by Dave Nocera

Created on: August 17, 2008   Last Updated: August 26, 2008

This article provides guidelines for conducting effective interviews for professional candidates. Interviewing can be a very subjective process, this article will make you aware of how to manage your own subjectivity and it gives you an objective note-taking methodology to judge candidates with diverse experience against a consistent standard.

In his book, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", Malcolm Gladwell introduces the concept of "thin slicing" to rapidly size up a situation. Executives are trained in this way, to make split second decisions with less than perfect facts. And because of this, executives tend to be terrible interviewers. They simply cannot resist the instinct to make up their mind about the candidate in the first few minutes of the interview, and then they spend the rest of the interview rationalizing their initial assessment.

As a CEO and president of several companies I have learned from that mistake; eighteen months after I hire the wrong person for the job, they have morphed the job into something else. I call that "something else" their manifest destiny. For example, if I hired a person as a computer programmer and their manifest destiny was project management. Eighteen months after the hire, the candidate is doing more project management work than computer programming.

Determining the candidates' manifest destiny is the single most critical element of the interview process. Manifest destiny goes beyond experience and qualifications. You need to determine in the interview what the candidate loves to do and hire her for that job. If you get it right, you are both happy eighteen months from now. If you get it wrong, you added a tremendous inefficiency factor to your business.

The best way to know a candidate's manifest destiny is body language. The candidate will be more excited when discussing what she loves to do. To identify the candidate's manifest destiny ask open-ended questions like, what was your greatest professional success and how did you make it happen? You found her manifest destiny if she appears more confident and makes more eye contact when answering. Unless you are desperate, don't hire a candidate if her manifest destiny isn't what you need.

Always start and end the interview describing the company's hiring process. This is what the candidate will remember most and it makes an excellent ice-breaker, establishes trust, and provides the candidate with a realistic time-line. For example, I have more candidates

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