I spend a lot of time traveling the world and talking to IT executives, managers, and staff members.  Even with the economy struggling, a surprising number of managers are hiring new staff.  I did a webinar on hiring in November, and over 300 people registered to attend.  You can listen to the recorded version of the webinar here.

Hiring is great, and it’s sure better to hire than to fire.  However, with hiring comes the possibility of the dreaded hiring mistake, the opening scene of one of the manager’s worst nightmares.  Since interviews are so important in selecting the right people to hire—and, ideally, deflecting the hiring mistakes—you need to be able to conduct effective interviews.  What are the important elements of an effective interviewing process?

One element is a good job description.  In addition to the obvious sections of this document, it should answer for following questions:

• What tasks and responsibilities are involved?
• What and how much experience?
• What specific skills are needed, and what is the career path?
• What training, education, certification, or licenses are required?
• What is the start date?
• If unusual, what are the hours, the dress code, and the travel requirements?

The first four of these sections are easy to complete if you have done a task analysis and skills inventory for your team.  Finally, avoid a classic worst-practice of job descriptions by distinguishing between required and desirable qualifications. 

With the job description in place, you can start interviewing candidates.  (I assume that your HR department will handle the actual recruiting activities that bring candidates and their resumes your way.)  To make the process efficient—to be blunt, to minimize wasted time on in-person interviews with unqualified candidates—I recommend using a phone interview (perhaps more accurately called a “phone screen”) to start.

This brings us to an important point that applies to the interview hiring process.  While we were all taught to be polite when growing up—and you should be polite in this entire process—we do need to turn off the politeness instinct that causes us to pull back and redirect questions when we sense that the other person is uncomfortable.  Remember, the objective of the hiring process is to hire the most qualified candidate, not to make all the interviewees completely comfortable. 

So, in the phone screen, you should explore the person’s experience and qualifications in a polite but incisive way.  In particular, weed out people who pad their resume or inflate their experience.  If a buzzword or acronym is on a resume, check that the candidate has meaningful mastery of the subject. Carefully evaluate all claimed expertise and experience in the phone interview.  Be especially skeptical if a skill is listed without any description of a particular job where the skill was applied.  Also, you may want to verify degrees, certifications, and licenses if these are important.  If the candidate passes the phone screen, then you can schedule an in-person interview with yourself and others on the team in which the person will work.  Key managers who will work with the candidate are often included.  Again, I assume your HR team can help you set up the interview participants and schedule.

In the in-person interview, include a mix of qualification questions, behavioral interviewing, and audition interviewing.  Qualification questions are those with correct and incorrect answers; e.g., “What programming language is primarily used to write the Linux operating system?” Pick skills and knowledge that relates to the actual work the successful candidate will perform, then develop a set of good qualification questions for them.  Don’t make these questions so hard that no one gets them right; the objective is not to pose the riddle of the sphinx to the candidates, but to measure their level of skill.

Behavioral interviewing is concerned, obviously enough, with how a person will behave on the job.  Behavioral questions are open-ended, and often require candidates to relate their past experience to the job you are considering them for. For example, here are three possible behavioral interview questions:

• Tell me about ways that past managers have enabled you to do your best work.
• How will what you learned on project XYZ help us here at our company?
• Of all the jobs you’ve had, what was your most enjoyable job, and what did like the most?

Depending on the culture, workstyles and values of your company, the right answer for any of these questions could be the wrong answer for other companies.

You should also include audition interviews.  An audition interview is where you set up an actual work task—or a scaled down version of it—and ask the candidate to perform it.  For example, if you are hiring a test engineer, you could ask the candidate to create a test based on a requirements specification or user story from a past or current project.  As another example, if you are hiring a test technician, you could give the candidate a real test case–written to the expected level of detail as most test cases–and have the candidate test a real system.  While audition interviews might sound complicated, they’re actually easy and fun once you get the hang of them.  I have hired some really good people—and not hired some people I might otherwise have mistakenly hired—based on their audition interviews.

Let me conclude with some cautionary notes on avoiding classic, all-too-common interviewing mistakes.  One of these mistakes is scaring off the candidates.  This can happen when people deliberately intimidate, stress out, or just plain weird out candidates in interviews.  It can also happen when interviewers who are having a bad day vent their frustrations; you should be honest about the good and bad aspects of the company, but don’t painting a bleak and bitter picture.  Another classic mistake, which I mentioned earlier, is being afraid to ask tough questions.  Probe for weakness in the skills and experienced claimed in the resume and the interview.  Keep your ears open for fudging, vagueness, attempts to redirect the question, and using incorrect technical terms.  Another classic mistake is to break the law.  Be sure you know what questions and topics you can’t bring up.  Again, turn to your HR department to help you (and others who will be involved in interviewing) understand what topics are acceptable in an interview.

Successful teams are built by smart managers who have mastered the art of effective interviewing.  Effective interviewing starts with a good job description, as that document defines clear requirements for the position.  Effective interviewing should also include a good phone screen.  The interview process should include qualification questions, behavioral interviewing, and an audition interview. Don’t scare off the candidate or break the law, but do ask polite yet challenging questions. By including these essential elements of effective interviewing, you can be a smarter hiring manager, too.