In today’s rapidly evolving job landscape, the interview process remains a crucial element in the hiring cycle. However, traditional interviews are often riddled with challenges, leading to mismatches between candidate performance and actual job capabilities.
In a recent HR Means Business podcast I had a conversation with Stephane Rivard, CEO of Hiring Branch, a company offering skills based hiring assessments, and our discussion centred on the need to overhaul the way we approach the interview process to enable a shift towards more practical evaluation methods.
We covered 4 key points:
- Shift Towards Work-Simulated Assessments: This represents a move away from traditional Q&A style interviews towards work-simulated assessments. This approach allows candidates to actively perform tasks related to the job they’re applying for, helping to provide a more accurate evaluation of their abilities. Leveraging AI to gauge how candidates express themselves, especially focusing on essential soft and robot-proof skills, is at the core of this framework for job success.
- Identification of ‘Soft’ Skills: ‘Soft’ skills – which I prefer to call ‘Robot-proof’ skills as soft implies they are easy to master when, in fact, they are quite hard to perfect – are increasingly recognised as pivotal for job success, especially in customer-facing roles. These skills encompass fluency, building rapport, active listening, empathy, and probing abilities, among others. Many organisations are beginning to prioritise these competencies, as they can have a significant impact on employee performance.
- Challenges with Traditional Interviews: Our conversation covered the limitations of conventional interviews, which too often rely on structured questions that fail to reveal the real person behind the candidate. Human biases, whether conscious or unconscious, significantly influence interview outcomes. Moreover, candidates can often provide misleading information during interviews, leading to a mismatch between their interview performance and actual job performance.
- Customisation and Bias Elimination: The approach advocated by Stephane Rivard in our chat seeks to eliminate biases by focusing solely on candidates’ skills and capabilities. By customising assessments to specific roles, businesses can delve deeper and evaluate candidates on higher-level skills, ensuring a better match for the job requirements.
Work-simulated assessments can be particularly significant as they are able to provide a more accurate overview of a candidate’s potential. This approach, utilising AI to measure crucial soft skills, can address the shortcomings of traditional interviews that often fail to uncover the real attributes of candidates.
Robot-proof (soft) skills such as fluency, empathy, active listening, and probing abilities are key components driving job success, especially in customer-facing roles. For these positions, conventional interviews usually prove less effective, often fall prey to human biases and inaccurate representations or explanations by candidates.
We also touched on the customisation of assessments based on specific job roles, which enables a deeper evaluation of the higher-level skills required. Elimination of biases is key to this so that evaluation is purely done candidates’ skill sets.
Overall, Stephane makes a strong case for needing a paradigm shift in the interview process. By incorporating work-simulated assessments, organisations can better identify candidates whose skills align with job requirements, leading to improved performance and reduced biases in the hiring process.
Here’s the podcast…hope you enjoy the conversation….
https://mervynn.podbean.com/e/rethinking-interviews/
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