Despite everything, interviewing is a subjective, judgmental process. It is unlikely that all the interviewers rank the candidates in exactly the same order.
Sometimes, an interviewer will observe or miss something, and their score is markedly different from the rest of the interview panel.
In this section, you will learn how to do the following:
- Deal with your unresolved intuition issues
- Identify and resolve ranking differences between the interviewers
- Decide on a consensus ranking of the candidates
The inexperienced manager needs to be well prepared to present his or her nagging doubts and defend the candidate scores. At the same time, you need to be open-minded and to engage with the rest of the panel's opinions to move toward a consensus. This can be a difficult balance for the inexperienced manager. However, if you make sure that you have thoroughly prepared by thinking through your scores and doubts, then you will impress the rest of the interview panel.
You can use your NLP skills to read your interview panel's non-verbal communication. If you are all sitting nodding in agreement with mirrored body language, you will know you have an agreement. If someone is sat with arms crossed in front of them as a defense, they are indicating they are not open to be dissuaded from their view. Are their eye cues suggesting they are remembering or imagining the candidate's skills? You will need to explore the reasons why they hold this opinion so strongly.
Remember the open and closed question choices. To uncover reasons, you need open questions, and to test for agreement, you need a closed question.
Your ability to manage the interview panel's consensus building will increase your credibility with your peers.
When your boss quietly asks them how you performed, they will be likely to respond very positively: "amazingly well!"
If, despite your efforts to understand your doubts, you still have unresolved ranking issues of your own, you now need to share them with the interview panel.
This is not the case that you are simply inexperienced at interviewing. In my experience, 10 to 20% of candidate scores just don't feel right.
Ideally, the panel will all share their doubts on their rankings. They probably have some of the same doubts as you.
To give an example, consider a candidate who said they have the experience you are seeking but subsequent answers did not satisfactorily show the individual's contribution to the team's performance. You are left with a nagging doubt that the candidate was part of the team and not a leading contributor. You may have written "contribution?" on the score sheet, and despite the follow up questions, you may not have had this concern completely relieved.
Talk them through your concerns and make use of their perspectives to help you to resolve your doubts. You can use your new NLP skills to better understand your co-interviewer's points. Don't forget though that there is always a limit on time—as well as patience—in a meeting.
The first step is to compare your candidate ranking with the other interviewers. Write up a list in rank order for each interviewer. Are there any major discrepancies? You all need to understand why this candidate has received such a widely varied score. Did one interviewer spot something? Or did they perhaps miss something? Discuss it and find out what caused the score variation.
Tip
Tip
At a company I used to work for, the Board were looking for a Chief Executive and had developed a comprehensive job specification around our vision for a product. The tight specification left us with two candidates to interview, although one was clearly ahead on paper. Each candidate received a full day's interview including meetings with stakeholders, desk exercises, and addressing a meeting. Both candidates performed well. The interview panel sat to consider whom to hire. I was concerned; my intuition was kicking that the leading candidate before and during the interview appeared to hold some views contrary to our vision. We carefully revaluated the candidate's answers and found evidence of the contrary views. We dug deep into the scores and could see that the answers to questions around our vision were not particularly strong. The candidate had put on a strong, confident performance, and we had been swayed by the strong character. Much to everyone's surprise, we offered the job to the other candidate. If you can all see that one of the skill scores is out of line between you, then consider adjusting it in light of the information that was observed or missed.
This is an iterative process. Keep doing it until the candidate rankings are broadly similar.
Sometimes, your intuition will still be signaling dissatisfaction. By now, I would expect the interview panel to be largely in agreement, so you are probably not alone in being perturbed.
As an example, consider that despite all the previous work, you feel that Candidate C is better than Candidate A. You all feel the skill scores for both candidates are sensible but the ranking is wrong. Now it is time to review the weighting factors that multiply the individual scores.
You can see in the following score sheets that while the scores are close, Candidate A is ranked ahead, scoring 60 points compared to 58 for Candidate C.
Skills 1 and 2 are weighted with a factor of 2. This doubles the score for these two skills as they are considered very important to the ability to succeed in the job.
After a discussion with the interview panel, you might consider that skill 1 is even more important and should receive a 3 weighting.
Adjusting the weighting factor for skill 1 alters the candidates' scores as follows:
You will need a good reason to change the weighting factor by 100 percent. This is not an exercise to adjust all the weighting factors to make your favorite candidate rank first.
It may be that you are stronger or weaker in one of the skills yourself, which could be a reason for altering the skill weighting factor for your first employee.
Ensure that the interview panel unanimously agrees and make a meeting note as to why the weighting factor was changed.
Do not adjust several skill factors to achieve the ranking result you "want". If you have to defend your collective decision to alter the factors, it has to be on the basis of clear, sensible, and recorded reasons.
Tip
Tip
I once needed to replace a Purchasing Manager to operate in a software-based materials requisitioning planning (MRP) environment, sourcing and negotiating as required. There was an urgent need to reduce capital held in inventory and purchase prices. There were many well qualified people interviewed as business conditions were tough and businesses were failing. The job specification called for strong MRP, sourcing, and negotiation skills. To test their negotiation ability, the final question was "when did you last get a discount?" With one exception, the candidates had to think hard to find an example. The exception just laughed and replied "I always get a discount". She had been a PA to a creative design house outsourcing their designs for manufacture. Her MRP experience was none, her sourcing experience was very limited, but negotiating was in her DNA. My experience included MRP and international sourcing, so I put together a training program to impart that knowledge. I changed the skill weighting so negotiation was much more important than the others. Interestingly, this ranked all the candidates in a more acceptable fashion. She was stunningly successful and is now a qualified Purchasing Manager. A problem can occur if a candidate is very strong in those secondary "would like" skills but weak on the main skill.
I do caution against expecting the ideal candidate who scores 10 out of 10 in every skill. You will be extremely fortunate to have such a candidate. You need to select a competent candidate.
However, it is perfectly sensible to set a bar for particular skills, and even total scores, so that those falling below the bar can be eliminated from consideration.
This is a useful technique if you have interviewed a lot of candidates and need to reduce the amount of data you are attempting to consolidate.
Once again, the important and correct method is to discuss it and make a meeting note about why and where the bar was set.
When you broadly agree on the rankings, draw up a table on a flip chart or screen so you can all see how the rankings vary.
This figure shows you how to do that:
Put up the ranking by each interviewer of each candidate.
Candidate A was ranked first by Interviewer 1 and second by Interviewer 2 and you.
Add the rankings together—1 +2 +2—to give a combined rank.
Mark the lowest rank total as overall rank 1, then the second lowest as 2, and so on.
You now have a combined rank of the candidates as follows:
- Candidate C.
- Candidate A.
- Candidate D.
- Candidate E.
- Candidate F.
- Candidate B.
Are you and your interview panel all happy that this ranking is sensible?
If you are all happy with no sign of opposition from your intuition, then you have succeeded in ranking the candidates.