After seeing so many failures from the interview process, I started having doubt on it, seriously. When I said failure I was refering to the cases like candidates who got hired did not manage to show expected performance or candidates who failed to get recruited are getting huge successes in other companies.
I always believe that there must be a better approach to evaluate job candidates, and here it comes.
We can still do a very basic and short interview with the job applicant, maybe 15 minutes or so asking simple questions like "We're building on Microsoft platform, do you feel like going into Microsoft platform?", "We're doing banking solution, do you like doing that?" and of course the last question to ask will be "Do you want to give it a try?" During the conversation we'll be basically just observing the general attitudes of the person, things like whether the person talk dirty words, whether he has basic manner and things like that. Never judge further than that. Make sure that the interviewer has the authority to make recruitment decision, no waiting time, no further discussion with management. Everything simply just has to be quick and precise.
If the applicant agreed that he or she would like to try further and you also felt nothing wrong with that person, right away offer a so called "one-week job" with reasonable amouunt of money, like a few hundred dollars. Some rules have to be practiced as compulsary for this one-week employment:
- Working days start from Monday to Friday, it has to be Monday to Friday, not Tuesday to next Tuesday, and the week must not consist of any holiday. Give the chance of experiencing the usual flow of working atmosphere and environment.
- Treat the person exactly like a permanent employee. Give parking season pass and door access card, assign email address, a permanent desk and so on and so forth.
- Assign shortest possible tasks regardless the nature of the tasks. It can be design task, programming task, testing task or even network administration task.
- If there is meeting in the week, invite the person in like you invite other participants.
The objective of the working week is, allowing the person working like a permanent staff, so that both parties can evaluate more and decide whether to continue.
If the person perform extraordinarily well and make you think that he can do so well just because he knows this is just an assessment period, at least you know this person can perform when he gives his best. Anyway, how to make employees give the best is the question that make the employers and managers cracking their head everyday. If the person can't perform up to your expectation, you lost the money (compare the figure with the pay of 3 months probation period if you think the risk of this approach is extremely high).
With this approach, not only you as the recruiter can assess the candidate in a more accurate way. It also allows the candidate to enjoy the working culture of the company and you will no longer receive resignation letter with the statements like "I did not know I have to work long hours almost everyday..."
