Friends Don’t Let Friends Interview Alone

You may remember the TV commercial from some years ago that was attempting to prevent drunk driving with the tagline, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” Well, I have a similar tagline for hiring employees, “Friends don’t let friends interview alone.”

One of the absolute rules of the Secrets to Hiring Success Program is that all face-to-face interviews must be with at least 2 interviewers (the hiring manager and at least one other person) in the room, even if the candidate was previously vetted by an outside search firm. The only exception to this rule is the Initial 30-Minute Phone Assessment and the Behavior Based Phone Interview both of which can be completed on a solo basis by the hiring manager, a Human Resource Manager, or an outside consultant.

The reasons for the insistence on at least 2 people in the face-to-face interview are:

1.

To have another pair of eyes and ears to assess candidate reaction and answers. In this Program, the HM is the person responsible for asking the questions and the 2nd interviewer is primarily there to gauge candidate reaction and record observations. Years ago, I read about a negotiating technique used by the Japanese known as the Japanese Observer. The Japanese Observer is a member of the Japanese negotiating team who sits to the side of the negotiation and simply records his/her observations of members of the opposing side in the negotiation. These observations are the reactions to what was said during the negotiation that the negotiators may have missed because they were involved in the content of the negotiation. The 2nd interviewer can be that “Japanese Observer.”

2. To help offset any bias for or against a candidate by a hiring manager.

3.

To ask questions that will help clarify a response from a candidate or that will further drill-down into the answer given by a candidate.

4. To be a sounding board for the hiring manager after the interview.

5. To provide a legally defensible interview that avoids the “he said, she said” setting of the typical 1-on-1 interview.

The 2nd interviewer should be someone who you trust and who will have the ability to compliment your skills (e.g., If you tend to be “all business,” then find someone who can provide a little of the “warm fuzzy.”). The 2nd interviewer can be another manager, someone from the Human Resource Department, or an outside consultant. Additionally, you may want to ask a 3rd interviewer to participate in the process for strategic positions. For non-senior management positions, I would probably limit the panel of interviewers to 5 people.

Supporting the concept of at least 2 interviewers in an interview is the experience of the international search firm, Egon Zehnder, which reported in a Harvard Business Review article titled “Hiring Without Firing” (July-August 1999) that “a second evaluation reduces the possibility of hiring error from 50% to 10%, while a third evaluation practically guarantees a good decision.” The second and third evaluation in this quote is referring to the 2nd and 3rd interviewers, respectively, who sit in on the interview with the hiring manager.

The Secrets To Hiring Success Program offered by Lukesh Consulting Group (LCG) offers specific tactics for interviewers to use that improves the chance of hiring the right candidate the first time.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Interview Alone