July/August 2010 Parking - 68


■ ■ ■

Business Tips and Tactics
don’t ask candidates, ‘Here’s the job, how are you going to do it?’ My approach is, walk the candidate down the hall to where they’re going to work and let them show you how they do the job.”

Reinvent Your Hiring for Better Hires: Three Steps to Better Hiring Decisions
What’s wrong with using traditional job interviews or even the newer behavioral techniques in your hiring process? Summed up in three words: They don’t work. “There’s absolutely no correlation between how well a candidate interviews and how well (he or) she performs on the job,” says Nick Corcodilos, author of the bestselling Ask the Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job. The traditional interview focuses on questions the job seeker can answer with straightforward replies, such as: Tell me about your last job. Why did you leave your last position? What were your primary responsibilities?

Reinvent How You Do Hiring
The better approach to hiring qualified people is what Corcodilos calls a hands-on, at-work meeting. “It’s a meeting between the employer who needs to get a job done and a worker who is fully prepared to do the job during the interview.” The new approach that Corcodilos advocates has three basic steps: 1. Prepare your candidates. “Rather than tell a candidate to come in and interview with them, talk to them on the phone and tell them, ‘We invite people to come in and show us how to do the job. There are no tricks here. We want you to show us what you can do.’” Give the candidate a list of the problems and challenges your company faces. “Encourage them to learn all they can about your business or organization and to come to the interview ready to show you how they work and prepared to present their strategies and solutions.” 2. Prepare yourself. “Structure a day’s work for the person you think you need to hire,” Corcodilos says. “Pick two or three tasks that are the main part of the job.” 3. Demonstration. “Give the candidate the tasks to do, live problems to solve,” Corcodilos says. “Let them demonstrate that they can do the job, and that they can ride a fast learning curve without falling off. Why hire anyone if they can’t show you they can do the work? “And if a candidate wants a job they haven’t done before, sit them down and ask them, ‘How would you do this job?’” he continues. “Assess their ability, their potential to do the work. What’s so complicated about that?”

The behavioral interview—also called a competencybased interview—seeks answers from applicants about how they behaved in past situations. Sample questions could include:
■

Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you resolve it? Tell me about a successful project you completed. What important steps did you take to make it successful? Describe work you’ve had to do under pressure.

■

One reason traditional and behavioral interviewing has become such a time-waster, Corcodilos says, is because applicants have become skillful and sophisticated in answering the questions. There are books and Websites that not only give examples of typical questions job seekers might face in interviews, but also coach them on the answers employers want to hear. “Managers and applicants approach interviewing as a task in itself, and there are clever questions and clever answers,” Corcodilos says. “Employers, surprisingly,

A New Approach for Every Job?
Does the hands-on, at-work meeting approach always identify the best applicants for every type of job? Probably not, acknowledges Nick Corcodilos, a headhunter who’s been advocating this technique for 15 years. “But from an employer’s standpoint, it works in most areas and fields,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of managers tell me they've shifted over to using this approach.”

And it's fair game for job seekers and employers alike, notes Corcodilos, who offers this example of how one savvy applicant successfully used the approach: ”This guy worked in a lab in a hospital. He told me that when he applied for the job, he didn’t get hired. He called

the manager up and told him he’d like five minutes with him. So, he thought of three specific suggestions that, if they hired him, how it would boost productivity by five percent. He got the five minutes and he showed them how his suggestions would change the process. And he got hired.”

National Parking Association PARKING July/August 2010

July/August 2010 Parking

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of July/August 2010 Parking