by Beth | Feb 13, 2025 | Uncategorized
If you haven’t read part 1, read it here.
When I made my horrible bad hire that made national news, I immediately started reading every hiring book I could get my hands on. I needed help! I needed guidance on how to hire people so that I could run my restaurant. It was completely daunting. Almost every book that I read had a list of questions at the end. One book Hiring the Best by Martin Yate had a list of over 400 questions.
Who has time for 400 questions???
What I have found after interviewing almost 20,000 people in my career is that the questions are less important than the structure of the interview.
Here are 5 tips that are more important than the actual questions:
1) Put a list of 8-10 questions together and ask the same questions in the same order to every single candidate. The analysis is so much easier when you don’t have to question your questions.
2) Ask the question. Listen to the answer. Ask the question. Listen to the answer. An interview is not a back and forth. Your answers to the questions don’t matter, so let the candidate say their answers.
3) Interview in a group. This protects you all from any liability, and you will hear things that your counterpart won’t and vice versa.
4) Limit your list of questions to no more than 15 per interview. I find that after awhile, the candidate gets tired (and so do you). If you have more questions, schedule another interview.
5) And finally, if you are talking, then you aren’t listening. There is a reason that you have 1 mouth and 2 ears. And if you find yourself talking too much, see tip #2.Interviewing a candidate is hard work. It is even harder when you are making up questions as you go along. When you have some structure and consistency in your questions, it becomes way simpler to focus on your candidate.
My clients regularly tell me that just listening helps them make better hiring decisions. And isn’t that what we all want? Don’t forget, if you don’t have the time, energy, or bandwidth to hire yourself, A-list Interviews is here to help.
POWER THOUGHT: Avoid questioning your questions. Put a list together and use it in every interview.
by Beth | Jan 30, 2025 | Employee Hiring
Every year when January hits, I get inundated with emails from people who are hiring. They are overwhelmed with applications, and they MUST start interviewing candidates. In a bit of a panic, they email me this question:
“What questions to you ask potential employees, Beth?”
As if somehow a magical list of questions will solve all of the hiring issues that you have ever had.
In order to come up with questions that work for you, you have to know what you are looking for in a candidate. “But Beth, I just want a good person to come work for me!”
No, you want a good “employee”, not a good person. There is a difference. A good person may not be the best fit for the job. A good employee is a great fit for the job AND a good person.
Now we are getting somewhere.
Here is the first step to a fabulous interview process: sit down with your team in front of a white board and ask yourself this question: if I could have the absolute BEST person for this job, who would they be? After you write your list of the Ideal person, type it up, add your company logo, and print the list on actual paper. Then, take that list and hang it up in your office, in your house, in your bathroom, and place one in your car.
The single most important part of the interview process is the mindset of the Hiring Manager, and the mindset must be clear: in order to get the employee you want for the job, you have to be able to picture how that person will be in the role and describe that person’s demeanor.
This mindset is the vision for your hiring process, and without that vision, you are wasting your time with your hiring process.
POWER THOUGHT: When hiring, don’t start with questions. Start with the vision.
by Beth | Jan 16, 2025 | Attitude, Employee Hiring, Leadership, Selecting Good Candidates
You have two recent graduate candidates:
Candidate A) has a degree in right industry. She worked her way through college, has volunteer experience, a 3.93 GPA from an Ivy League university, and has 1 minor typo on her resume that would not have been caught by spell check.
Candidate B). has a degree in the right industry, she worked her way through college, has volunteer experience, her GPA is in the toilet, and she almost flunked out of a “lesser” college twice. She has no typos on her resume.
Who do you hire?
Really this is a trick question, because you can’t make a hiring decision based on what I just told you. You need to “interview” them both first. And, as it turns out, both women were hired and are stellar employees. Does this surprise you?
Candidate B has ADHD, and school was really hard for her. She clawed her way through college one day at a time. She had professors who worked with her and advocated for her, and she passed with not so flying colors. She is one of the all-time favorites at her job.
Here is the bottom line: you can’t tell a good candidate by reading their resume. NO ONE can. A resume is a “Marketing” piece by the candidate, full of exaggerations and sometimes outright lies. They are designed to get through AI, applicant tracking systems and websites. They are NOT designed to help you choose who is the right fit for your role and who isn’t. The only way that you can tell who is qualified and who isn’t is to conduct an interview with that person.
So, how do you read a resume? Use it for information on how to contact a candidate and then call them for an interview. That’s it.
POWER THOGUHT: How do you read a resume? With an open mind and a solid interview process.
by Beth | Jan 1, 2025 | Uncategorized
Approaching the new year, here I am stuffed full of cheese and chocolate, and I had a former client call me out of the blue. He said: “Beth, I have this employee who started off great, but this person is making my life hell!”
He went on to describe the ultimatums and threats this employee kept saying. Things like: “if you don’t do this, I will quit.” My client was so frustrated! “I gave this person a great bonus, I have allowed them to work from home, though I suspect a lot isn’t getting done, and I just lost a big client because of shoddy client service from this person.”
“But do you want to know the straw that broke the camel’s back? I just realized that I don’t want to go back to work- AT MY OWN COMPANY- because I HATE working with this person!”
It is a new Year and a new you. If you have eaten cheese for 2 weeks, and you don’t feel excited to go back to work with that soul-sucking employee, then it is time to fire that person. Just like you start a new diet or a new exercise program, the new year is the time to do some intense evaluation of what is working and what is not in your business. Start the new year fresh!
In addition, the busiest day of the year for applicants looking for a job is the second Tuesday in January. Think about this: the people who are fed up with their work environments are also looking to make a change. So, if you want to start the New Year with someone who REALLY wants to work for you, get going! Now is the time.
POWER THOUGHT: New Year, new goals, new awesome employee and new culture!
by Beth | Dec 18, 2024 | Uncategorized
Over the Thanksgiving holiday a few years ago, my daughter and I were listening to the radio. A song came on that we both love. I began belting out the tune at the top of my lungs and sang along to the chorus of the Zac Brown Band song. I sang “Long Gone” along in perfect pitch (to me at least). My kid laughed uproariously. “MOM”, she yelled, “Those aren’t the words!” I said, “Yes they are!” She giggled “No, really. It’s not ‘Long Gone’. It’s ‘Home Grown’!” She had to Google it for me to believe her.
This misunderstanding happens in interviews for new employees all the time. Someone on the interview team will recount what the candidate said and someone else will have heard the words from the person completely differently. The very first step in the analysis of an interview for the hiring team is to agree to what the candidate actually said. The candidate’s choice of words that they used are very important. For example, “My boss is really great to work with”. Did they really say “with”? Are you sure they didn’t say “My boss is really great to work ‘for’? That simple word changes the entire meaning of the sentence as well as the intent of the comment. The word “with” denotes that the candidate doesn’t acknowledge their bosses’ authority, and if they don’t acknowledge it in the interview, they really won’t when they have direct deposit.
I talk about listening to the exact words all the time to my clients to ensure they get to hire someone who will fit with the company culture, leadership style and even the position itself. If you are not paying attention, you can miss something important in an interview which can lead to a bad hire. You can also really embarrass yourself in front of your beloved daughter.
POWER THOUGHT: Did you really hear what you thought you heard?
