Give Effective Interviews

SELECTPro® is a web-based program that helps interviewers design and organize behavior-based selection interviews.  It allows the interviewer to easily create a custom Interview Guide: a document (or script) that the interviewer uses to conduct a job interview. An Interview Guide can optionally be turned into an Automated Online Interview. This allows candidates to provide written responses to the interview questions over the web--ideal for a pre-interview screening or first interview.

          Sign up for SELECTPro membership Interview training
          Test your interview skills Conflict style test

Few people can spend the time and effort it takes to create effective behavioral interview questions. Take advantage of the twenty years of human resource consulting that led Dr. Pfaff to the formation of SELECTPro.

  • Impress candidates with well organized and professional interviews. Don't lose good candidate due to poor interviews.
  • Re-use interview guides to save yourself time.
  • Trust your gut feeling, but only after asking the right questions and gathering the right information.
  • Get consistent interview results by giving consistent interviews.
  • Put your hiring managers out of their misery by providing them with a simple and effective hiring process.
  • Universally applicable to any type of job. Management, engineering, health care, manufacturing, government, retail, food service, etc.
  • Spend the time during an interview paying attention to what the candidate is saying, not racking your brain trying to come up with another clever question to ask.

Don't Gamble on Making a Good Hire!

Interviewing is a high-stakes game: You spend an hour with each of a dozen potential job applicants, make a choice, then roll the dice and take your chances. Choose the wrong candidate and your organization could pay the price for months or even years to come. And it can be a steep price. A professional job that pays $48,000 annually and turns over too quickly can cost a company as much as twice that in hiring expenses and lost productivity.

That means the 60 minutes you invest in meeting with applicants had better be time well spent. Hiring employees is like going to Las Vegas -- You never know if you're going to win. But good gamblers play the high probabilities. Interviewers should do the same thing.

The critical skills for employee success usually are best revealed in interviews. That means a good HR practitioner has to be a proficient detective who asks the kind of questions that get applicants to open up and reveal their good and bad workplace characteristics.

Behavior-Based Interviewing

To increase the odds of making the right hiring selection, behavior-based interviewing is the method of choice. Behavior-based interviewing is an approach that looks at past behavior as the best predictor of future performance. This systematic approach helps reduce turnover by selecting people whose skills and motivations match job requirements. It has proven to be a more valid way to assess job skills in an interview. Behavior-based interviewing rejects the old-school practice of hiring based on one's gut feeling--the practice known as "I know a good one when I see one."

Behavioral interviewing is one of the best ways to explore a candidate, but using good behavioral questions is important. And in crafting questions, hypothetical is out; reality is in. For example, rather than asking, "What would you do if ..." one should ask, "Tell me about a time when you ..." Just because people can give the right hypothetical answer doesn't mean they can do what they say. You want the candidate to tell you about a real-life experience.

SelectPro

SELECTPro provides two ways for you to gather interview information:

  1. Using face-to-face behavioral interview guides.
  2. Using automated online interviewing where candidates answer the interview questions over the web.

Sign up with SELECTPro and start dramatically improving your employee selection process. Select a monthly membership or pay-as-you-go.

Thanks for the questions! SELECTPro is an excellent idea. Here's the feedback I received from one of my candidates: "Philip, I was impressed with how well prepared you were with an excellent set of questions and hope that my answers were equally as good."

-- Philip Nathan, Director of Engineering
with a major software company