by Hire Authority,Inc.

Does Your Applicant Succeed When Its Easy And Quit When ItBecomes Tough?

To effectively assess any applicant, it is imperative that interviewers uncover certain information about their applicants. Because of therelationship that exists between an interviewer and an applicant, applicants are forced into selling themselves during an interview. Noapplicant wants to be rejected. They want the job offer even if they dont want the job. The applicant knows that they must accentuatetheir positives and successes while minimizing their negatives. Many interviewers listen to these success stories and automatically assumethat the applicant is a high achiever when in truth, even the lower performers have some successes that they can talk about.

It is very important for interviewers to determine specifically how the applicant reacts when the going gets tough. This is crucialinformation for accurately determining whether an applicant is a top performer or just posing as one. Anyone can succeed when the pathinvolves smooth sailing and is relatively obstacle-free. In the real world, of course, no job is without its share of difficulties. Highperformers achieve more results despite the obstacles, the hardships and the imperfections within every work environment. Lesserperformers make these their personal excuse for the lack of achievement.

Interviewing Tip: When assessing an applicants skill level, ask for examples of past behavior in situations that involved an obstacle ofsome kind.

Many of the questions that we ask applicants are phrased poorly, often without us realizing it. These questions may bebehavior-based, but ask only for happy-ending success stories. For example, "Tell me about a time you exceeded a customersexpectations." Both high performers and low performers can answer this type of question fairly well.

Improving your interview questions is not difficult. The key is to phrase questions so that you request specific and actual examples ofpast behavior in situations involving an obstacle or problem. A better way to phrase the example question would be, "Tell me about a timeyou dealt with an irate customer." High performers will be able to talk in much greater detail about the action they took to conquer theobstacle. The lower performers will lack much of or at least some of this effort and will offer up more excuses as a substitute for the lackof results. Do this with all your skill assessment questions and it will help you to better distinguish between the different performancelevels.

Monthly Interviewing Tips & Techniques provided by Hire Authority,Inc. This information and much more can be found in the book "Dont Hire Anyone Without Me!" To learn more about our on-siteworkshops, please contact us at (561) 638-0313. Copyright 2001. Permission to duplicate granted. Please feel free to pass thisinformation on to anyone who conducts interviews.