Page 154 - Becoming a Successful Manager

Hiring the Right People 145

contentment with a rote job. From an applicant’s description of
committee work, you can deduce that the person is a team player
and cooperates with fellow employees.
Always seek out evidence and documentation of these intan-
gibles in action. Don’t simply accept a generality such as “I wel-
come challenges.” Uncover incidents that support the statement.
One way of doing this is to ask candidates to tell you about a chal-
lenge they undertook and describe how they handled it. Apply the
appropriate questioning techniques, and anytime you hear a gen-
eralization or an abstraction, probe for concrete examples. This
way, you keep achievements at the forefront and won’t get caught
up in vagaries. You are going to hire the best candidate to perform
a certain function, not just the best talker.
With this dynamic, in addition to answering your questions,
prospective employees have a chance to stand out and to tell their
complete stories when they might otherwise have been too ner-
vous to summon up details. They will see that your interest is in
their performance and that you want to know about them. This
demonstrates to interviewees that you value them as people and as
prospective employees.

From Willing to Ready

You can determine if an applicant is ready for the position at hand
by identifying past patterns and using them to deduce the next
stage in the person’s professional development. By using the sug-
gested questioning and listening techniques, you can learn much
about the whole person, including personality and personal quali-

fications. You will want to take into consideration whether or not a
candidate seems to have grown in past jobs. Has the person taken
on ever-increasing responsibilities? Does the person display suf-

ficient maturity to relate to a diverse group of co-workers?