A mentor of mine once told me that if your success in hiring is 50% you are better than most. And although that may be correct, a 50% miss rate is very expensive.
For much of my career, I relied on what I thought were sly questions to probe and test each interview candidate, trying to figure out how they think, how they reason, how intelligent they are, and how they might fit into the organization. Some passed with flying colors and some failed. Some we hired and some we did not. However, when I reviewed the "results" of my hiring, I was disappointed. There was all too little correlation from the ones who "passed" the interview process to their success in their roles.
At Force 3, we decided to try to beat these odds. After a good amount of research and a little help from our friends, we aligned on a new approach of behavioral interviewing called STAR. The acronym STAR stands for "S"ituation, "T"ask, "A"ction, "R"esult. The difference between a STAR interview and those traditional interviews that most of us fall back upon, is that done right, a STAR interview is very hard for the prospective employee to game.
I not assuming that any prospective employee that I've interviewed has intentionally been deceitful. However, it is very clear that we all try to "perform" during the interview process. Some of us do a better job than others - for example, sales people are good at being chameleons and taking on the characteristics best suited to win over their prospect. However, when we interview, we are really not trying to measure performances, we are trying to measure people.
The STAR process enables us to to a much better job of getting past those who just plain old interview well and those who don't. It focuses us on inquiring deeply into their past successes and failures and actions that the candidate actually took, rather than those they might have thought about. We drill deeply into what actually occurred in their historical backgrounds and then are in a position to overlay those actions and results on what we anticipate they will encounter in our environment.
The interview process that we use is painstaking and tedious. It requires the investment of tens of hours of multiple peoples' time and attention. It includes multiple (usually four) stages of multi-person interviews, exercises, and social interaction. It requires a deep commitment from our organization - both in time and resources. And, as we have learned the hard way, there are no shortcuts.
Some candidates blanche at the investment required on their part to go through this process. These candidates can be weeded out immediately. Others find that the intensity of the process gives them confidence that we are serious about the quality of candidate we invite into our organization. And the best candidates are often the ones who are specifically attracted to our process because it enables them to more clearly portray their past experiences.
So far our anecdotal results seem quite promising. However, anecdotes alone are not enough to justify this level of investment. So over the next months and years we will be comparing our success rates and anticipate being able to attribute a concrete return on our investment to this process.
