Employers’ Approach to Candidate Selection Has Been Broken for Years

Most job seekers that I have met overestimate their interviewing skills. Many figure that they must be pretty good at it because they have gotten jobs through interviews in the past. Being the last candidate standing while young in a career is a confidence booster, but the techniques used at entry level often fail when the stakes get higher and the competition is stiffer.

This is because of interviewing skill gaps on the hiring side that job seekers don’t foresee, especially at management level. The ability to leverage those gaps is the secret sauce to separating oneself among a herd of competitors. The patterns are strong, and the fix is straightforward. The two major issues are:

1.       Very few companies train their interviewers on how to differentiate between a good candidate or a poor one. Sure, employers will instruct interviewers not to ask illegal questions. They also may provide standardized lists of questions for them to ask. But they almost NEVER train them how to truly understand how a candidate can deliver the outcomes that the job is funded to produce.

2.       Most companies approach interviewing as a process of elimination, not an exercise to find the best person to take them forward. We know this is true because of the tiered approach they take to thinning down the talent pool: Start by narrowing 100 candidates to 15, then cutting from 15 to four, then reducing the four down to one. Notice also that most interviewers tend to concentrate on the job seeker’s past as opposed to focusing on how the candidate will perform in the future. They often then make a subjective choice by picking the one who made the finals that they liked the best.

Using the past to predict future performance can offer valuable insight provided that the problem solved in the past matches the need going forward. It often doesn’t. To illustrate the point: imagine if you had a plugged sink and needed to hire a plumber. Would you ever ask that plumber to share their greatest accomplishment? Or their biggest challenge as a plumber? Or their greatest weakness? Or why they left a job before becoming a plumber?

Of course not! You would share your problem with them and make your decision based on who can best fix that problem when you need it fixed for the best price. The hidden job market works in this way, but the published job market does not.

The hidden job market produces 75% t0 80% of hires because the “interviews” normally happen before the position is publicized, “requirements” are generated, or down-selection begins. This is because those conversations almost always revolve around the things that a company is intending to do and how a prospective new hire can help them do it.

Once the position gets posted, the conversations rarely go that way. This is because the interviewers approach the whole thing procedurally and tend to forget that the entire reason that a position is open is because the company needs to invest in a person to solve a problem or seize an opportunity.

Nearly all job seekers prepare for interviews by reading the job responsibilities and talking about how they have performed those tasks. The problem is that employers have already screened for those things before they let candidates in the door. The key is to differentiate ourselves by focusing on what really matters: being relatable to the interviewer and focusing on results over tasks.   

How to do this is part art and part science. We will discuss some of these techniques in the next couple of blog posts. Stay tuned!