In January of 2011 I had started a thread with some questions about job interview issues, related to an opportunity that had been presented to me. I did get the job and I am having a blast, fortunately. We are looking, however, to hire someone who would work in my field and would be in a subordinate position, along with three others. Our small team is a good one and we all get along but I want to ensure that whoever we hire is a good fit with these three others. I’ve heard of an interview process that involves having an applicant spend some time with his or her prospective co-workers so that they can see if they would want to work with this person.
Has anyone out there participated in this type of process and, if so, how was it structured? I can’t seem to find anything useful about it on the web. I mentioned it to my manager and he thinks that it’s a good idea but he doesn’t have any idea of how it’s actually done either. I don’t want to set up a directionless, one hour conversation between three people and an outsider so I would appreciate any insight or advice as to how this is done professionally and effectively.
I’m not aware of a particular technique, but what we do in my department is have a more formal interview with three or four candidates (questions range from problem solving skills to technical questions), and then the top one, or possible two, are invited for a more informal one hour coffee with other members of the team to see how they fit in personality-wise. Could you do something like that?
Spend some time in the sense of working with them, or spend time being interviewed by prospective co-workers. We always do the latter and can’t do the former because of issues if proprietary information. If you don’t have these issues, it sounds like a great idea, especially if you can see what suggestions the candidate has to offer, and how fast he or she gets things.
We have fallen into an informal system that you could build upon.
We have recruited several applicants from the United States to move to our slice of paradise in the Caribbean. There is a formal interview process that takes an entire day but we offer each interviewee three or four days to check out the island. During that additional time several of our staff have offered our time to meet the candidates for meals, and island tour, or even touristy activities.
The formal interview day includes some computer based testing, a traditional panel interview but also a sit-along in our communications center. Usually we are interviewing two or three candidates in that day and have no problem having them meet each other. One or more applicant sits in the comm center while they do the panel interview one at a time. This is an opportunity to ask job specific questions.
On the other days we usually meet up at their hotel and go for dinner at a restaurant. This offers the candidates an opportunity to ask questions about the job, work-life balance, and island living. Most candidates take up an offer for a guided tour on another day so they can be sure to see what is important to them.
Currently this is informal and anything candidates say outside the formal interview day is not a factor in the hiring decision but… applicants might learn something that leads them to decline a job offer. That’s ok. Island living is not for everyone. Better to realize it early than have both sides put a lot of effort and money into trying to make it work if it never will.
Those who participate in the panel interview do not get involved in the informal aspect except perhaps for assisting with airport pick ups and drop offs.
In this litigious society, I’d be afraid that if you did allow, say, two people to “hang around” and you hired one because the other didn’t fit in, you could be accused of some sort of illegal bias. Whether true or not, provable or not, it could tie you up in an expensive litigation for a while. If money allows, you might want to hire a couple of people as temps for a month or two and pick the one that fits in to hire full time.
Sure. I’ve gone through this. Just set up a half hour interview with each team member one-on-one with the candidate. If they only use 15 minutes then so be it.
Have your team review the resume and come prepared with whatever questions they want to ask, ranging from technical to conversational. It’s quite easy to ask some specific questions about job skills, and squeeze in a few questions about the weather, the city, etc. without getting too personal.
Probation. People can be hired under probationary terms, usually set by X months. At the end, you can release them or take them off probation. They can also be let go at any time during probation.
There’s a very easy way to do this, but it involves committing for a year to each candidate.
Hire them through a head-hunter as a contractor. If they work out, hire them at the end of the first year (and paying a fee according to the agreement with the headhunter shop). If they don’t, don’t renew the contract.
It’s a pretty good way of finding very productive employees, but it doesn’t come for free. It works best with a shop with a fair number of contractors on an ongoing basis. The easiest way to do that is during growth. Do all the growth by adding contractors, and slowly accumulate regular employees from the pool of contractors.
One of the best things for a small company is a temporary business contraction, causing serious layoffs. It’s an easy way for the company to get rid of a large portion of the employees without much fear of repercussions, and to select the least productive ones to let go. (Otherwise, it’s rather difficult to let people go just because they’re not particularly productive.)
I’ve been through several of these phases in small companies. After the purge, the company is always remarkably productive. Of course, it’s rarely a good thing in itself to be forced into a contraction. If I were in a small company again, and had any say, I’d avoid a lot of this by using lots of contractors, and hiring the best of them.
I’ve seen the contractor-to-job approach used a lot of times. I’ll just guess that the success rate is a something under 50%, maybe a big something. But that was the point, to qualify the candidate before hiring to a full time position. The best approach I’ve seen is with internships. The success rate is also low, but that’s the idea. When I was just 22 I volunteered to work at a place for a day for free. They took me up on it and hired me. I think most companies would be concerned about liablility in variety of forms if they did that today, so it may not be at all practical. Probation has been used for a long time. It’s almost pointless for at will employment but it’s some protection against claims of unfair termination. I don’t know how most places do it, but I think the probation period should have a lower pay rate to incentivize the candidate to perform well and get a known pay increase at the end of the probationary period.
No matter what you do there’s going to be risk in hiring. Some candidates look ideal throughout the hiring process, even the initial stages of employment, but over time they end up falling short. And if you’re hiring it’s no surprise to hear that a candidate you turned down is doing an excellent job somewhere else. That’s life, that’s business.
They can collect unemployment anyway. The only reasons they couldn’t are just cause termination, quit, or lack of previous income during the “base period” (CA, don’t know about other states). Probationary periods are merely internal devices and have no impact on state regulations regarding unemployment insurance.
My company does the 3 month probation thing. People are right that in an “at will” state, it can seem sort of pointless. Since you can get fired at any time before or after the probation period and it has little impact on collecting unemployment benefits.
What it does do though, IMHO, is help motivate candidates to put in their best effort learning the ropes of their new job. And it also provides a useful milestone that tells candidates they are doing their job correctly and that the company is ready to make a longer-term commitment. We’ve actually had a number of employees not make it through the 3 month trial.
Contract to hire also works.
Other that having the other members of the team meet them for a one hour interview or all of you taking the candidate out to lunch as part of the interview process, there isn’t a lot of value in having a candidate shadow you for a day. They’ll be on their best behavior anyway or they’ll simply hang back and observe you doing your jobs.
For those suggesting or using panel and/or “informal” interviews with current team members, please be aware that everyone who is allowed to interact with a candidate must be trained in what they can and cannot ask. A simple “Tell me about your kids” inquiry, even well intentioned, can lead to discrimination claims.
A much safer approach is to use behaviour based interview questions to help determine personality types.
i’ve been involved in a couple of things. One employees were scheduled for short 30 min informal sort of interviews.
the other I liked was to schedule an interview to include a lunch. Then an employee or employees take the person to lunch (on the company dime)…not with a supervisor. It makes it more informal, it gets the employees and prospective some time to learn about each other. It also makes the employees feel more valued…and HEY…FREE LUNCH!
I understand that this is a common technique in smaller law firms when they are considering hiring a new associate. I don’t have personal experience with this but my former law clerks have told me about it. The firm usually interviews the candidate with a two- or three-person panel, then the candidate meets with each of the firm’s other lawyers for 30 minutes or so. They can talk about what ever they want – the culture of the firm, law school classmates they have in common, sports – the idea is to be sure everyone gets to meet them and decide whether they fit the culture or not. Sometimes, these meetings are on the same day as the initial interview, sometimes not. Seems like a good way for the firm and the candidate to get a feel for the firm’s personality.
On the flip side, I’ve been offered contract positions and turned them down. Fuck you for wanting to hire me on a contract; I’m looking for full time work. If you can’t provide me that them I’m looking elsewhere.
ETA: This was before the 2009 meltdown. I may not be as picky if I find myself in that situation again.
Let me be the first to applaud you for actually letting the future co-workers have a say in the hiring process. In all the jobs I’ve head in my career across four different industries I have only had one where they did this, and I am still friends with people from that job 20+ years later. At the time, we all hung out together on the weekends and even vacationed together. It was a tough research job in the pharmaceutical industry, but we made sure that the people we hired were all good fits with the group because the hours were long and the conditions sometimes not so great.
The general approach they used, which I have tried to replicate at my current company, is that management interviews the candidates and gets it down to their top three or two based on who they like that they feel is qualified and a good fit. Then they invite their future co-workers to take them out separately to a long lunch as a group over the course of a week. The co-workers appreciate the free lunch and they can do a combination of talking shop and talking about personal things that will determine how they will mesh as a team. No alcohol is involved, but the interviews are unsupervised. We always remind the group not to ask too personal of questions to avoid lawsuit issues, but at some point you have to trust your current employees to do the right thing. The co-workers then vote on who they want and that’s who we hire based on the majority answer. We’ve never had anyone try to sue the company who didn’t get the job and honestly, if they did, you can bet that’s the LAST person I want working for me as they have already shown they are the kind of shitty people who sue over nothing just to intimidate others and get their way.
Would someone who was otherwise very religious, had very strong political beliefs, or who had a phone that constantly pinged them from family/friends e-mailing them at lunch be discriminated against? Almost surely they would, because those kind of people generally don’t work well in a group or work as hard because they are distracted, and I would leave it to the co-workers to suss that out better than I could just checking their technical skills in a formal interview. Hell, I think the lunch interview is even more useful because people let their hair down, and that’s when you get the honest/stupid questions like “So does anyone care if you sneak out after lunch on Fridays to go surfing?” or “Can you believe that bullshit Obama pulled in that last press conference?”