- What were you hired to do?
- What accomplishments are you most proud of?
- What were some low points during that job?
- Who were the people you worked with?
- Why did you leave that job?
STAR Interview Technique – Top 10 Behavioral Questions
How to use the who interview method for hiring
Here are steps you can take to follow the who hiring method:
Grade candidates
Lastly, you can use the scorecard you created to grade each candidates performance throughout the interview process. Asking each candidate the same set of questions can help you compare their qualifications and skills. Based on each candidates performance, you can grade each candidate with an A, B or C to reflect how closely they match the mission, competencies and outcomes of the position.
Create interview scripts
Some hiring managers prefer to manage interviews more informally, but theres value in conducting interviews using scripts. This can help you ensure you ask all candidates the same set of questions. It can also help you prevent distractions during the interview process.
Hiring is every company’s number one problem, yet managers use the wrong approaches to hiring
When it comes to hiring, managers often still rely on a series of bad habits. For example, they continue to rely on CVs, even though CVs are “a record of a person’s career with all the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed”. They often regard hiring as a mysterious black art with many secrets. They rely on “voodoo hiring” methods, among which:
If you are willing to abandon all these ineffective “voodoo” approaches, the good news is there are clearer paths that can lead you out of the “hiring mess”…
There are 4 steps to finding A players for your teams :
A players are the only kinds of players you should want to recruit. Here’s how they are defined by Smart and Street: “a candidate who has at least a 90% chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10% of possible candidates can achieve”. They must also be a perfect fit for the culture of your company.
Hiring these players takes hard work because you have to dig hard, ask tough questions and sometimes be prepared to question your assumptions. ghSMART’s hiring methods relies on 4 essential steps:
Always start with the scorecard
Scorecards are any company’s “blueprint for success”, according to Smart and Street. When companies don’t bother to define what they want before they begin the hiring process, they are doomed to fail and hire the wrong person for the job. “In hiring, everything is situational and no situation is entirely replicable”.
The scorecard must be composed of three parts:
To generate a flow of A players, successful executives can’t afford to let recruiting be a one-time event, or even something they only do now and then. They are constantly sourcing, constantly on the lookout for new talent.
The number one method is to ask for referrals from your personal and professional networks. It’s often been proved to be the most effective way to find the best candidates. 77% of industry leaders interviewed for this book believed referrals to be the best way to generate a flow of relevant candidates.
Being constantly on the lookout for new talent means systematically asking the people you meet: “Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”. Talented people generally know other talented people and they’re often happy to pass on their names.
Referrals from employees have proved again and again to be a unique source of excellent hires. They are necessarily well-targeted because employees know the company’s culture and values better than outsiders. Involving employees in sourcing and recruiting is highly beneficial to the company.
Traditional interviewing is not predictive of job performance. The ghSMART method offers to structure the selection process through a series of 4 interviews. Precious time must be used intelligently to collect relevant facts and data about the candidate’s performance track record.
1 . The screening interview is the first step. It is a short phone-based interview (no more than 30 minutes) destined to sort the obvious mismatches and save everyone a lot of time. Even screening interviews must be structured. Here are the questions that should be asked during the screening interview:
2 . The Who interview is a thorough structured interview meant to unveil patterns in a candidate’s career history. It is the most reliable predictor of performance that consists in a chronological walkthrough of a person’s career. For each job, the following questions should be asked:
When you walk the candidate through his / her career history chronologically, you get to understand the events as they actually happened. The threat of reference checks makes the candidate more honest.
Typically, a Who interview can take as many as three hours to conduct. “For every hour you spend in the Who interview, you’ll save hundreds of hours by not dealing with C players. The return on your time is staggeringly high”.
Understanding why a candidate left his / her previous jobs is essential. A players are pulled to greater opportunities whereas C players are often pushed out of their jobs. That is why unveiling the patterns provides precious information about a candidate.
3 . The focused interviewis meant to gather additional specific information about the candidate. It focuses on one (or several) of the outcomes and competencies on the scorecard:
After each answer, the interviewer should get curious and ask What? How? Tell me more! follow-up questions. There can be several focused interviews to double-check if the candidate is indeed a good cultural fit for the company.
4 . The reference interviewsare for testing everything learned during the previous interviews. Don’t skip the references! At least seven different references should always be interviewed: 3 bosses, 2 peers or customers and 2 subordinates:
With references, the absence of enthusiasm is a terrible sign.
50+ most common job interview questions
This question seems simple, so many people fail to prepare for it, but it’s crucial. Heres the deal: Don’t give your complete employment (or personal) history. Instead, give a pitch—one that’s concise and compelling and that shows exactly why you’re the right fit for the job. Muse writer and MIT career counselor Lily Zhang recommends using a present, past, future formula. Talk a little bit about your current role (including the scope and perhaps one big accomplishment), then give some background as to how you got there and experience you have that’s relevant. Finally, segue into why you want—and would be perfect for—this role.
What is the STAR method?
The STAR method is an interview technique that gives you a straightforward format you can use to tell a story by laying out the Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
By using these four components to shape your anecdote, it’s much easier to share a focused answer, providing the interviewer with “a digestible but compelling narrative of what a candidate did,” says Muse Career Coach Al Dea, founder of CareerSchooled. “They can follow along, but also determine based on the answer how well that candidate might fit with the job.”
FAQ
What is the WHO interview method?
What are the 10 most common interview questions and answers?
- Could you tell me about yourself and describe your background in brief? …
- How did you hear about this position? …
- What type of work environment do you prefer? …
- How do you deal with pressure or stressful situations? …
- Do you prefer working independently or on a team?
What is the STAR method when interviewing?
- Behavioural interview.
- Situational interview.
- Case interview.
