The Right Way to Hire

by Edward Poll, J.D., M.B.A., CMC

More than ever, good hiring practices are a key element in building successful professional service businesses like law firms. It's been estimated that each employee turnover costs an organization anywhere from three months to a year in salary, depending on the position. Obviously, hiring correctly is important. The following three critical phases or steps of the hiring process were outlined to me in a recent interview with Bruce Barge, Senior Vice President of Aon Consulting.

Identifying Job Requirements

Employers need to take the time to think about what the requirements for the job are. You want to determine what will differentiate a person who will be really good at the task from someone who will probably not succeed. Ask yourself: "What kind of knowledge am I looking for? What sort of skills? What kind of behaviors do I need to see?" For example, if you are a transaction attorney who wants to bring a strong litigator into the firm, it may be irrelevant whether the litigator has business development skills ("finder"). In this example, you want a lawyer who is expert in the litigation process and can take care of the existing clients ("grinder").

Your list of job requirements will be the basis for the next two steps. Setting Up a Screening Funnel If you have a large number of resumes coming in to a firm, you need to set up a "screening funnel" to manage all the applications. The goal is to take the many candidates coming in at the top end of the screening process and gradually narrow them down so that by the time you get to the bottom of the funnel, you're dealing with only the two or three most qualified ones. At the top of the funnel, use a "resume screen" to weed out people who are obviously not qualified or who you know aren't going to make the final cut. You can set up a process very quickly for rating a resume based on the job requirements you've already set up.

At the next level, you can try a "telephone pre-screen" where you use a short checklist that takes no more than five to ten minutes to go over with an applicant to make sure he or she is in the right salary range, that they have the right technical qualifications and that they have the right attitude.

An optional final screen, helpful if you can whittle the number of applicants down to a reasonable size, is some sort of testing. One approach is a general ability test where if, for example, you're looking for secretarial or office staff, you want to evaluate the candidates' word-processing skills, including words-per-minute, error-rate, etc. If you're looking for a mid-range professional, you could suggest a hypothetical client relations scenario and ask them to write a description of how they would respond. This approach assesses the candidate's ability to interact effectively with clients and/or to manage staff.

Using Interviews

The structured interview is the mainstay of the hiring process. The goal is to acquire a more in-depth understanding of the best-remaining candidates and really choose someone who is going to be with you and productive for the long term. The problem is, interviewing is not a very effective screening tool as it is commonly applied. And that's because most employers do what's called an "unstructured interview." That is, they sit down and just throw questions at the candidate off the top of their heads. The evidence shows that the prediction of success from this type of interview is almost zero. It just doesn't work!

There are a number of things that can be done to make interviewing an effective hiring tool. First, remember to make the interview job related. If you've identified the job requirement areas discussed earlier, now is the time to use them.

Put your interview questions into two categories: the "can-dos" and the "will-dos." The can-dos relate to the knowledge areas that a person needs to have. "Are you familiar with the laws in a given area?" "Do you have the following word-processing skills?"

Then you link the "can-dos" with the "will-dos." These are more behavioral-type questions such as: Are they going to show up for work on time? Are they going to treat clients well? Are they going to interact effectively with co-workers? The way to get at these answers is to ask questions to elicit "situational judgment." That is, you give a person a hypothetical situation-hopefully one drawn directly from the job setting-and ask, "How would you handle this?" This type of question can be very effective because it really gets at how a person might perform for you. Finally, there are three common mistakes that people make in interviewing. First, many interviewers talk too much during the interview. Sometimes they want to rescue an uncomfortable candidate by giving them the answer or by talking about their firm. Ask your questions then get out of the way and let the interviewee talk.

The second interviewing mistake is to ask very general and vague questions. "What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses?" These questions produce very little of value, and it's easy for the interviewee to have a stock answer ready.

The third interview mistake is asking questions that are illegal. As a general rule of thumb, these are questions that have no obvious reference to the specific job performance or that would be in violation of one of the employment laws. Without going into detail, you can't ask someone, for example, how many children they have or what their marital status is or if they've been disabled in the past.

There really is a right and a wrong way to hire staff and attorneys. The wrong way will get you into trouble, both in terms of wasting your time and money and even, perhaps, legally. A little forethought and planning will go a long way to make you more efficient in the hiring process and more effective, not just lucky, in selecting the right person the first time.