Quick Tips for Improving your Interview Process

Good afternoon! Attached to this SHARE is an article I wrote on a quick and easy way to drastically improve your "round robin" interview process when bringing a candidate onsite to meet with your executive team. I would love to network and certainly appreciate any and all referrals. Thanks! Mike

About Jack Berlin

Mike Silverstein

Partner & Director of Healthcare IT

Direct Recruiters, Inc.

31300 Solon Road, Suite 4

Solon, Ohio 44139

(440) 996-0594 direct (440) 667-8334 mobile

msilverstein@directrecruiters.com

About Direct Recruiters - About Prizm Share

Interview candidate hired manager team topic information

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Good afternoon! Attached to this SHARE is an article I wrote on a quick and easy way to drastically improve your "round robin" interview process when bringing a candidate onsite to meet with your executive team. I would love to network and certainly appreciate any and all referrals. Thanks! Mike

About Jack Berlin

Mike Silverstein

Partner & Director of Healthcare IT

Direct Recruiters, Inc.

31300 Solon Road, Suite 4

Solon, Ohio 44139

(440) 996-0594 direct (440) 667-8334 mobile

msilverstein@directrecruiters.com

About Direct Recruiters - About Prizm Share

Interview candidate hired manager team topic information

document preview

<p>Quick Tips to Improving Your Round Robin  
Interview Process 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Mike Silverstein, Managing Partner  
& Director of Healthcare IT 
 
Bringing a candidate into your office for a â€œround robinâ€ interview and having your top Executives take 
time out of their day to interview that person is expensive, complicated and time consuming. Therefore, 
if you are going to do it, have a plan and make it worth it.  
Historically, Human Resources plans a back-to-back barrage of 45 minute â€œinterviewsâ€ and the 
â€œinterviewersâ€ are stuck trying to figure out in a very limited amount of time whether or not a candidate, 
that is likely not going to be working for them, has the skills, personality, experience etc. to step into a 
critical role in another part of the organization. As a result, the candidate is likely repeating the same 
surface level questions and giving the same surface level responses 45 minutes at a time, six times in a 
row. At the end of the day, the interview team is generally asked for their â€œthumbs up or thumbs downâ€ 
and maybe they are asked for a little bit of qualitative justification around their decision. Ultimately, the 
interview team probably learned very little additional, relevant information as each interview likely 
covered the same generic topics and information.  
I would offer the following as an alternative approach that will give your hiring manager much more usable 
information in making their decision and will give you a greater bang for your buck when pulling your key 
executives in to do a â€œround robinâ€: 
1) Have the hiring manager identify five to six areas/topics that are key to being successful on his or 
her team, i.e. technical acumen, organization, attention to detail, soft skills and ability to build 
relationships quickly, industry knowledge etc. 
2) Assign one of these topics to each member of the interview team (i.e. VP of Product Development 
to focus on the candidates â€œtechnical acumenâ€). 
3) Provide a handful of sub criteria for each topic (i.e. if youâ€™re interviewing a sales candidate and 
your VP of Product Development is focused on his â€œtechnical acumen,â€ you donâ€™t need to know if 
the candidate can write software code, rather, have they used a CRM in the past, are they able to 
talk credibly about technical topics that are important during the sales process such as â€œHL7 
interfaces,â€ â€œinteroperability,â€ â€œSaaS vs. client-serverâ€ etc.). 
4) Have each member of the hiring team focus almost exclusively on their respective topic and assign 
a 1-5 rating for each sub-criteria that is important to the role the candidate is interviewing for.  
5) If possible, immediately following the interview, have a brief â€œpow-wowâ€ with the hiring team to 
review their findings.  
This process will now allow your hiring manager to have more control and oversight over the interview 
process for their team. As a result, instead of having the same surface level information from all six 
interviews, you will now have in-depth information about six topics that are critical to success in the 
respective position. The hiring manager should now be armed with much more relevant information in 
regards to the candidateâ€™s ability to be successful in the position being hired for and he/she should be 
able to make a quicker, more educated decision.  
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