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5 Bad Ways To Hire

Hiring someone is expensive. You will pay in three resources:

  1. Time (doing it right takes time, and doing it wrong takes even more time...)
  2. Money (obvious)
  3. Organizational complexity. Each person you add to the org increases communication cost, etc.

With these costs in mind, you want to know what...

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Stop Throwing Darts! (No More Guessing...)

I recently spent two days doing non-stop interviewing coaching and I was blown away by two realizations:

  1. New interviewers are nervous and almost always ramble in their question-asking, inadvertently including words in their question they did not intend. This skews how the candidate hears the...
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When To Listen To Your Gut

One of the main things we do in our Talgo workshops is systematically show teams how to gather and use predictive data to make more accurate hiring decisions. Data being the operative word—in contrast to more subjective "gut" decisions which are the primary driver of most hiring...

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What’s Results Got To Do With It?

Why not just create an interviewing scorecard based entirely on competencies—why bother listing the results expected at all?

We got (a variant of) this question recently in a consulting call, and I think it’s a good one.

To be clear, a purely competency based framework alongside the...

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Show Me the Incentive And I'll Show You...

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result," is among my favorite Charlie Munger quotes.

How does this apply to interviewing? Unlike other parts of the talent pipeline, you often have people performing interviewing in a more-or-less "volunteer" capacity. They aren't an HR professional...

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Don't Ride the Segue (or Segway)

Most of us know the Segway. A supposedly "cool" innovation that was received by the general public as decidedly... uncool.

Keep that image in mind the next time you are tempted to "segue" your interview from one topic to the next. Most interviewers attempt to do this to make the conversation more...

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High Probability Poker: The Art of Side Door Interviewing

In interviews, the questions we ask should serve two goals. First, they must have a high probability of gathering relevant, predictive information about the candidate. Second, they should avoid telegraphing exactly what we’re looking for or what the “right” answer might be.

When...

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The Positives of Asking For Negatives

Most interviewers are either afraid of asking for negative information from candidates (weaknesses, mistakes). Or they are simply unskilled in doing so. Often both.

Why do we insist that asking for negative information is such an important part of a well conducted interview process? Three...

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When to Hire a Generalist: 4 Situations that Break the Rules

There’s no shortage of leadership gurus who talk about the importance of hiring people with specialized skills and expertise. “Specialists over generalists” was a common refrain at my former employer, the renowned leadership advisory firm ghSMART. Peter Drucker has written...

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