Don't Underestimate The Importance Of The Employment Interview

A good employee can become a new profit center, they can drive sales, they can bring new skills to your business, they can help others to succeed, they can contribute to giving your business a much better reputation and they can raise morale.

By the same token, if you employ the wrong person, they can steal from you, destroy the morale of your existing staff, lose customers, refuse to use any initiative, argue and be uncooperative. Almost as bad is the unscrupulous employee may even sue you for "wrongful termination" (illegal termination), even though you were legally and morally right in letting them go.

Because of the potential for bad hires to negatively affect your business, it pays to learn as much as possible about practical interviewing techniques. Whilst there is a lot of information in resumes, just remember that 40% of them contain omissions and downright lies. In today's world it is necessary to have strategies and tactics to identify these people early in the hiring process.

We all know that it is important to recruit people because of their honesty, intelligence, skill, knowledge and people skills. Generally speaking, however, we are not too good at predicting future behavior. This is where we try and use our judgment to guess how each candidate will fit in with the existing staff. We try and predict how they will get on with our customers.

There is one area which is often overlooked in the interview and recruitment process. Unfortunately, it is very important human characteristic. This is the ability to learn. It's very rare that something comes along and can do all the tasks required without supervision or coaching.

The quality that you should seek in your candidates is "learnability." This is the ability of the employee to make changes, and take directions, to listen and adjust, to think and respond. Nothing is more frustrating than to have a member of staff who is in need of a greater level of skill and in spite of your best efforts, cannot perform.

Regrettably, there are some people in this world who just cannot learn no matter how hard you try to teach them. Some just don't have the mental horsepower to learn whilst others are "legends in their own mind" and feel that they don't need to learn anything more. Either way the outcome is the same and they make very poor employees. Because these people exist, it is very important to make sure that your process of recruitment identifies them clearly so that they can be weeded out.

Peter Mitchell is a business consultant who has helped many businesses to lift their labor productivity in the workplace at little or low cost. His practical guide The Key To Productivity should be on every manager's desk and used to install your productivity improvement program. To find out more go to www.thekeytoproductivity.com.