despite having favorably impressed 11 of 12 
interviewers, he notes that "everyone has a different agenda," and that 
such agendas - whether personal or political - can conflict with the 
organization's best interests.

"This was a case where 11 people had said, 'This guy's a hire.' But one 
person said the candidate wasn't enthusiastic enough, and that was it."

Experts readily acknowledge that there are both effective and 
ineffective ways to go about group interviewing. The worst examples 
involve situations in which a candidate is passed around to several 
interviewers who riddle him with the same set of questions.

This can make for a frightfully tedious experience for the job-seeker; 
it may also compromise the value of the sessions for the employer.

"When people all ask the same things, something interesting happens: 
The candidate gets better as he goes along," notes Lynn Nemser, an 
independent hiring consultant in Pittsburgh. "Well, guess what? You've 
given that person a dozen chances to refine and improve his answer."

Linda Clark-Santos, senior vice president of talent recruitment for 
Washington Mutual, has developed systems designed to eliminate such 
repetition, which often results from interviewers simply not knowing 
how to ask meaningful questions that will help them assess a 
candidate's suitability for a particular position.

"Everyone here used to have their own process when it came to hiring. 
If people had more than one interview, it might have felt like the same 
experience over and over," she says. Now, the company's corporate 
intranet contains a guide that provides interviewers with a battery of 
useful questions that probe a candidate's past responses to particular 
workplace scenarios.

But as the old disclaimer goes, past performance is no guarantee of 
future success. Companies need most to consider whether a candidate is 
a good fit for the company's culture, says Joseph Broschak, assistant 
professor of business administration at the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign.

"Interviewers need to determine not just whether people have the 
skills, but also consider whether they match the intangibles we're 
looking for - things like ethical orientation," he says.

Despite the growing popularity of more rigorous, structured systems of 
hiring, a few holdouts remain, particularly at smaller firms.

Kimberly Egan, a partner at San Francisco's Center for Culinary 
Development, a food-product development firm, still relies primarily on 
instinct when it comes to hiring.

"I've always had a talent for being able to read people," she says. "I 
personally think business school should teach a class in how to read 
your gut."

Pre-interview patter practice

"So, where do you see yourself in five years?" "What are your greatest 
strengths and weaknesses?" "How well do you work in teams?"

Hackneyed questions along these lines are the stuff bad job interviews 
are made of. Asked once, they're merely silly. Posed six times by six 
consecutive interviewers, they can be downright maddening.

But suppose you want the job despite your interviewers' shortcomings in 
the snappy repartee department. How can savvy candidates respond to 
tired lines of questioning in a way that ensures they leave a trail of 
suitably impressed interrogators in their wake? Experts offer these 
tips for making your patter matter:

Know your questioners. "One of the things candidates absolutely must do 
is know the backgrounds of the people they're interviewing with," says 
Smooch Reynolds, president and CEO of the Repovich Reynolds Group, a 
recruiting firm in Los Angeles. "You want to find those common threads 
so you can strike a positive chord in each person you meet with." For 
better and worse, human- resources experts say, people tend to like 
people with whom they have something in common, whether it's an alma 
mater, a past employer, a former colleague, or a passion for obscure 
'70s punk and new-wave bands.

Educate yourself. "Especially with the Internet, if a candidate tells 
me he doesn't know much about the company he's going to be interviewing 
with, my first thought isn't that he's lazy; my first thought is that 
he's dumb," says Bob Woodrum, a partner at Korn/Ferry International who 
specializes in placing senior public-relations executives. "If you 
think you can just go in and be charming, that's a big mistake." Mr. 
Woodrum says he advises clients to know as much as possible about a 
company's operations, market niche, competitors, and unique business 
challenges before the first meeting with a prospective boss.

Turn the interview around. Don't use the job interview as a chance to 
rehash your resume's highlights and tell war stories, recruiters say. 
"If they didn't think you had the basic skills, you wouldn't be there," 
Woodrum points out. "You want to focus on what you can do to help the 
company and to find out what each interviewer wants from the person in 
this position."

Know when to stop talking. Woodrum further notes that a recent survey 
of Korn/Ferry's partners revealed that a failure to stop yakking is the 
single most common reason why candidates don't make the final cut. "You 
want to have a conversation with people, but you also have to know when 
to listen," he says. "Social skills do matter."

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