Interviewing just by asking straight questions or goofy questions like the bowling ball will often not get you the best client, especially in the day and age of the counterfeit candidate. that person who has all of the answers, and comes completely prepared for the interview, then lands the job and three months later and three months salary later your letting him/her go because while they sounded like the perfect fit and answered all of the questions right, they didn't have the applicable skills, or knowledge or behavior that were required in the job.
One of the tools that these people use are educational websites like wetfeet.org that can prepare a candidate for almost anything that you can throw at them.
Some ideas or recommendations that I could give you would be.
1. Use personality Profiling tests, we use one that works really well, and even has false flag indicators. Also if your putting this person into a team or a department make your best performer in that department write it as well, that way you have a comparison between your candidate and your "Top Performer".
2) Find a way to test thier applicable skills before they interview, if they need to use a certain software product, either buy commercially available tests, or create one of your own.
3) The initial interview should be fairly quick and general, talk a bit about the role, and a bit about your company culture, and test them on thier behavior, make sure that you get specific examples.
4) Do your reference checks, but request permission to phone a random former employer instead of letting them supply you with a couple of references (The oldest rule in the book is "Everybody has two friends)
5) The second interview should be a panel interview with a little more pressure, attendee's should be depending on the position that your hiring for either from your leadership team, or the manager that the employee is going to be working for, someone from HR and yourself. When you panel your asking specific questions about past performances, successes and failures and your looking for detail and examples that they can't make up on the spot.
We actually publish some pretty good white papers on hiring and retention issues if any of you are interested, send me a PM, and I can provide you with them.
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