Build an interview plan that leaves nothing to chance (Hiring High Performers Part 4 of 6)
Haven’t defined your role requirements and want some pointers? Check out our Resources section!
Now that you have the first draft of your role requirements ready, you can think about how you’ll assess candidates against these criteria. Often you and your team only have a few hours to make an assessment of the candidate and decide to hire them or not. In this part, you’ll learn how to make the most out of the precious interview time.
STEP 1: Create the Hiring Plan
Take your job requirements and break them into topic areas. Which hard and soft skills make sense to be assessed in one interview? You’ll want to have at least one interview in the process covering each topic area. Decide who should be on the interview panel.
Decide what success would look like for each interview. A Hiring Plan should include the job requirements, as well as “the bar for success”, which is a description of what meeting the hiring qualification would look like.
Build an interview team. Once you define these aspects, think of who in your team would be the best person to assess each area.
Are there any subject-matter experts in the team whose judgement you need?
Any stakeholders whose buy-in is essential for the role?
Many female candidates feel more comfortable if there is at least one female interviewer; do you have any opportunities to diversify your interview panel?
We’ve noticed that a lot of teams don’t consider adding an interview slot where the candidates actually meet the athletes they’d be working with. Given how important it is that the athletes and candidates have good chemistry, consider if an athlete be included in an interview slot as a second interviewer.
Ideally, each interview should have two interviewers to reduce interviewer bias. This also allows the interviewers to focus more on the candidate (maybe one interviewer asks questions and one takes notes), instead of focusing constantly on scribbling down notes.
All interviewers should be informed of the Hiring Plan. Each interviewer should know what criteria they should assess, as well as your expectations for where the bar is in terms of the candidate’s experience being “enough” to meet the criteria. Once they have this info, it’s their job to determine which questions to ask.
STEP 2: Review your notes from your recruiter
At ATHLIN Talent, we will always knock out the easy things in our discovery call with your short list candidates. Therefore, you don’t need to waste time asking about a candidate's availability, willingness to travel, salary expectations or visa requirements. Make sure your interview focuses on the “meat” of the position and not on logistics.
STEP 3: Data-driven, continuous improvement is key
A Hiring Plan is never set in stone and should be iterated when new hiring data becomes available. Your ATHLIN talent recruiter will always walk you through the hiring dashboard for your role at the start of each hiring catch up, so you can make data-driven improvements on the following:
Is there any info that seems to always be missing from the interview scorecards?
Are candidates dropping out at a certain stage and can anything be done about it?
Look at the candidates who made it far in the process but were rejected or pulled out of the process. Was there anything to be learned from these cases to either keep candidates onboard or not waste so much time with the wrong ones?
In the upcoming post, we will cover some tips for asking great interviewer questions. Stay tuned!
This post is part of an ongoing series, Hiring High Performers. To read previous posts, check out the Resources section on our website!
You can also find an interactive G sheet template here which guides you through all the best practices in this series.
