Hiring is very challenging in this day and age. Finding and keeping good people seems to be harder than ever. But if you follow a few easy steps and use emotional intelligence, your next hire might be the best one you ever had.
You can find previous steps in narrowing down the number of candidates for a position HERE, and then move to step No. 4:
Asking the right questions.
To manage to hire the right person for the role, your interview questions need to match the personality style you are talking to. I suggest using the DISC method for this purpose, as I have been using it in my own company for two decades and have had amazing results with it.
But to put things in perspective, it is good to know what percentage of the population what style is taking. The results are in, and they say:
D style = 10% of the population
I style = 25 – 30 % of the population
S style = 30 – 35% of the population
C style = 20 – 25% of the population
With simple math, we can see that Ss and Cs combined makeup up around 60 % of the population. That means:
60 % of the population of the planet Earth is the reserved kind.
That means most people on the planet don’t want to be the first to speak and they don’t like to talk about themselves a lot.
What do most HR people lead with as a first question in an interview? “Tell me about yourself”.
That is an EPIC fail. It’s a bad idea.
“Tell me about yourself” is a question that works well only with about 40 percent of the population. So, we need to have tools in place that allow us to ask the appropriate questions.
Dividing the interview into two segments
Naturally, a lot of questions will be specific to your industry and the role you need to find. However, before you dive into role-specific questions, you should spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of an interview getting to know the person sitting across from you.
To help you with that, I have prepared example questions for you to use for different personality styles. It’s completely free and you are free to use these questions in your recruitment process and as a base for forming questions that will be more specific for your line of work and the core values of your company. The link for your “Best rapport-building questions for different styles” is HERE.
Remember, you want to follow job benchmarking so that you can match the people to the role, and that has to be applied to questions as well.
If you follow my question guidelines and steps that I have laid out in previous posts, you can create around 45 minutes worth of conversation with solid questions that will show you what kind of person is sitting across from you and how well will they fit in the company and the role that you see them in.
The more specific question you can get, the better.
Think of this when you are thinking of the questions to ask.
The rule of thumb is to have the first 10 or 15 minutes of the interview orientated towards hitting their personality style that you got in one of the first steps, and then you will go to the question that will be directly connected to the role. This will be the time to check their past experiences and see can they show you where they showed their core values that are aligned to your companies core values.
How all this looks in practice can be seen in the video below. I’m sharing my tools and the step-by-step process I’m using in my own company. Glad to help!
