Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Blog

A Sure Way to Have a Candidate Fail is Ask Questions About Experience

We have assisted thousands of hiring managers with interviewing. In just about every case most interviews focus on candidate’s experience.

This for the most part is a complete waste of time. The interviewer spends hours often in great detail going thru every position the candidate has held for the last 20 years. They ask a lot of leading questions, often good questions, style questions, standard questions such as “What are your strengths and weakness” or the same old questions that have been asked since the first interview in time.

So why is all this a wast of time? Because when the candidate comes on board Monday morning “Do you give a rip about there past experiences anymore?” “Do you care if they have 5 years or 8 years experience?” You only care about one thing and one thing only - “What are you going to do for me now!” THAT IS IT, PERIOD.

And yet you spent all your time interviewing on their experience and few if any questions on “How will you solve my problem when you come on board.” You just expect them to convert that past experience to your deliverables.”

If you want to conduct a useful interview you should talk about your issues, your problems, your deliverables and how will they solve those problems once they come on board. After all isn’t this what you really want.

A better way to interview would be to focus on “What defines success in this role?” and then probe to identify if they can deliver this success and how they would deliver this success. Our Success Factor Methodology is designed to do just that. Our interviewing process tests the candidate’s ability to do your job. We have 5 core questions that should be asked in every interview and how to probe deeply.

Interviewing is not about experience, it is about them doing your job, because that is all you really care about.

You can find a lot more information about interviewing and defining success at our website www.impacthiringsolutions.com.

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