If you just use an interview to select candidates, research shows you are going to hire the wrong person about 85% of the time.

The key to any valid and reliable interview is asking past behavior questions.  

If a hiring manager isn’t properly prepared, there are many issues that can arise during the interview process that can prevent them from obtaining the information necessary to make a good hiring decision.  In my years of training interviewers, I’ve witnessed many of these mistakes, and have compiled a list of the top five mistakes that most commonly occur.  It's important that hiring managers understand how each of these errors directly impacts hiring decisions.  

Even with all of the advances in testing and technology used to hire new employees, the interview remains the number one utilized employee selection method by organizations to date. Most interviewers will tell you that they cannot feel comfortable with a potential hire until they have met the candidate face-to-face and been able to shake their hand. The question in our eyes is not “should we have an interview in the hiring process?” but “what kind of interview should be used in the hiring process?”  

I was recently talking with my friend who just got back from a family vacation in Hawaii. I was very interested to hear all about her trip. When we finally talked I asked her very excitedly, “How was Hawaii?” and she replied with “It was beautiful, we had a great time.”

While on an 8-hour journey back to my hometown of Beaver Dam, Kentucky from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I needed to listen to something to prepare me for the sights and sounds of what coming back home to a small, country town entails. So I decided to listen to none other than fellow “redneck” and comedian Jeff Foxworthy. If you want some insight into my small, rural town in Kentucky, some of the iconic Jeff Foxworthy “You might be a redneck” jokes certainly do not fall far from the truth. Regardless, I am proud to say I am one of those rednecks and his jokes may or may not fall far from describing me and my hometown ...

It seems like my ESPN Scorecenter did its best to distract me from my daily tasks last week. After all it was the first day of free agency in the NFL, and many teams weren’t short of activity. I’m especially pleased to see my hero Peyton Manning collecting Wes Welker in his receiving corps, but that’s nothing you care about.

Before you jump for joy and tell your boss you’re researching potential candidates at the nearest watering hole, please read on.  Although I love a good happy hour, we’re not talking about that kind of bar.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but it’s worth saying again:

Are you falling out of love with you hiring process lately? After a rough day of interviewing dozens of candidates that have no business in your candidate pool, are you left crying on the couch with a tub of ice cream in hand? No one wants that. When making hiring decisions the stakes are high, the people you bring into the company could be with your organization for years to come – that’s a pretty big commitment. Loving the hiring process and choosing the right hire is possible. Here are a few tips that will leave you swooning over your hiring process once again.

1. Get important people involved.
Hiring is a big deal. The people that you’re hiring will be with your organization for, hopefully, many years. People who will be working with a new hire should be part of the process. Do everyone a favor and get those people that will be supervising and working alongside your new candidate(s) involved in the process to figure out what competencies are important. They’ll appreciate being involved, and you’ll have more information about what the right selection model should look like.

2. Team up with the experts.
Your people know what’s needed for successful performance on the job. They’re job content experts and bring critical knowledge to the table. Knowing what functional competencies are important is only half the battle, however. Measuring your candidates for those functional competencies takes a scientific expertise that only assessment experts can provide. Assessment experts dedicate themselves to worrying about the most accurate methods of prediction so that you have all of the information that you need to make the best selection decisions possible.

3. Use a consistent process.
A lot of times when we talk about consistency in hiring processes, we are coming from a legal defensibility perspective - inconsistent hiring practices are regarded as a major red flag to several agencies that you do not want to alarm (EEOC & the OFCCP topping the list). Consistency, however, should also be regarded as a way to improve the accuracy of your selection decisions. As any statistician knows, the upper limit of validity is reliability. In essence you can never have a valid (and predictive) selection tool or process if decisions are not made consistently across candidates.

4. Train your worries away.
No matter how much care and time you put into creating predictive, efficient, and fair hiring tools, there is always that moment of anxiety when human error comes into play. You’ve recruited, you’ve screened, you’ve spent time and energy putting in place best-in-class selection tools … and yet the final decision is in the hands of someone that may just throw all of the selection best-practices that you love right out the window. Save yourself the heartache and get those hiring managers on board with the right way to do things. Sign them up for behavioral based interview training so that they can learn all of the skills they’ll need to add significant value to the selection process.

So toss that old hiring process to the curb and integrate these four tactics into your hiring system.

In today’s ever-changing marketing landscape, organizations can’t afford to rely on traditional tactics to generate and convert leads. Gone are the days of blasting out content to the masses in hopes of finding the needle in a haystack that wants to purchase your services – aka SPAM (no one likes that in their email inbox or on their plate) . Marketers must now rely on a more strategic approach that involves developing quality content and distributing it methodically to only those that are interested in the topic. So, how does this relate to HR?