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Jack Berlin
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<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 “round robin†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 “interviews†and the “interviewers†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 “thumbs up or thumbs down†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 “round 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 “technical acumenâ€). 3) Provide a handful of sub criteria for each topic (i.e. if you’re interviewing a sales candidate and your VP of Product Development is focused on his “technical acumen,†you don’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 “HL7 interfaces,†“interoperability,†“SaaS vs. client-server†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 “pow-wow†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 candidate’s ability to be successful in the position being hired for and he/she should be able to make a quicker, more educated decision. </p>
