I was introduced to a hiring technique called Targeted Selection, which basically says that you only want to ask questions based on a persons past to predict how they will respond in the future – you must avoid hypothetical questions.
So lets say that you want to know how someone might cope under stress… you cannot ask this :
“What are your coping methods for dealing with stress?”
You would rather need to phrase it like this:
“Please describe for me a time in your past when you had to deal with stress, and how did you cope ?”
Okay so not a very imaginative questions.. but you get the idea – always frame your questions in the past and based on something concrete.
No Gut Feels ?
The framework asks you to up front define a set of behaviours that you would like to see in your interviewee and if they get all/most of the ticks, then you should hire because they are what you want.
This apparently helps to make the interview more objective and less driven by gut.
Now while I can see the spirit behind this, and understand the logic – that targeted questions based on actual past events are more likely to result is real world answers and not textbook responses -what gets me is the extremeness of things like this.
How can you ever remove the gut factor from an interview ?
I have 2 key problems with ignoring gut :
1. Interview are subjective :
No matter what process you put in place, no matter what framework you make use of .. this will always be a subjective exercise.. and to pretend not is just naive and asking for trouble.
We are taking about people here.
2. I trust my gut :
I know my gut is more that just a random feeling… it is the output of my brain working overtime, processing thousands of thoughts rapidly, cross referencing it with my world experience – forming opinions, making analyses… and resolving all of this in a neat little package called - a gut feeling.. which my conscious brain is just too dumb and slow to understand in any other way.
Why would I ignore that because some over simplified process ticked a few boxes ?
Keep the baby in the bath
Easy tiger… I am not saying that targeted selection is bad.. lets not throw the proverbial baby out with the extremist view bath water.
I am happy to use the technique to help phrase questions to help the interviewee focus on the question.
However – this is no silver bullet for interviewing. I cannot agree that there is a process devoid of subjective gut that can help you pick the correct person.
Once you are past the technical competencies.. hiring like almost anything involving people in the knowledge based industry, is part science… but a lot art – and the only artistic bone I have in my body is my gut bone ( umm so to speak ).
Proof by repetition
Plus if I am wrong, then were does that leave us room for classic stories like “chicken lips” from Peopleware as summarised here :
The idea of employment audition introduced in Chapter 15 had a similar effect. In addition to technical judgement, workers supply a team perspective on how well the candidate will fit in. The authors were part of a well-knit group whose members started to have many characteristics in common, in particular, a similar sense of humour. Their shared theory of humour held that chickens were funny while horses weren't, and lips were funny while shoulders weren't. After interviewing a well qualified candidate, one of their colleagues asked the others if they thought the candidate would come to understand that chickens with lips are funny, they all didn't think so and rejected that candidate.
