Selection Interview, Employee Selection Process

Whether you are the vice president of marketing in a multinational pharmaceutical company, or as sales manager for a software design firm employing 30 people, you will in some time in your career be called on to conduct a selection interview. Everyone in a supervisory position is likely to be involved in the employee selection process. If just one person reports to you, chances are you will have interviewed that person, even if only as part of a series of interviews.

Organizations nowadays are very concerned about excellence, ethics, being effective, the quality of their relationships with their customers, being efficient and organized and lean and productive in a competitive marketplace. In order to be effective in those arenas, having the right people in the rights spots and selecting them properly is critical.

Given the critical importance of effective hiring, one would think that a high proportion of the people involved in the employee selection process would get some training. Yet, that is rarely the case. Most managers are introduced to the interview process with the words, there are two candidates coming in tomorrow morning. Tell me what you think of them and do a good job.

It seems odd, doesnt it, that while you would never be expected to perform any of your other professional duties without some sort of plan or guidance, selecting the person with the skills and knowledge and character traits necessary to perform a particular job function a critical component of the success of any organization is often left to trial and error and chance? Interviewers usually have no more than their everyday social conversational skills to rely on. For those few who have had some training, the form it usually takes sitting in and watching someone else do it isnt particularly effective.

Obviously, for someone who has never interviewed before, some exposure to the interview process is better than none at all. However, even if the person you were watching was an expert, there would be too many things going on for your to be able to digest them and apply them in a systematic way.

The interview is not just one skill done well, but a dozen or so techniques working together simultaneously. All the research conducted on interviewing supports the conclusion that about 12 independent factors make up the most effective possible interview. These factors form the core of Swans How to Pick the Right People program, a workshop that can help managers digest the employee selection process and apply interviewing skills in a systematic way.

If your organization has not trained managers to make accurate pre-employment assessments, they probably are not doing as well as they could. Targeted selection interview skills are is trainable, and Swan Consultants (http://www.swanconsultants.com/) has developed a Selection Interview Workshop that gives participants the skills they need to make more effective and valid hiring decisions.

The success or failure of any organization is determined by its people. To increase profits, productivity and morale, there is no better way than to hire the right person -- the first time around.