The Effective Hiring Manager

16Each Interviewer Uses the Same Set of Questions

At this point, we’ve suggested several steps in hiring that either aren’t trained or are very different from what you’ve learned or know. (This is particularly true of this chapter.) We encourage you, once you’ve laid out your preparation for your next hire, to bring your direct reports together and walk them through what you’ve done, how this process is different, and how their roles will be, in some, cases quite different than they have perhaps grown accustomed to.

We discussed earlier that before you start this process, you’re going to develop a list of behavioral interview questions. These questions are based on the job you envision your new direct doing.

These questions form the core of each and every interviewer’s evaluation of the candidate.

This is at the heart of effective interviewing: Each candidate is being compared to one job. The job is the same, so each candidate is compared to the same job against the same basic criteria. This not only produces more effective results (more true positives and true negatives, and fewer false positives and false negatives), but it is also seen as more fair by candidates.

What is typical in interviewing today looks to those of us who have studied and measured interviews and outcomes as utter chaos. The idea that one interviewer (let alone all of them) could give three fundamentally different interviews to three different candidates is ludicrous. Easier, yes. Requires less preparation, ...