Collaborative Interviews

Why companies today spend so much on recruiting both internally and externally and what can you do now to stop wasting your budget

The hiring process now consists of 3-6 interviews with different stakeholders. Each interview adds a risk for a job seeker to be rejected. Out of 6 separate days, a job-seeker will likely have one day not as good as others.

And this is normal. Recent scientific research shows that employees' productivity is highly volatile, so we should concentrate on evaluating the overall performance as average and the approach the employee takes when her/his performance is below average.

After four fabulous interviews, you get one lousy day and perform average, or maybe it even not a job-seeker, but the interviewer who feels terrible on that day or has some drama going on in his family or is just too busy to pay attention to the interviewee and just trying to finish the interview ASAP to move on to work they need done. As a result, both the candidate and the company lost time they could have devoted to productive work. The company now needs to repeat the process, keeping the position open and the work stale.

How do we solve this? By conducting collaborative interviews. It is not a good idea to give unilateral decision rights to a single person if the whole reason why there are so many interviews is to ensure that the collective hiring decision is right. So the solution here can be found within this very reason, which means that the hiring decision should be made collaboratively rather than individually by each person in the group. Every member of the group of interviewers may be granted the right to veto (if this approach is believed to result in a better outcome for the business), but the interview, post-interview discussion, and decision should be made collectively. Collaborative interviews yield better decisions due to a more robust decision-making process that is less susceptible to bias. This means you will also be less likely to be sued for discrimination or any other inappropriate individual action. Conducting two collaborative interviews with 3 people in each session compared to 6 individual interviews will:

(1) reduce the duration of the recruiting process for one candidate by 3x times;

(2) provide a better job-seeker experience;

(3) make use of resources used by the recruiting process more efficient;

(3) reduce the company's susceptibility to risks related to bad decisions or actions of individuals in the hiring team.

One drawback of this approach is that collaborative interviews are more difficult to schedule because you need to coordinate schedules of multiple people. It is more likely that someone’s plans change, and they have a too busy schedule, and they won’t be able to attend. If the company sees value in hiring the right candidates; if the company sees value in saving rather than wasting its resources; then these are only excuses.

So are your interviews collaborative yet?

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