Improving Hiring Through Better Interviewing

When asked to rank their top priorities for TA investment in 2024, companies consistently ranked interviewing as number one, according to a recent Aptitude Research report. Despite the critical importance of interviewing, many companies face significant challenges that impact its success.

During our November webinar, we sat down with Christina Beans, Principal Program Manager at Splunk (a Cisco company); Mervyn Dinnen, HR & Talent Trends Analyst at Two Heads Consulting; and Joe Keenan, Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Equinox Group who shared actionable insights for turning interviews into a strategic advantage in your hiring process.

Check out the full 1-hour webinar below or read on for a brief synopsis of the 4 major areas we dug into.
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1.) Why Job Interviews Are Failing Us

Before diving into this topic, we polled the audience on their top challenge within their organization’s interview process. For the top two answers - 29% mentioned that there’s no standardization or consistency around the interview process, and 19% stated that they make candidates go through too many interviews.

So, why are interviews failing a lot of teams out there? Mervyn recently dug into a Psychology Today article that walks through this and actually inspired the topic of this webinar. According to the article, interviews go wrong because of 4 main things: 

• Illusion of accuracy - Hiring Managers believe they can evaluate someone’s potential from a 30-60 minute conversation. 
• Belief that there’s a perfect interview question - unstructured interviews fail to predict a candidate’s potential performance. 
• Unconscious bias - we’re all susceptible to making snap judgements based on factors that have nothing to do with job performance, which can overshadow the actual skills and competencies that are crucial for the job. 
• Fit fallacy - overemphasis on cultural fit, which often leads to homogeneity rather than diversity. 

The next three topics are centered around best practices across the interview process. 

2.) Structured Interviewing

When it comes to structured interviews, Joe mentioned that at Equinox, that means interview guides, pre-employment assessments, and interview intelligence to ensure they have the right data - with the ultimate goal of ensuring every candidate is assessed on a consistent basis.

Christina sees the establishment of structured interviews as the starting point from which organizations can make more fair and informed decisions. Decades of research has shown that the administration of structured interviews is the gold standard for improving the accuracy and reliability of hiring decisions. Bottom line - if you’re going to conduct interviews, they should be structured!  

3.) Leveraging Data For Informed Decisions

For our second poll, we asked the audience what data they find most impactful to making informed hiring decisions. The top two results showed that 42% prioritize interviewer feedback, while 36% rely primarily on candidate skills analysis.

Mervyn believes that past performance data is imperative. To add to this point, Joe feels strongly about skills-based hiring. If we only look at experiences, we end up making a lot of assumptions, which leads to bad hires. At Equinox, they aim to get data from pre-employment assessments on how candidates would handle certain situations versus how many years they’ve been working in a specific area. Walking through a resume is great, but talking about what they actually did in the position is more meaningful. 

Christina added that there’s no one data point that you can use to make a decision on a candidate, it’s a culmination of data that’s gathered. It’s important for TA leaders to assess how they’re going to measure the success of hiring outcomes long-term. If possible, those KPIs need to be measured pre and post implementation of whatever strategy you put in place - whether it’s structured interviewing, pre-employment assessments, etc.

4.) Training Interviewers

At Splunk, they have an interviewer certification program. It’s not mandatory, but it’s strongly encouraged. Christina mentioned that interviewer training is a tough thing to tackle. Ongoing learning that is peer driven and collaborative is what’s really going to strengthen interviewing capabilities and establish good interviewing as the norm. Training is of course incredibly important, but equally important is determining whether or not the behaviors you’re trying to instill with this training are actually coming to fruition in real life.

Joe stated what you train interviewers on is what you want them to be competent in - that could be active listening, communication, sales techniques, hiring neutrality, etc.

In the end, just because you’re a Hiring Manager doesn’t mean you know how to hire people. Our role as TA experts is to educate Hiring Managers how to hire properly. 

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And with that, we wrapped things up!

Huge thanks to Mervyn, Christina, and Joe for joining us! Don't forget to check out the entire webinar linked above for even more great insights.

And see you on December 17th for our next webinar! We’ll be joined by Scott Sell, VP of Talent Acquisition at Mercy; Andrea Lessard, VP of Talent Acquisition at Red Bull; and Ben Dickinson, VP of Talent Acquisition at ID.me to discuss the major TA trends that were most impactful to their businesses in 2024 and any major lessons learned. You can register for this live conversation here.