By John A. Haas
Management Strategies Group
In small and mid-sized companies all employee are key. All must contribute and wear many hats for an enterprise to thrive. Deciding who you need and finding them remain critical success elements.
Defining Expectations
The "easy" part is deciding the needed competencies. These fall into three general categories:
Knowledge: education, knowledge, technical skills, experience, etc.
Business Acumen: breadth of experience, process skills, analytical/problem solving skills, organization skills, etc.
Workstyle Attributes: communication ability and style, taking initiative, flexibility, leadership style, etc.
The categories aren't as important as thinking through the elements in advance.
Screening Candidates
This is by far the more difficult challenge. One must "test" what's on the resume, plus judge how well the candidate will fit into your operating culture.
After screening resumes a series of carefully planned, structured interviews can get at the other, potentially more critical aspects.
Consider developing the following interview ideas:
Hiring manager: Review job expectations; probe resume details, answer questions, etc.
"Behavioral" interview: Seek detailed descriptions of recent successful/unsuccessful projects, including their role, why they think it did or didn't go well, and the outcome.
"Incident" interviews: Develop generic scenarios of typical difficult situations an incumbent would face in the job. Ask what the issues are and how he/she would proceed as next steps.
Prepare interview questions in advance. Seek interviewers' impressions regarding "chemistry," cultural fit, communication skills, functional knowledge, quality of questions, etc. Develop scoresheets for all interviewers to complete, and use to discuss and compare candidates.
July 1999 - Volume 9, Number 3