What does an interview really tell you about a potential employee? If that person interviews well, are they going to bring the skill set you want? How do you really know?
A manager I know needed to hire someone who could master MSExcel. He designed a test consisting of a simple set of actions to be carried out in Excel. One task was to Freeze Panes. No one tested actually knew how to do that. Only one person looked it up in the Help index. That person was hired – the one person of the bunch that actually knew how to look for an answer when they didn’t already know it.
This article in Fast Company offers a great discussion of the validity and reliability of the interview, as opposed to work samples and job tests. It asserts that giving job tests might be the easiest competitive advantage you ever acquire.
via Made to Stick: Hold the Interview | Fast Company.
When the economy finally turns around, you’ll start hiring people again. You’ll sift through dozens of impressive-sounding résumés — who knew there were so many VPs in the world? — and bring in the standouts for the critical final stage: the interview. You’ll size them up, test the “culture fit,” and peer into their souls. Then you’ll make your decision. This is the Official Hiring Process of America. And it ignores, almost completely, what decades of research tell us about how to pick good employees.