Interviewing Candidates

Think about this for a minute-lets say you have an employee who works for you for a year and makes $40,000 a year. She is an entry-level accountant. Over the course of that year you have a number of people who collectively spend a significant number of hours training her. You may also send her to off-site training. It probably takes several weeks before she can work independently for an extended length of time. The point is, do the math-it probably does cost you at least $40,000 when she leaves after a relatively short period of time. It doesn't matter whether an employee is slinging hamburgers or performing brain surgery. When she leaves, you see a large investment walking out the door. To avoid this, make sure your interviewing process is first-class so that you will be able to hang on to your investment!

Thanks for reading.

Interviewing Candidates

Multiple studies have shown that the cost of replacing an employee who has left your company can easily amount to one to one and a half times the employee's base salary. For example, if a departed employee made $40,000 per year, then it will cost your company somewhere between $40,000 to $60,000 to replace him. That range seems way too high, doesn't it? However, it is accurate.



Let's review why next time.

Interviewing Candidates

From the company's perspective, why is the interviewing process so important? One of the obvious reasons is that the on-going success of the company depends upon hiring the right people. We all know this fact. However, management at many companies never calculate the cost of hiring the wrong person. Do you have any idea what this figure amounts to? Stay tuned...the amount may surprise you. Thanks for reading.

Interviewing Candidates

The candidate is probably taking notes during the interview-you as the interviewer should be taking notes also-listen attentively and record the candidate's responses to your questions. After the interview, take (15) minutes and review your notes, then rate the candidate before you interview another one. Sounds obvious, but many interviewers fail to do this. As a result, the candidates all blend in to one person in the interviewer's mind-confusion reigns!

Interviewing Candidates

We listen to what others are saying in one of two distinct ways: we either listen to respond or we listen to learn. Listening to respond means that we are formulating our response to the candidate while she is talking to us-therefore we do not really hear what the candidate is saying-we miss important information because we are saying to ourselves-"when is this person going to shut up so that I can dazzle her with my brilliant comments!"

Listening to learn means that we really focus on what the candidate is saying-we pay attention-we keep our ego in check, and therefore we learn a lot about the candidate that is not on her resume. She is telling us what we need to know to make the right hiring decision-all we need to do is listen to her.

Thanks for reading.

Interviewing Candidates

(To my readers-I am back after a family vacation and a training event).

We were last talking about the interview process from the interviewer's perspective. When they are conducting interviews, interviewers utilize different techniques-some spend a lot of time asking the candidate questions about his/her background using the candidate's resume as a reference-others ask each candidate the same set of questions-some interviewers use a combination of these two (2) techniques. What ever technique you chose to use, make sure that you ask the questions, then STOP TALKING AND REALLY LISTEN TO THE CANDIDATES' RESPONSES TO YOUR QUESTIONS.....you will be amazed by what you learn.

Interviewing Candidates

One of the biggest mistakes that interviewers make is that they talk too much during the interview. I interviewed once for an HR Manager position at a local manufacturing plant. My interviewer was a Vice-President of this particular organization...and he did not know the first thing about conducting an effective interview. He talked almost the entire time-when we were done, he really did not know anything about me other that the info. that was on my resume.