Book Notes: The Effective Hiring Manager
This summarizes the book The Effective Hiring Manager by Mark Horstman
Rating: 5 stars!
Part 1: Overview
Intent: enable any hiring manager to hire the right employees and make them productive ASAP.
Main Idea: all pre-offer activities are an effort to find reasons to say “no”. This is opposite of the common belief that they’re a search for someone to say “yes” to. The wrong hire is so costly that the effective hiring manager does everything reasonable to eliminate that risk.
Big Ideas:
– 1st reaction to job opening should be don’t hire—work out or delegate to the floor!
– Hiring is the most important managerial duty because it’s the costliest to mess up.
– The main objective is to find ethical and professional reasons to say “no”.
– Have your whole team interview each person, 1:1, all on one day per candidate.
– Interview results capture meeting: each person starts with “yes/no” reco and data on why.
Top 3 Essentials:
- If you must pick one thing from the guidance: create behavioral questions.
- Then: do better phone screens. Ask 2/3 directs to do interviews like yours.
- Finally: add the results capture meeting.
Hiring principles
- Try not to hire. Delegate to floor.
- Set a high bar, ahead of the process. You must raise the average performance of your team.
- HR rarely trains how to ask questions/probe, setup the day, how to get input from your team. HR training more about legalities than an effective hiring decision.
- Good hiring is about the outcome, not the decision itself. If they turn out to be unproductive, it was a bad hiring decision regardless of the interview score.
Part 2: How to Screen
Reading resumes:
– Titles: Avoid letting people through on “maybe”. You have all the judgment for the role you’re in. You know what you’re looking for based on who you currently manage.
– Dates: Leaving off dates is a negative, as is leaving off month and only putting years. Candidates slip into “there’s nothing untrue there…” not realizing that it’s a reason to distrust based on leaving out info.
– Companies: Find out what you can about whom they worked for. Growing companies provide better experience generally. Small company that stays flat is concerning–growth is easier when small so inefficiency likely is what they learned. Small=<100 employees. 500+=big. Meaning they share most similarities. Ask about candidates coming from big to your small company, red flag but not a big one.
– Career progression: “Have they grown?” Similar/same roles in one firm is ok IF they show learning/teaching/increase in responsibility. Bad if they’ve been in similar roles in similar firms. Almost never hire a non-manager to be a manager of people for you.
– Responsibilities: Easy to put on, we all have them. Don’t consider them high value without achievements. Someone fired had the exact same responsibilities as a to performer. What’s good is if responsibilities match those of your role. Experience=accomplishments, not responsibilities or jobs. Don’t assume you know the responsibilities just cuz the same title exists in your company.
– Accomplishments: The saffron of resumes. Screen by asking 3 ?s: is it an accomplishment, is it noteworthy, is it measured? Qualification (“significant”) without quantification (“top 5 of 100”) is suspicious.
– Education: Three questions: Is the level sufficient? What quality level of ed? How did they perform? Common error: assuming a four year time frame means graduation. Look for the degree.
– Accuracy: It’s important written communication. Don’t hire known poor communicators.
– Density/relevance: What proportion of the experience is relevant to your industry and role?
Finally, have yes, no, and maybe piles. Don’t screen tired, upset, sick or hungry. Don’t let her screen until you know they know the system and your role.
Toss the no pile or use for training. Phone screen the yes pile first.
Screening social media
Screen it because there’s behavior relevant to the role. Don’t use it as the only source of info on someone. Like taking them to lunch, their impolite behavior there likely will continue in the workplace. Behaviors destructive to the team are terminable. Look at the whole person, because we hire whole people. Don’t consider medical conditions b/c not relevant. Social media behavior is likely relevant. We mean professional screening, not looking for political or social match etc which borders on discrimination. Screen for unprofessional, unethical, or poor communication behavior that could surface at work.
– LinkedIn: does it match the resume? Any endorsements?
– Others: Any concerning posts/likes? Photos showing poor judgement?
– Industry specific apps: how’s their behavior there?
Phone screens
Purpose is to reduce burden of face to face interviews by reducing #. 30 minutes is enough. It’s a partial interview. Can lead to all candidates being screened out. Fine to run long but occasionally. Manager calls candidate. Take a moment to explain the process. Start with tell me about yourself.
Probe about decisions, behaviors etc if less than one minute answer. If time, ask one or two behavioral questions assuming you’ve prepared them. No need to share or make a decision yet.
HR phone screens: they likely aren’t the only one who can do it. They likely don’t know the role well enough to actually screen like you would. Thus their opinion won’t predict success. If you do have an HR who knows the role or has even interviewed for it before, well done. Let them screen.
Part 3: How to interview
By now, you have:
– Avoided hiring, initially. A.k.a. you considered the productivity opportunity.
– Set bar high. Hiring is the most important decision you make as a manager.
– Committed to looking for reasons to say no. Avoids false positive, the worst outcome possible.
– Established hiring criteria. What results?
– Created questions based on those criteria
– Screened resumes
– Screened candidates’ social media
– Conducted phone screens
Now, full day onsite interview day
– Tell them the process in-advance, best by email
– Brief your team in-advance on the day’s plan. They’ll be on alert to help.
– Give candidate agenda w/names, where, when, a map, and brief them on logistics
o Calms their nerves. Reducing stress increases true positives and true negatives
o Captures normal schedule changes (e.g. one interview is out sick)
o Answer questions, escort.
– Only 1 candidate per day.
o Logistics much harder. Crises mean 1 won’t be fully evaluated.
o Candidates are inevitably compared to one-another (vs the bar). Only rank candidates who get over the bar, unanimously.
– All calibrated directs interview if there’s time.
o 6-7 interviews are usually possible.
o If you have 10 directs, not all can interview due to time. Each escorts them to next interview.
o If not enough to fill a day, can have peers interview, as long as they follow your process which you told the candidate they’d experience.
o More experienced interviewers get more time. In the morning. Less experienced get 60 minutes. After more experienced interviewers.
o 90 minutes per lunch if offsite. Don’t let traffic, etc put your agenda at risk.
o Your interview is last, 90-120 min.
- If they accept, you need time.
– Do results capture meeting.
Physical interview setup
Don’t put candidate in conference room for the day of interviews (barring security reasons).
90 degrees is great. Can do it in your cubicle. Reduce distractions for the interviewer at all costs. No screens. No phones, and obviously silenced. Discourage interviewers from chatting. Each interview stands on its own. Assume this candidate has 100 other offers and is future CEO.
No panel interviews ever.
- Right way is 1 on 1. Result of each interview is hiring decision. Reco is equivalent of “I would hire or not.” It’s your decision, thus your interview time shouldn’t be shared with other interviewers.
- Loss of multiple effective perspectives, wrong kind of perspectives.
- Risk of bad questions/probes. What good is saved time only to listen to bad questions?
- A’s own evaluation biased by B’s questions stemming from unknown rationale.
- A may not have time to ask A’s own probes.
- Negative correlation to effectiveness. Panels don’t increase true positives and increase false positives.
- Candidates hate them. Greater % of candidates interviewed this way turn down offers.
- If told have to, consider political capital. “That’s how it’s done” isn’t always “mandatory”.
- They’re not “safer”. Previous screening steps eliminate most risks of unprofessional candidates, every interviewer asks same questions and is trained, expected to defend reco with data. Look for examples of lawsuits—rare. Panels aren’t the answer anyway.
Technical interviews
Assess tech skills as realistically as you can, in real time.
Separate from behavioral interviews—make it one of the interviews on the final day of interviews.
Outcome is hire/not hire as usual.
Some examples of problems/questions (e.g. make a pivot table out of this dataset). One candidate claiming “MS Office” skills who fails this will convince you to keep doing this.
Probe while they work out problems—why that step now?, etc.
Each interviewer uses same set of questions
Each candidate is being compared to 1 job. Job is the same, so criteria are the same. More effective and seen as fair by candidates.
Typical today, interviewers don’t use same questions.
– Don’t allow interviewers to use their own questions, go with their gut, or to not prepare.
Won’t they say “well I already answered that question”? Only the weak ones.
Won’t they get frustrated at the same questions? No.
Won’t they get better throughout the day? No. We’ve tested it. It’s harder for less-prepared candidates, a good thing.
How will we get different perspectives with same questions? Interviewers each bring own filters and will glean different qualities via different probing questions.
Candidates are not well-prepared for interviews, generally. Bad guidance out there:
– “Prep should be about the company.”
– “Interview the interviewer.”
– “Learn to be a storyteller in interviewers.” Slightly less dumb.
– “Answer a question with a question.” Really? How well does that work in any situation?
Best candidates like structured professional interviews.
Basic structure of each interview
8 phases:
- Introductions. first and last name, with a space and louder first name. Role and relationship to candidate’s would-be role “I’ll be your peer on the team.”
- Brief small talk. Sports, how have interviews gone, how was drive in.
- Interview overview. “Thank you for interviewing with me today. At MT we use behavioral interview style meaning I’ll ask about experiences you’ve had and how you handled them. You should hear the same behavioral questions in each interview. I’ll interject, that’s normal. I’ll take notes, please don’t let it distract you. Time to ask me questions. I’m excited you’re here, let’s get started.”
- Tell me about yourself. Easy, good candidates will have prepped answers, introduces probing and thought process/decision making, should be 3-5 minutes, decide how much to probe, if 1 minute move on, don’t take time from other questions. Not “walk me through your resume.” We already know that info, or they’ll tell stuff less valuable than what our behavioral questions will discover.
- Core behavioral questions.
- Custom/targeted questions. May be behavioral or relevant to your company or culture. Not technical questions which have their own interview.
- Answering their questions. We don’t recommend skipping this, but if you have a couple of minutes left, it’s fine. If you have 5+ minutes, it may be more helpful to ask another prepared behavioral questions. If you’ve already made up your mind (i.e. found reason to say “no”), take notes to backup your reasoning, or if near the end, ask for questions and don’t ask more of your own questions. It sends the wrong message and isn’t helpful to the decision. Interviewers who decide it’s a no and depart from prepared questions often stop taking notes, which is a red flag for candidates. You may need extra data at the results capture meeting.
- Evaluate their questions. Vast majority of candidates think it’s a two-way street. Learning about the company & team becomes “deciding yes/no during the interview, too”. Terrible guidance. Of course, they evaluate the interviewer too, but not equally. If that were so, they’d get more than 5 minutes out of an hour. But if we haven’t behaved professionally, that’ll come back to hurt us. Still, time for their evaluation of us is when power passes to them (i.e. the offer is made).
- Impressive: shows they’ve prepped in lead to question. “I noticed product X is… so how will my role relate?”
- Not impressive: yes/no or numeric questions (close-ended). Not about high-level company or industry info unless genuinely connected to their role. Candidates who ask about what they’re interested in take time away from convincing you they’re the right person. How much they could be paid, benefits, etc. are premature before there’s any offer. These are strikes against the person.
How to take notes
Not important because they’re a legal document, but because you need to decide whom to hire based on evidence.
What to write, and where
Pre-print the questions on your answer sheet.
– Why not take notes on a blank page? You want to ask the same question the same each time. “Tell me of a time when you influenced direction on a project?” Is different than “How have you influenced project direction?” and answers can’t be compared.
– Handwritten only. Purpose is having good record of what transpired. Effectiveness over efficiency. 3 groups: laptops/handwritten/pretend pen. Laptop < pretend. And they suspect you may be doing something else. “I talked for two minutes but he only had 50 key strokes…”
– Write down as much as you can. Best interviewers (most true positives) write more. You don’t have to write every word to capture the key idea, but…
– Don’t paraphrase. Write exactly what you hear. Facts can’t be argued. Conclusions can be. You will remember the conclusions you drew, no need to write them, and it takes time away from writing what was said.
– Use abbreviations. Remove vowels if meaning preserved. “C” for candidate. Longer words, use first syllable. What’s required from HR or legal is 1 sheet of paper with question and space to write notes. Write what you hear, file with the resume, done.
How to probe.
“What questions should I ask” is not right, it’s “How do I evaluate answers?”. We’re looking for behaviors. Candidates don’t answer with behaviors. Can’t probe for anything, hence the prep work to design questions.
How: avoid constantly interrupting. Apologize for interrupting, then get more info. Decisions they make and most important behaviors we identified in our prep.
Probing for decision making, what to listen for and what to say:
– “so…” “obviously…” “I concluded…” = why?
– “My plan was…” = how was the plan created, what were unchosen options.
– “go back quickly if you would please, and explain your reasoning there. Why did you choose that action plan?”
– “Sorry to interrupt, but tell me more about how you came to that decision?”
– “I apologize, but can you help me understand your analysis? Why those choices?”
– “Why did you choose that action, that plan?”
– “Excuse me, why did you decide to do that?”
Probing for communication: what to listen for and what to say:
– “I talked to them.” Say “Excuse me, what did you say? How did you prepare, how did you talk to them?”
– “We had a meeting and…”. “I’m sorry, can I ask about the meeting? How did you prepare? Did you know how people would feel beforehand? How did you present your idea?”
– “We exchanged emails…”. “Sorry, tell me more about that exchange. Why did you chose email? What other choices did you have? What are your criteria for choosing email?”
Part 4: How do decide and offer/decline candidates
Interview results capture meeting (IRCM):
To capture interviewer recommendations in as short time as possible. Causes better interviews b/c they’ll have to come to this meeting and start with hire/don’t reco. Without this, evidence shows whoever talks loudest and longest wins. speeds up process and improves quality. Almost as important as interviews themselves. After all interviewers have interviewed the candidate, but don’t wait until all candidates have interviewed if more than one has made it to the final day. Mention a couple bad hires, they’ll be able to help you, you’ll be able to help them with interviews, and they’ll want to adopt it guaranteed.
Logistics:
– Day of or after candidate’s interview day. Sched an hour, keep to 30.
5:00 Remind agenda
5:05 Report 1
5:10 Report 2
5:15 Report 3
5:20 Report 4
5:25 Report 5
5:30 Open discussion
6:00 Close
– Have person send report in-advance if they can’t attend.
– Use “what & why”. Hire/don’t and support based on what they heard/saw.
o Support: behavioral examples in 4 areas. Interpersonal, cultural, skills, and technical (if qualified to share it, i.e. you did the technical interview).
o Interpersonal-how well did they interact with you?
o Culture-how well would they fit in?
o Skills-what did you see in the answers to the behavioral questions including how answers were communicated?
o Technical-how did they perform.
o “I recommend we don’t hire Andrew. Interpersonally, he kept interrupting me, even after I asked him to let me finish the question. Culturally, I have concerns as well. He said twice that collaboration was overrated and that he believed in leaders deciding. Skill wise, there’s no question he could od th ejob the told me of his success brinign a difficult project in on time. But the interpersonal and cultural areas are big concerns. I say no.”
o After all go, you the leader share.
– Not ironclad but aim for unanimity. If someone didn’t follow the process or is less experienced. If team all recommend not hiring but you disagree, don’t hire. Your vote doesn’t outrank all combined and future decision input is less.
– At this point, time to make a decision. Even if there are more to interview, because you’re not sure others will come in. Delay making the offer, not the decision. Share how you capture results in the IRCM.
Check references
Check between decision and offer. Hour or two. Not to find out why we want them, but to make sure there aren’t concerns we haven’t found ourselves. In careful firms, HR has told managers how to not answer these questions, but most managers just remember “only give dates of employment”. Most firms aren’t that careful though. Risk of defamation is low.
- Start with admission…“Our firm has been interviewing Ally Simpson, and we’re in the late stages where we check references. She listed you as a reference. I only have a few questions, this won’t take more than 5 min.”
- Ask factual questions…”would you please confirm dates of employment.” This builds trust for later when we may ask questions they wouldn’t answer without trust. They’re likely willing to find it, don’t give them dates candidate gave you unless they can’t find them.
- “Could you confirm the job title for me please?” Not an automatic red flag if title isn’t exact. Use of “manager” implies people or budget, though not always. Watch for pattern. Use of “director” while not supervising managers. Larger, known company with pattern. Consider sharing what was on the resume for clarification with reference.
- “Please comment on accuracy of following job description.” Read job description from resume. Give wiggle room. References typically understand this. If reference has been quiet so far, can help with prompt. “job we’re considring will have budget of x, in the resume he said budget of y. Is that accurate?”
- Be thankful to build rapport. Not expecting gross discrepancies to be common. Want reference to relax. Say thank you.
- Progress to substantive questions. “I was told about project X. Can you confirm his involvement? And can you tell me about results?”
- “What was his best contribution?” May not get a good answer.
- “What would you say his areas of improvement are?”
- “We’re looking at him for __ role. How would you assess that fit?” Few can resist their ego and will answer. 4-5 negatives here may be enough to cause pause.
- “If you were me, any concerns about hiring them?”
How to offer
Don’t let HR handle this, ever. Managers run the company, not HR nor lawyers, who may have dictated this process because others have messed up in the past. If it’s mandatory that HR makes official offers, make the offer, tell the candidate that HR will call, and ask the candidate to accept to HR officially.
Prep:
– Beyond salary and start date, ask HR what benefits comprise an offer. Medical, dental, vacation, pension, incentive pay. Take time and notes. Don’t need to know monthly deductible yet, find out who you’d ask for more info.
– See if there are any parts you can increase.
Make the offer the moment you’re ready and you can
– Morning if you can. Candidate has more time, you feel better during the day.
– Don’t wait for in writing. Verbal is faster, more personal, and drives faster decisions. Fine if HR says not official until written. Tiny chance someone accepts verbally and declines written. Voicemail is ok! Don’t play ambiguous phone tag.
– Be upbeat. Praise and congratulations. Talk about fit. Sell! Talk about your high standards. Won’t increase candidates entitlement for more compensation.
5 Offer elements
– Offer, position w/location, comp salary+ben, earliest date open to discussing and share no later than date if there’s one, deadline always—about 1 wk including weekend (Fri-Fri). Contact a day before a deadline.
Making the offer
– Ask for acceptance when you make the offer.
– Call candidate every 3 days.
How to decline
– Obligated to notify them expeditiously. Golden rule. Day decision is made.
– Call, not email. Avoid chit chat. “Hi Gary, how are you. I’m calling with less than great news, there were things I liked about our interactions but we’re going with someone who we’ve found is a better fit for us. We wish you the best in the future.”
– Leave a voicemail. It’s polite because it gives news quickly, it’s not cold. They could play the voicemail for others expecting it’s positive. If they call back, let it go to voicemail and assess their message to see if calling back would be valuable (i.e. they’re professional).
– You can offer feedback but don’t have to. If you want to, “you didn’t demonstrate effective presentation skills. That’s not to say you don’t have them, or that you can’t develop them.”
How to handle two viable candidates
Communicate personally and directly with all viable candidates. HR will never understand your needs nor timing as well as you do, and they’ll add time to the process. If a candidate is rejected, we tell them, still pending, we tell them, questions, we take them. What if HR flubs and answer and you lose the candidate?
Communicate to all candidates that the decision is still pending. Before we communicate rejection, we call viable candidates. Tell them they’re still in the running. “Roberto we were very impressed in your interviews. Some candidates have been ruled out, but you are still in the running. Sometimes it takes several days to get all the details worked out, but I’ll keep you posted. Congratulations on your strong performance.”
Offer the top candidate. Taking longer than 72 hours is too long when you have more than one candidate. Provide a short deadline to the top candidate.
– By 5pm 4 days from the start of the day you make the offer on. If on Mon, Thu 5pm. If Tue, Fri 5pm. If you offer on Wed/Thu it’s Monday 8am. If on Fri Mon 5pm.
– These aren’t ill-perceived by candidates; they’re getting mistreated by disorganized companies.
– “Cedric I’m still working on things. Should have more by (1 day after deadline for first candidate).”
– If 1st accepts, be thrilled, decline the 2nd candidate as the others.
– If 1st declines, offer 2nd candidate.
Part 5: Onboarding
Onboarding new hires
Begins as soon as offer is made. Onboarding = minimize the time before they’re fully effective after the offer.
5 Phases: Close, welcome, prepare, admin, ramp
Close:
- Close the candidate. Regularly communicate. Offerees never go >3 days without hearing from us.
- Welcome: once accept, multiple people reach out. Site visit, house hunting, etc.
- Prepare: may be admin they can do. Work to share in advance, or context to give. Make sure security cautions are based in actual rules before not sharing out of fair.
- Admin: paperwork, badge, etc.
- Ramp: can start before admin in some ways. Activities to accelerate performance.
Discipline makes learning possible. Don’t make it up, have a set process. Hot wash every time we finish following it. Document and publish for the others involved in the process. Consider the MT checklist.
Switch from finding a reason to say “no” to leveraging strengths.