Who is Interviewing Your Interviewers?

After 25 years in the corporate world, followed by 21+ years as an Executive Recruiter, I have seen most everything you can see in the hiring process.  Of course, much of the attention that is given to this subject is centered around the candidates and their struggles.  The reasons they succeed and the reasons they fail.  The reasons they do and say the things they do during the interview process.  Certainly, it is a topic that is worthy of the attention it gets from all of the executives out there.  It surely is a focus of Human Resources Managers all over the globe.  It is also a key focus of all of those Executive Recruiters out there as it was for me for many years.

Having said all of that, let me now tell you that in my experienced opinion, there is another topic that should be getting as much attention.  Perhaps more.  That is, the interviewers themselves, and not the interviewees.  Let me explain.

Whether you are a CEO, CFO, or any key executive in the corporate world, let this be my version of a wake-up call.  Whether you are a self-made billionaire or a very wealthy retired individual that requires various services in your life, you too can take heed to this issue.

We all need to hire great people for our staff, our teams, our organizations and our personal needs.  We all depend on our management team to bring in the best prospects and to hire the very best in the marketplace.  I know, I have been there for many years.  We count on our folks to ask the right questions, dig as deeply as possible and cover all of the critical points to hire our next great employee, or great company, or great agent or great contractor.

When the hire does not go as well as we would have liked, we make assumptions that it was the candidate that was the issue, or the market just goes haywire from time to time. Perhaps it was just the wrong fit or not the right time. Can you be sure that is indeed what happened?

Do you have a department that continues to have open positions?  Do you have positions that just can’t seem to be filled, or when they are filled they simply don’t work out?  Do you have a great body of resumes that for whatever reason don’t pan out?  Maybe the issue isn’t what it appears to be.  Maybe, just maybe, it is something else entirely.

I have made all of these assumptions as an executive for some great and successful companies.  It is so easy to do.  In fact, I will go so far as to say that is standard across the hiring process.

For the last 21+ years, I have been able to see this process from a totally different perspective.  As an Executive Recruiter, I have been able to able to dig into this topic deeper than most get the opportunity to.  I started my recruiting company 23 years ago and have since sold the company (still going strong) and retired.  I have taken that time to reflect on some of the key topics that I have seen and experienced over the last 45 years of hiring.

I believe strongly that the only way to be successful in any business is to build relationships and understand fully your client’s needs.  That has enabled me to get inside client cultures, inside their hiring practices and understanding their strengths and weaknesses.  That has further enabled me to help companies improve their hiring practices, find the weaknesses, discover the unknown issues and yes, interview the interviewers.

I can tell you this is a major issue in the hiring process in America.  We promote our best engineer, or our best scientist, or our best plant manager to the next level position.  We assume because they were great at engineering or at product development, they will be great at management.  Many are.  However, guess what… there is very little if any training on actual interviewing.  HR does the best they can, but most are overwhelmed and have little time for this.  It is a major gap in our corporate process and our process of developing staff.

I have seen example after example of this.  I have seen the manager (new or senior) repeatedly ask the wrong questions.  I have seen them struggle on what to ask and most importantly, what not to ask.  I have seen the hiring team so afraid of making a hiring mistake that they constantly look for reasons not to hire, rather than all the reasons they need to hire.  I have seen the hiring manager who is so afraid that the candidate they are interviewing is so strong and has such great qualifications that they are afraid to hire them for fear it may make them look weak.  Yes, this happens all the time.

Another major issue is what I call “company arrogance”.  I have always been very proud of where I worked and especially so, of my own company.  There is a big difference between company pride and company arrogance.  An example of the latter is when the hiring manager or hiring team grill the candidate on why they think they deserve to join their company instead of selling them on why they should want to.  By not knowing the right way to present that in a prideful way, they can dramatically “turn off” top quality candidates.  In today’s highly competitive market that can end up costing you millions of dollars by losing that great sales manager, or great CFO.

The list of examples of hiring teams not being properly trained could fill up many books. Passing up a perfect candidate because he didn’t go to the college they did.  Taking so long to make decisions that they lose candidate after candidate.  Or the new manager who believes she should “low-ball” every offer to save money when in fact they keep missing out of filling their openings because the typical top candidate today will have 3 to 5 offers at a time.  Or the hiring manager that talks negatively about the company or their department without even realizing the consequences.

In all my years of helping clients hire top talent and helping clients to improve their processes by understanding their hiring teams and interview techniques I have seen more than most.  I stated this in my recent book, From All Sides – The Truth About the Hiring Process in America that if I could have one wish that I believe would impact the job market and hiring in the United States the most, it would be to train hiring managers across the country on proper hiring practices and interview skills.

There are endless training classes for candidates on how to write resumes’, how to prepare for interviews and how to answer a plethora of questions.  There are simply very little to no such training for the interviewer.  Thus, companies are at the mercy of what we assume they know.  Executives are at the mercy of the performance or lack of performance of their hiring teams.

This missing piece could be costing you greatly in many ways.  You could be hiring the wrong candidate sure, but you could also be missing out on who you don’t hire.  You could be bringing the wrong folks into your company family or what can sometimes be worse, not filling a role at all by taking months or years to get that all important role filled.

I encourage everyone to take the time and energy to focus on this.  I have seen what ignoring it can do to those clients I have worked with over the years.  I believe people are our greatest asset by far. No company can afford to miss out of top talent by simply not knowing their interviewer.

Written by Al Polson.

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