Usually, we don’t think of opportunities to speed things up as also increasing the quality of the output, but the IRCM does just that.
The IRCM is almost as important as the interviews themselves. It happens after everyone has finished their interviews of each candidate. Don’t wait until all candidates have interviewed if more than one has made it to your final interviewing day. Remember that candidates are not being compared to the others: each is being compared to the standard you set in your preparation.
The IRCM’s purpose is simple: to capture all interviewers’ recommendations for each candidate—in as short a time as possible after the interviews are complete. When you ask other managers and associates to interview one of your candidates, you tell them, based on when the interviews are, when you will have the IRCM.
As a general rule, hold the IRCM the day of, or the day after a candidate’s interview day. We recommend keeping them to 30 minutes, but often you need an hour, so schedule an hour, and if you finish early, so much the better.
You start, taking five minutes to remind everyone of your agenda. Then give each attendee five minutes to report. We don’t recommend allowing open discussion after each interviewer’s recommendation and justification. Just let them all get through their reports, and then allow open discussion. The agenda is:
We know there are some readers who are thinking it’s hard enough to get people to interview your candidates—how are you going to get them to interview and come to another meeting? The answer is simple. Mention a couple of less than great hires, tell them how the new person will be supporting what they do in their areas, tell them that you’ll always be available to help them with their interviews, and tell them, finally, that once they see the meeting in action, they’ll want to do it themselves, guaranteed.
Everyone who interviews comes to the meeting. It’s normal for some people to have a conflict. When someone can’t attend, our guidance is to have the person report in an email to the hiring manager by the time of the meeting. Have everyone follow the “What and Why” guidance in the next step.
When each interviewer reports, whether in person or by email, he or she covers two points: what—whether to hire or not hire, and why—behavioral support of the recommendation.
First and foremost, they recommend hire or no hire. Just that. Nothing fancy. If you’ve interviewed, whatever you talked about, you start with the Hire/No Hire recommendation. This is critical.
Interviewers are going to want to talk about their experiences, about something specific that was said. There are interviewers who want to avoid making a decision, and some who want to avoid disagreeing with the hiring manager. They want to defer to you. But the whole point of multiple interviewers is gathering different points of view.
To be clear, you don’t start an IRCM with an open discussion. Interviewers who know this will happen find it easier to come to the meeting without a hiring recommendation.
Note what the IRCM structure causes: every interviewer has to finish the interview with a decision: a hire or no hire recommendation.
An interview is not “a discussion.” An interview is not “a chance to gather information.” It is not a chance to “get a feel for a candidate.”
An interview exists for each interviewer to gather the information necessary in making a hiring decision. An effective interview results in a recommendation to hire or not to hire. That’s the result/outcome/product of interviews. Not information, data, thoughts, or feelings that will then be bandied about as “the group” come to a decision.
The format of the IRCM forces every interviewer to interview with the purpose of making a decision individually about the candidate.
Without the requirement to decide after the interview, interviewers end up just gathering data. When that happens, our testing shows that the biggest determinant of the hiring decision is who talks first, loudest, and/or most. This isn’t a professional way to assess talent.
Without the IRCM structure backing up the interview as a decision, whomever talks the longest and loudest wins. Ludicrous.
So the first words each interviewer says at the meeting are “Hire Her” or “Don’t Hire Him.”
Then they support their recommendations based on what they saw and heard in the interview. Again, we urge you to require recommendations before support. Interviewers want to talk about what they saw, what they heard, how it was interesting, what clever conclusions they drew. But none of that matters nearly as much as whether they recommend hiring or not hiring.
When giving their “why,” interviewers support their recommendations with behavioral examples in four areas: Interpersonal, Cultural, Skills, and Technical. (You only provide technical input if you’re qualified to share it, usually because you conducted the technical interview.) If we’re interviewing a project manager in an IT organization, and you’re the marketing person with whom she must have a good relationship, you’re NOT going to give feedback on the technical details.
For each of the three or four areas, you use the What and Why format:
In each case, the “why you said that” brings up a specific answer or behavior from the interview that shows competence in each area. This helps managers look for those very things in interviews.
Here’s an example of an interviewer report:
I recommend we don’t hire Andrew. Interpersonally, he kept interrupting me . . . even after I asked him to let me finish the question. Culturally, I have concerns as well. He said twice that collaboration was overrated—that he believed in leaders deciding. Skill-wise, there’s no question he could do the job. He told me about his success bringing a difficult project in on time. But the interpersonal and cultural areas are big concerns. I say no.
After everyone else, you, the hiring manager, share your recommendation.
Now that you have heard from all of the interviewers, you have to choose to put into action whatever decision model you’ve chosen. Many managers use some form of voting process: a majority or a super majority. Some managers even consider everyone else’s input to be only input, rather than recommendations, and the hiring manager’s interview and opinion take precedence over all else.
We recommend having a (modifiable) standard of unanimity in your decision. If everyone recommends hiring the candidate, including you, prepare to make an offer.
This, of course, means that Manager Tools recommends not offering someone who doesn’t receive unanimous support from your interviewers. There are situations, though, which make this not an ironclad rule.
Perhaps you have one or two interviewers who are relatively inexperienced, and their input reflects that. It might be reasonable to overrule their recommending not hiring someone whom others with more experience want to offer. Perhaps you have someone who hasn’t followed your process, either in the interview or in the reporting during the IRCM. You might choose to ignore that input.
If your team all recommend not hiring, but you disagree, we’d recommend you not hire the candidate. Otherwise, it will come to be seen that your vote outranks all the others combined, and all but the most professional and experienced teams are likely to be less diligent in their support of your process.
The decision model we recommend is off-putting to managers who have never used the Effective Hiring Process before. Typically, input after interviews is not required to be structured. It may not be timely. Different interviewers notice different things (because they asked different things, based on differing concepts of the role and different levels of training).
We have found that the divergence and lack of structure most managers have previously experienced will almost completely disappear if you follow the Manager Tools Effective Hiring Process. Trust the process. If, after everyone reports their recommendations and support, you’re uncertain what to do, thank everyone for their input and adjourn to ponder your decision.
Because ultimately it is your decision.
At this point, it’s usually time to make an offer decision. You make an offer decision even if there are more candidates to interview. The reason for that is you can’t be certain that the other candidates will come in. Also, remember that this process compares candidates to the hiring standard, not to each other.
If you do have other candidates to take through the final interview day, and your current candidate warrants an offer, you simply delay making the offer to the candidate at this point. Depending on how long it is until you get to the other candidates, you’ll want to stay in touch with the candidate until you’ve made a final decision.
This brings up a special note about the hiring manager’s interview with each candidate. It happens last, so you (the hiring manager) have the additional responsibility of telling each candidate what the process is going forward. We encourage you to share how you capture results in the IRCM. Tell them that you will be in touch on a regular basis (usually every three days) until a final decision is made.
If after your first final interviewing day you decide that your candidate meets your standard, you could still choose to make an offer to your first candidate without seeing the others.
This is a hard concept for many managers. Usually that’s because we’re used to the idea of comparative interviewing, and waiting to see everyone and then “choosing the best.” But that’s also usually because we don’t set clear standards for hiring and compare candidates to that standard.
You will find that comparing candidates to a prepared standard makes hiring much better and much harder. That means that when you find someone who meets the standard, you’ll want to make an offer to the person even if someone better might come along.