Reprinted with permission © 2008 TreeTop Technologies
The typical hiring manager is, first and foremost, a manager and thus tied up with the daily tasks of overseeing staff, attending meetings, juggling budgets, and the list goes on (and on, and on). For most, weeding through the mountains of resumes, just to reach the point of conducting final interviews with potential new hires, is a necessary evil.As such, truly excelling at interviewing is a rare skill among hiring managers.
What many people don’t realize is that a few simple changes in presentation and execution can really enhance these much-needed skills. Such changes result in not only being better at extracting good information, but also make the hiring manager look a lot better to job candidates as a potential supervisor.
“One of the most important steps is to get rid of the resume,” says TreeTop Technologies’ Director of Recruiting, Doug Fowler. By all means, hiring managers should review resumes before interviews. They should refrain from looking at the resume during the interview unless a quick check of facts is needed to jog their memory.
“I usually print out the resume and have it facedown on my desk during an interview,” Fowler says. “I want to engage, have eye contact and really assess the candidate’s interpersonal and communications skills. If I were to just run down the resume and say, ‘I see you worked for five years at company X; what did you do there?’ I won’t learn much. It’s much better to ask open-ended questions and invite an interviewee to share examples of challenges and successes on particular projects and get them to share what really drives them as workers.”
Fowler suggests that if you are a hiring manager and you didn’t have a chance to review a resume thoroughly before an interview (because you were already juggling too many priorities) you are better off skimming the resume quickly and asking open-ended questions rather than going down the resume like a grocery list.
“You want to know what the person has done, how that person did it, and whether that person can do it for you,” Fowler notes. “Typically, someone has already done initial interviews or screening of the candidate before he or she gets to you. So, as the hiring manager, what you really need to do is get the person to open up to you and share who he or she really is.”
Action Item:
Footnotes: From "View from the TreeTop" Volume 2 Issue 8 August 2008