The Interview

I had alaways considered myself a good interviewer of prospective employees. Recently though I was listening to my wife talk about how she interviews and the steps and logic her organization puts into every interview. I have heard everything throughout my tenure from body language, feeling about them, to writing down their answers to questions and go with the right response you feel is best for the property. Many companies offer question(s) in a professional manner to ask. When interviewing though, how many small to mid range companies, have a process to follow having the site level take care of qualifying who will get through to the final round.

For example, what am I trying to get out of the question is not just asking it and making the assumption they gave an intelligent answer it is more than that. At my level as a manager started using a consistant technique called S.T.A.R. This acronym refers to did the prospective employee in each of their questions answer the basic fundamental characteristics regarding Situation, Task, Action and Result. This has resulted in good hires for my property and excellent hires for the company. Also, with HR being all about documentation and being fair throughout the process allows the same judging criteria to be in place for each applicant. I wonder how many of us ask the question and feel we have a right answer we want to hear but do not have a consistent way of gauging each employee.

I just wanted to post on this and hopefully more people will find this useful and help them as well. Good night all.

I had an interesting discussion/discovery about how interviews work with a friend of mine recently. She explained to me how her company changed the process for conducting interviews by working with the people from Gallup. Yes, those same people who do the Gallup Polls, can help your company do interviews.

The story she told me was about goalies for hockey teams. Gallup found that when asked, all successful goalies answered similar questions the with similar answers. One that really stood out was that they see the puck coming at them in "slow motion" when they're playing.

So, what Gallup did for her company was ask those employees who were considered "superstars" a list of interview questions. Then they looked at those answers to see what the similarities were...sort of like "All Good Property Managers say they care about their residents"...from that, they pick out key words for the interviewer to listen for.

They do the same for employees who are not considered "superstars" and from the comparisons, can outline a process for interviewing that helps companies find people who are the right fit!

I thought it was quite interesting and for every interview I went to after that, I started paying attention to my own word choice and that of my interviewer to see if what they're looking for matched up with what I was looking for.