MODERN PEOPLE
Recruit Right: How to
ensure you make the right
hires for your team!
By Anna-Lucia Mackay
A
ccording to a report
published in Harvard
Business Review, out of
20,000 hires during a three year
research period, 46 percent had
failed in the first 18 months and
only 19 percent achieved success.
The primary reason given for
failure was “poor interpersonal
skills” which 82 percent of
managers admitted to having
overlooked in the recruitment
process.
If people are hired and
subsequently fail down the track,
then the first thing to review is
the recruitment process. How you
interview candidates and their
referees is crucial to ensuring you
get the “right people on the bus”
as Jim Collins put it in his article
“Good to Great”.
Global research continually
confirms that the most effective
approach when employing
someone is to conduct a
behavioural interview with all
candidates. Yet, more than half
42 ModernBusiness
February 2016
of the managers we surveyed
were not able to describe what a
behavioural interview is, let alone
conduct one.
So what is a behavioural interview?
Put simply, it is a style of interview
which focuses on fact rather than
hypothesis or “what if” situations.
It is designed to find out how a
candidate has behaved in a work
related situation in the past, rather
than relying on their estimation of
how they would behave in future
situations.
The behavioural interview does
much more than this, however. Its
core objectives can be summarised
as follows:
• To carry out a structured and
goal-orientated process
• To assist a manager in making a
decision not based solely on gut
feeling
• To identify past behaviours so as
to gain insight as to what future
behaviour can be expected
• To gain as much objective data
as possible using a subjective
assessment method
• To carry out a systematic process
rather than pose a set of questions
• To collect examples of situations
that can be further validated during
the reference checking phase.
So where to you start?
There are five stages to a
behavioural interview:
1
Analyse the Job
All too often, managers
arrive at an interview ill
prepared. Very little, if any, time
has been spent going through
the necessary paperwork to
identify what skills, behaviours
and experience they are going
to be looking for to ensure they
place the correct candidate in the
job. Most managers “wing it” and
then miss vital clues which would
tell them where any weaknesses
or gaps in the applicant’s skills
may be. The job description, key
performance indicators, list of
behavioural competencies must
all be reviewed – together with the
job advertisement, just in case you