I may have mentioned this joker guy before but if not, I will again. In February I hired a replacement for a sales coordinator that had recently left my group (for sake of this message, the position is not relevant, these techniques will relate to any position).

During the interview, I asked candidate Paul (fake name) a lot of good questions and believed I really got into his brain to understand the way he thought and what motivated him. It wasn’t long before I was sold on Paul with hopes that he would evolve into a rookie salesman on my team.

My old interviewing process was admittedly tough. I always had candidates interview with me and then a couple of my peers individually. With each additional meeting, it signified a move up the ladder towards them landing a job. If you interview with me and I don’t setup a 2nd meeting right there, odds are you are not hired. I just don’t want to waste my time (or yours).

So Paul seems like a keeper. I interview 3 other people and no one is really grabbing my attention. Paul interviews with 2 other people on my team, including my boss. We are all totally sold on this guy…he is the one.

I hire him after the standard HR background and reference check process. Paul agrees to $41K year in salary and another $18K in bonus potential. This is an $11K raise for Paul who had come to me with 2 years of experience already doing this stuff. It was a golden deal for both of us, he gets more money and I don’t have to train a new guy. All he has to do is coordinate a couple of things, a little cold calling, event management, etc.

So on Day 3, I realize Paul sucks. He has zero skills that are of any value to me or my company. Paul even goes as far as faking meetings to appear productive and lying to my face. The guy was a weasel but he had learned to become the Master of Interviews. I got rid of him quickly but what the heck happened? How do we as hiring managers recognize and avoid this?

Here are the steps that I now follow. I still have candidates meet with my peers but there are a couple of additions that have I have worked in that have shown great results.

• Go through your internal HR process and get some candidates.
• Setup a 60-minute interview with each person holding a resume that interests you.
• During the interview ask all of the questions you generally ask but do not take more than 40 minutes. This is an important point. There is actually a book with a ton of great questions that I still use to this day if you need some new ideas.
• When there are 20 minutes left in the interview, ask them how they feel about the job and how they believe the interview is going. In reality the answer is not important, but you want a positive response. If they say, “I am not sure”, or anything wishy-washy, end the interview and toss the resume. If they are upbeat, more forward.
• Here is one of my additions. Give them a task right there in the interview. Not something like getting coffee, but something to briefly work on. If your position requires creating PowerPoint presentations, give them 60 minutes to create a presentation on why your products will be obsolete in 5 years. If it’s writing scripts, have them toss something together and see how it works and how well it’s written. It doesn’t matter what you do, but you are getting to see them in action before they become a liability.One Note: If you’ve been paying attention, I said give them 60 minutes but your interview is already 40 minutes in - that’s a long interview. Exactly, if the person says no I cannot do it, “I have to go”, then toss the resume. If they get squeamish, you know you are dealing with a strict 9-5 worker. Normally that is fine, but when a huge project comes up, I personally need flexible people so I am testing for it now. This is an interview and if they are not willing to be flexible here, God knows it won’t happen later.
• Once they complete the task, talk about it. How good is it? How creative were they? Do their skills match what they told you in the Question and Answer portion of the interview? Odds are that many times the answer will be no (in my experience). If things look good, move on. If not, you know what to do.
• Assuming there is a second interview, you will want to do the same thing again. Give them another task and see how they do. This task should be much harder and something that is almost above their level. Let’s see how they problem solve and get things done under pressure. Remember, what you see during this exercise is what you are going to see on the job. If you can deal with the results of these interview tasks, than OK. If not, it’s time to bail on this candidate.

Note: If you are a federal contractor or otherwise concerned about overall fairness, I would ask all candidates to complete the same tasks as opposed to changing them each time.

The point of everything here is that it not only costs money to hire incompetence, but it costs you your time. I hate the process of hiring and interviewing people so I have learned to only hire quality and how to retain good employees. Paul has been replaced with someone that is ridiculously talented and I went through 13 candidates to find him. Yes, it took a while but the time spent now is 1/10 of the time it will take me to get rid of people like Paul.