The Problem with Evaluating and Comparing Job Candidates:

How to avoid candidate blur and interviewing fatigue with a good way to evaluate and compare job candidates jpeg

Candidate Blur & Interviewing Fatigue

Has this happened to you?  By the time you’ve interviewed five candidates, they start to blur into each other. Do ten interviews and it’s impossible to compare candidates. Dave seemed to be better than Mary, who seemed to be better than Dave – what?! I know I’ve struggled with this interviewing problem and this is what I do to get better staff: Download Here

No Detailed Notes

I have a simple method to evaluate and compare candidates. You might’ve tried scribbling down notes or writing all over candidate CVs but this is hard work. After a while it starts to get difficult to:

  • Remember which candidate has what skills;
  • Compare candidate C with candidate G.

Even with the best notes. And anything that results in hand-cramp, quickly gets dropped.

Job Skills Don’t Have Percentage Ratings:

As job skills don’t quantify into a percentage ratings, evaluating how good someone really is, is highly subjective. The science shows that we judge job candidates on our prejudices and first impressions. Now instincts are very powerful but the result is we end up hiring people we like instead of the best person for the job.

Result: a bad hire that we don’t really want to fire because they are a “good guy” and we like them as a person. This is a manager tragedy. (Managing is hard and that's why Boss Camp was invented. Find out how to improve your manager skills and make managing easy in just an hour a week.)

Evaluate and Compare

The trick is to know how to evaluate interview answers and compare these answers to each other. I have a template that shows you exactly how to do this for you to download. Of course it helps to use the best interview questions:

The Best Interview Questions

The best interview questions are not theoretical questions that test knowledge. The best interview questions are simply interview questions that will tell you how well a candidate can do the job. This is a topic for another day.

Reduce Variables

There are so many variables that makes it difficult to compare candidates. That's why it's important to try and be as consistent as possible. It's boring but it works. What this means in practice is to ask job candidates exactly the same interview questions. Sure follow the flow of the interview. But if you've asked Candidate A if they are a good accountant and candidate B if they're good with numbers it's difficult to compare them!

Summary – How to Evaluate and Compare Candidates

Evaluating and comparing job candidates is difficult. Using a template will:

  1. Make our evaluation less subjective;
  2. Eliminate weak candidates and
  3. Allow us to compare candidates.

Choosing the best of the best will make managing easy.

Download your interview tool for evaluating and comparing interview answers here.

Comments:

Do you have any tips and suggestions for evaluating and comparing job candidates? Help the rest of us by sharing in the comments below.

SIDE NOTE TO MANAGERS

ARE YOU HIRING TO REPLACE A BAD EMPLOYEE? 

Here's some food for thought. Hiring is one of the foundational manager skills. Hiring is also a costly process. There are obvious costs like recruitment fees. But add in manager time, training and waiting for the employee to get up to speed and it’s not far off an annual salary. Ditto when things go wrong. The total cost of a bad hire is a minimum of 25% of their salary but could be over one and a half times their annual cost.  So is it worth the time, pain and cost of hiring someone new to replace your bad employee? What if I told you that there is an easy and time-efficient management technique that you can use to engage your employees, improve productivity and make managing easy.

SPECIAL MENTION ABOUT ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS

Do you know that regular, high quality one-on-ones with your employees are the single easiest management practice. Do one-on-ones right and not only can you can take care of almost all your management responsibilities in one go but you will also:

  • Improve employee engagement,
  • Boost productivity,
  • Build better relationships with your staff.

That's why I made a mini-course on one-on-ones (including a one-on-one template with a one-on-one meeting agenda) which will show you 3 Easy Steps 2 1 on 1's. What I expect you'll find is that you already know some of the content on some type of level but maybe you're not putting it into practice. This will help. As I say this is essential for new managers and helpful for experienced managers.

The Hiring and Interviewing Series

This is part of the Interviewing and Hiring Series. This series covers how managers can increase employee performance through hiring better employees. And how managers can avoid common hiring mistakes.

Topics in the Series Include:

Other Relevant Resources:

Power Interview Pack: The complete set of interview questions to get the best candidate for the job. Increase employee performance through hiring the best staff and avoiding bad hires. Link here. 

Hiring for Performance: How to hire the best employees and improve employee performance, engagement and retention. Link here.  

Employee Onboarding for Performance: If employee onboarding goes wrong, your new hire may leave you in the lurch or become a demotivated low performer. But motivate and integrate your new hire well and you will have a happy, productive team member. Link here.

 

Boss Camp

Did you study a technical skill but now you’re managing staff? Find out what they forgot to teach you in university about managing, motivating and retaining staff at WWW.BOSS.CAMP. The program includes topics such as:

  • How to hire for performance,
  • How to motivate employees,
  • What are bad employee motivators,
  • What you must do as a manager but isn't on your job description,
  • How leaders get power.