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A majority of human resources professionals (54%) make their final decision to hire a person based on “chemistry,” according to a poll released Tuesday by the Society for Human Resource Management.
from: Poll: A Majority Hire based on ‘Chemistry’ over at WorkExposedBlog.com
I’ve had managers ask me over and over again how to interview as if there is a silver bullet or super secret trick I’ve learned in the years I’ve been doing it and I frequently disappoint and surprise them. We’re in retail. What we do is entry level stuff. Just about anybody with good people skills can do it. Seriously. It’s not that tough to do. To do it really well needs a certain type of person and that is, for me, what the interview is for.
How well will the person fit in with the good/great members of your current crew? How will you feel after talking to them for 10 minutes during a shift change? What will they be like during an employee meeting? Are they positive? Upbeat? Do they smile easily and readily? Are they easy to talk to? They’ve just met you and they’ll deal with customers all day long that they have only just met as well… how relaxed and easy going they are during an interview is helpful to knowing how they’ll do with strangers during a normal work day.
Just talk to them. Are they profoundly qualified but after two minutes of talking to them you want to kick your dog? I wouldn’t hire them. You have to work with this person. I don’t care if they DO have 12 years experience working as a team leader at a competitor twenty miles away and they only left because the place flooded and closed. If you can’t stand to talk to them how will it be to work with them? How will it be on the co-workers and customers?
So is it a good idea to hire based on chemistry? I doubt it. I think that it gets in the way when we hire people who are just like the people we’ve always hired. I think sometimes we wind up losing something when we lose variety.
I once had a manager who staffed her store for over a year entirely with young African-American lesbians. (I swear I’m not making that up either.) Eventually I had to point out, gently, and carefully, that perhaps someone named Susan or Steve wouldn’t be completely out of line. Two weeks later she called me, so proud she’d “hired a Susan” which turned out to be a white lady that I don’t believe was a lesbian, but I never asked. This was a really good manager, she just had gotten in the habit of hiring people she clicked with. (I am in no way implying she was dating her employees. She wasn’t. I knew her family and that wasn’t something that was going on. She just kept doing it over and over again. She said, “that’s all that applies!” Well, we found that wasn’t entirely true and wound up diversifying a bit over time, slowly… and it didn’t kill her!)
So, while I firmly believe that we should hire people who will work well with others and who I can work well with… I also believe that just like I should do something different and unexpected once in a while, I should also hire outside my comfort zone just to make sure I don’t get too comfortable.
I talked interview tips in a previous post but it wasn’t the same type as this one so I’m OK doing it again. This one was from the interviewer’s point of view too, and the previous post was tips for the person being interviewed. Also, if you’re not subscribed to the Work Exposed Blog yet I recommend it really highly. It has one of my highest click through rates on my feed reader.
The It’s not what you know – it’s if I can stand talking to you! by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.