Motivation-based Interviewing: A Revolutionary Approach to Hiring the Best
225
Motivation-based Interviewing: A Revolutionary Approach to Hiring the Best
225eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781586445492 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Society For Human Resource Management |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 225 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The State of Hiring
In the past, I've had my share of hiring success stories, just like most interviewers have. I've also hired plenty of people who fell into that average-performer category. But oh, the pain of a bad hire! I don't know which I focused on more — hiring high performers or simply avoiding bad hires. Clearly some bad hires are worse than others, but none are a pleasant experience. I recall one particular hire in my early years of interviewing. His first day on the job was supposed to include getting on an airplane and flying to the corporate office to begin management training. As it turned out, he figured out a way to cash in the airline ticket we gave him and neither he nor the money was ever seen or heard from again. Then there was the time I was ready to expand my recruiting agency. It was a one-person operation with yours truly doing all the work, which became too much to handle. It was time for me to hire my first employee. I was very careful in my selection process, and quite confident in my abilities. After all, I was a successful recruiter and had already interviewed hundreds of job candidates! The person I selected came with interviewing and hiring experience as well as management experience. She seemed like a hard worker and expressed a profound interest in the job. On top of that, I liked her. However, much to my dismay, it turned out to be a total disaster! For the next few months, she had one excuse after another for not meeting her goals and her lack of productivity. Initially I felt compassion towards her hard-luck stories and gave her the benefit of doubt. Since she wasn't bringing in much revenue, the cost to retain her was putting a financial strain on the business. That hiring choice caused me so much stress! I would have been better off if I had never hired her and did all the work myself. I almost lost the business because of one poor hiring decision. The good part, however, is that experience got the wheels turning in my head: how did I get it so wrong?
After thousands of interviews, along with tracking the job performance of those hired, I discovered the real difference between high performers and everyone else. It's not how eager a person is to get the job, or even about their bounty of skills, but rather, it's how eager a person is to do the job. The million-dollar question was, how could I make this distinction before they were hired? I knew the answer would lead me to a place where I could genuinely tell the difference between the great hires and the not-so-great ones. Then it hit me: everything revolves around how we assess self-motivation.
Speaking of Motivation ...
Motivating employees has always been a hot topic in the business world. As supervisors, we're continuously trying to come up with ways to prod workers to take action, produce results, and achieve higher goals. We spend countless hours seeking ways to make workers want to perform better. We coach and counsel. We dangle carrots. Sometimes we discipline and threaten job loss just to get them to do the job they were hired to do. Around the turn of the century, this age-old problem got a new name: "unmotivated employees" are now called "disengaged employees" and the act of motivating employees became "employee engagement." It's the same problem — unmotivated employees — just a new name.
Have you ever noticed that the word "motivation" is often preceded by the word "self"? One would think we could just say a person is motivated or isn't. But somewhere along the line, someone attached the word "self" to the word "motivation" to make a distinction. When we refer to motivation, we aren't automatically talking about the ability to put one self into motion, not at all. This is where many interviewers go astray. They think all they have to do is assess whether or not a candidate is motivated.
So, go ahead and ask a candidate about his motivation. Ask him, on a scale of one to ten, how much effort he puts into his work or how important he thinks initiative is. Or how about a candidate who finished a project. Can we assume she is motivated? The project got done and that's what counts, right? What if the boss told her prior to the project, "If you miss this project deadline the way you have missed so many others, you'll be fired"? What if the boss constantly had to check up on her progress and push her when she lagged behind? What if this employee made excuses and argued with her boss, insisting that the boss was being unreasonable, that there was no way it could all get done? What if the employee spent too much time on the phone or took long smoke breaks? The project may have gotten finished barely on time. But during a job interview, this person can brag about how she finished a tough project. Only talking about the success of the project and conveniently leaving out the details about the boss's push, this candidate probably appears to have been self-motivated. But she wasn't. She had trouble with the "self" part.
If you fail to assess motivation correctly during the interviewing process, you can become the proud supervisor of employees who lack self-motivation and will be dependent on you to motivate them — also known as employee engagement. Too often these people slip through the screening process and are hired.
How Are We Really Doing at Hiring?
Organizations spend a tremendous amount of time, money, and resources teaching managers how to motivate employees as a way to improve the organization's overall performance and success, yet put forth very little effort training interviewers.
I think a little healthy introspection might offer some enlightenment. Ask yourself these questions: Why do we assume we have hired well when the employee is underperforming? Did they change or did we miss the mark? If the act of motivating employees is so effective, why then do we still have unmotivated or disengaged employees? Why do we think trying to fundamentally change another human being is a better strategy than fixing the selection process?
So then, what is the state of hiring and why is it important that we know the answer to this question? It's important because many interviewers and many organizations believe they are already doing a fine job at selecting their employees. This belief comes with a side effect: not being open to learning and implementing a better way. After all, what is there to improve when you're already good at hiring? Before we can leap into motivation-based interviewing, we must start by opening our minds. Knowing where the employee selection process is going awry is how we open our minds. There is a good chance that what you have always known to be true about interviewing and hiring, whether that's a little or a lot, is about to get disrupted. It's important to understand where we are today and why much of what we are doing when it comes to hiring is broken. I recommend that you sit down and buckle your seatbelt. You're in for a ride!
Untrained Interviewers
This is a good place to start. Over the past two decades, in the Hire Authority interviewer training workshops, attendees have been asked to raise their hand if they've never received any kind of formal training on how to interview. More than 80 percent raise their hands. Let's think about this; we have a lot of hiring managers out there who have never been properly trained on conducting interviews and making hiring decisions. What are we thinking? Do we believe there are no negative ramifications for hiring mistakes? Do we believe we have the power to change bad hires into high performers?
Imagine yourself for a moment sitting in the pilot seat of a commercial airplane that's in flight. You've never flown a plane or had any training and now you're told that you're the new pilot. There's a fairly good chance you're going to crash! This scenario is totally absurd, of course, but it is similar to promoting people into management and giving them the responsibility of interviewing and making hiring decisions without ever teaching them how. Many managers are essentially winging it when it comes to selecting new employees. Several years ago, after an onsite motivation-based interviewing workshop, a director-level executive came up to thank me. He said he had been interviewing for nineteen years and admitted he'd never really felt confident that he knew what he was doing when it came to hiring. He said he wasn't terrible at it, but he'd had his share of hiring mistakes. He finally felt that he received the training that would help him hire better. He said that he wished he'd had the opportunity to learn this information nineteen years sooner.
Of the 20 percent or fewer who had received training, most say it was some interviewing basics, legal dos and don'ts, and behavior-based interviewing, none of which will help any interviewer correctly or consistently hire high performers. When you think about this, there is no way anyone can believe we're getting the best possible hiring results under these circumstances. But it doesn't stop here. It gets worse.
Behavior-Based Interviewing
Next let's tackle behavior-based interviewing. There is so much wrong with it that using it is likely to erode your quality-of-hire.
Decades ago, when behavior-based interviewing was first introduced, I — like many of us — thought it was great. Considering where we had come from (e.g., gut instinct, the introduction of open-ended and hypothetical questions), behavior-based interviewing seemed great. However, after using it for a while we have come to discover it produces extreme hit-and-miss hiring results, and there are a lot of reasons why. Behavior-based interviewing is like interviewing in the Wild West: there are few rules, no minimum hiring standard, and almost anything goes. There's an infinite amount of bad behavior-based interview questions, along with instructions on how to answer them well, posted all over the Internet. Many of the questions are so ineffective they actually help candidates provide overly positive answers, causing interviewers to give unjustified high ratings. This wouldn't be a problem if each candidate actually performed at that level, but that's not the case. We have a big problem with underperforming employees because of this overrating. Ineffective interview questions gather candidate information that is unsuitable for use in predicting future performance, yet that's exactly what is being used to make hiring decisions. This is why behavior-based interviewing is essentially unreliable for identifying high performers.
Job Skills
One of the most common misconceptions in hiring is that skill level equates to job performance level — the better the skills, the better the job performance. Skill simply means the person can do the job, not that they will actually do it.
Hiring based on skill level alone is not the answer. Think about it: if it were all about skill, we would not need to interview anyone. We could hire everyone and teach them the necessary job skills, and 100 percent would be high performers. We would never have to terminate anyone either; we would simply fill their skill gaps so they too would become high performers. But we know it doesn't work this way, and that's because it takes more than just skill to succeed.
Skills are useless without the initiative to apply them. The world is filled with people who lack the initiative or motivation to do what it takes to make full use of their potential. Some skilled employees may lack motivation, while some unskilled or underskilled employees may be highly driven to achieve. Therefore, hiring well is more than measuring skills. If one relies on skills alone as the determining factor for hiring, the results can be employee job performance that ranges from very good to very bad, which is why most organizations employ the full gamut of performers. Hiring results become more about luck rather than effective interviewing. Skills and motivation go hand in hand, but they are assessed in very different ways.
Because of its limitations, it is impossible to correctly assess motivation using behavior-based interviewing. However, motivation-based interviewing aligns with what brings achievement and success about, making it far more effective at accurately identifying high performers.
Predicting Future Behavior
Behavior-based interviewing works on the principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. The problem with this is that it infers that a candidate's past behavior will repeat exactly the same way in the future. It suggests that they behave in only one way and are therefore predictable, but behaviors can and do vary. People may be on their best behavior or their worst behavior, but that doesn't mean they are always that good or always that bad. What is important to interviewers is how a person behaves most of the time. This is a much better predictor of future performance. Examples of infrequent behavior only provide insight to how a person will behave occasionally, leaving their normal, everyday behavior unknown.
Here's an analogy that may help: Imagine every example of past behavior that a candidate shares with you during the interview as either a green ball or a blue ball. In this example, the green balls are symbolic of the candidate's infrequent behavior. The blue ones represent the candidate's most consistent behavior. The blue ones are most important because they signify behavior that it is likely to continue occurring on a regular basis, also known as a person's predominant behavior.
If we want to predict how the candidate will perform from day to day as a norm, we must not be colorblind to these blue and green balls. Interviewers go astray because they can't see a difference, or they don't know that a difference exists. They assume all examples of behavior will exactly mirror future performance. Without knowing it, they use the information from a green ball to form their hiring decisions, and then they are surprised when their new hire doesn't behave as expected.
Behavior-based interviewing requires that actual past behaviors are used. This is good because real examples are better than hypothetical responses. But it still doesn't tell us how to distinguish between the consistency of behavior, what behavior is predominant, or how to see the color of the example. Although behavior-based interviewing is more effective than hiring strictly from gut feelings, it's still not enough to gauge a person's future job performance.
Pre-employment testing, another advancement in hiring, was designed to aid interviewers in identifying high performers, not replace them. When interviewers lack the proper training, however, the outcome of the test is used to make the hiring decision. The problem with this is that tests are typically not 100 percent accurate. I have personally validated a pre-employment test that turned out to be only 27 percent accurate (or 73 percent inaccurate) at predicting good hires. Let me put that into perspective: a flip of a coin would have produced better hiring results than that test. I am not against preemployment tests. I am simply for validating them; otherwise, we could be hiring underperformers and needlessly turning away great hires. First and foremost, the spotlight must be on the interviewer's skill level and how to improve it.
Quality-of-Hire: Why Isn't It Being Tracked?
When we analyze our hiring effectiveness, all we are able to do is examine the performance of candidates we have hired; we have no means to compare the performance of candidates we hired against those we did not. In truth, we don't actually know whether the best candidates are being hired. All we know is how the candidates who we hired are performing. Organizations must go beyond just tracking hiring efficiency using metrics such as cost-per-hire and time-to-fill. These metrics alone suggests that a fast and cheap hire is the most important measure of success, while actual job performance is irrelevant. Using this would be like imitating a factory assembly line that focused solely on the speed of output with little emphasis given to the quality of their product.
Quality-of-hire metrics, on the other hand, reveal the effectiveness of the employee selection process, as well as the effectiveness of the hiring managers. Unfortunately, it's not something I'm seeing a lot of organizations track yet. This means most don't really have a clue about how well they are doing when it comes to hiring high performers. The real purpose of these metrics is to trigger-positive change. Absent of that knowledge, there is usually no motivation to improve hiring results. I see two common reasons for inaction. The first reason is that no one seems to know exactly how to do it. The second is that it hasn't been made important enough to be mandated. It's part of the big picture of the state of hiring.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Motivation-based Interviewing"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Carol Quinn.
Excerpted by permission of Society for Human Resource Management.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Dedication v
Foreword ix
Introduction xi
Chapter 1 The State of Hiring 1
Part l Understanding High performers
Chapter 2 The Process of Achievement 17
Chapter 3 Attitude & Locus of Control 29
Chapter 4 Passion & Career Fit 43
Chapter 5 Motivation & High Performers 61
Part II Identifying High Performers
Chapter 6 How to Get Your Candidates Talking 81
Chapter 7 MBI Interview Questions 99
Chapter 8 How to Assess Locus of Control 123
Chapter 9 How to Assess Career Fit 149
Part III Hiring High Performers
Chapter 10 Hiring Words of Wisdom: To Hire or Not to Hire? 171
Bibliography 191
Index 193
About the Author 199
Become a Certified MBI Trainer 201
About Hire Authority 202
Other SHRM Titles 203
Books Approved for SHRM Recertification Credits 205