When we compose an interview strategy, we first want to choose who's going to be part of that panel, or decide that with the hiring manager. Certainly it's going to be someone from HR. We generally always see the hiring manager, and then often times the second level manager. We then want to branch out and see whom else we need. Is it possibly a colleague, teammate? Maybe it's a supervisory position and we want to get the team that's going to be reporting to him or her to be able to weigh in and to be part of that interview process as well. Additionally, we want to be able to consider diversity in this, and we want to make sure that we diversify the interview panel. We went over the diversification and inclusion process within recruitment a lot in the last module. So we want to be sure that we carry that through this entire process. Finally, we come down to what does that schedule look like? For me, I don't ever subscribe to one-size-fits-all. I think each hiring manager has what he or she likes or prefers, and I really just go with that process. Specifically right now there's one hiring manager that I'm working with, and he always wants me to take that initial phone screen, assess them out, see if I think that they would be a good fit, sometimes there's relocation we have to discuss. Then if that's successful, we'll move them forward to another meeting with him, one-on-one again, and then after that, we would take them to a panel interview. I have others that operate on the premise where the hiring manager wants to be the first interview. If that goes successfully, then we just take them directly into a panel. So it's really just going to depend on how the hiring manager wants to proceed, or what works best for them. Certainly right now, or as we've evolved with COVID, those in-person interviews don't really exist. I do know of multiple companies which are still having them, but I would say that the bulk of interviewing has moved to Zoom or similar platforms and that video interview. One of the things that I definitely wanted to bring up was how we handle that when technology fails. Prior to COVID, we had an interview for an MSL, which is a medical science liaison. That is a position that is always remote. They travel a lot for their job, and they go out to different conventions, conferences, meet with doctors' offices, just different all over. They're always on the go. So that position is remote and all of those interviews were set with Zoom. We had a situation where she was actually in Europe, and we needed to have those interviews because they were scheduled with a lot of our bigwigs, CEO, COO, so on and so forth, and the technology aspect of it didn't work. So we had to come up with plan B and we had to come up with it quickly. What we did was we switched to the phone call aspect until we could get IT to fix whatever was going on with the Zoom platform. At this point in time, because we've become so much more savvy with it due to a lot of remote working, I think we could probably better, more quickly manage a situation like that, but it's certainly something to think of when you have a lot of folks on the schedule, or if you were hiring an executive level position and you had maybe board members or similar. You just want to have some backup plan in the event that something like that happens. Then the final bullet here is group or panel interviews. There are some cases where I actually use both. We are going to have a panel interview where you're just going to switch from person A to person B, so and so forth every half hour. Then we have some group interviews where maybe we pull together the entire team from one department, say four or five people to interview at one time. This is something that you can use and, or, or even sometimes together. When we talk about interview styles, one of those styles that we have to mention is behavioral. For behavioral, we're relying upon a past experience. So tell me about a past experience and what the outcome was of that. My favorite question, I ask it in every interview, is tell me about a time you missed a deadline. How did you handle that, and what was the outcome? Additionally, it gives me another point because if I have somebody that tells me they've never missed a deadline, I know they're not telling me the truth. Even if it hasn't been within a working capacity, certainly through school or something else, maybe a hobby, whatever it is. When we talk about situational, what we're talking about is how you handle a hypothetical situation. This would be if you were maybe in a customer service or interviewing for a customer service position, simply asking how someone would handle a difficult customer or maybe a difficult coworker. But a hypothetical situation on how you would handle something. When we talk about the sample project, this can be a couple different things and sometimes could possibly bleed into when we talk about applicant testing. But for that sample project, I have cases and a due interviews where part of that interview that we set aside, whether it's a half-day or full-day is for that individual to give a presentation. Currently you all know I work in biotech land, so within that, we have scientists that have to give presentations and that's a scientific presentation. Then for the position I was talking about just in the prior slide, we have MSL's and those folks that Medical Science Liaison, those folks have to be able to present to doctors and similar parties, so a presentation is actually part of their half-day or full-day interview schedule. Certainly it's possible to see a hybrid of all of these things together. It's not that one is right and one is wrong. These are just different varieties that do exist. But you certainly want to go in with a plan and you certainly want to train your interviewers. I've seen so many cases over my years where we have new managers or new employees and they've never been trained on those types of things, so they're just winging it. We want to avoid winging it and it's not that we need to feed them the questions to ask or similar, we want them to try to have an organic, natural conversation so they can get to finding out for themselves if this person is going to be a great fit. But we certainly need to be able to train them on the parameters involved and what we're looking for, or maybe at least level expectations. This also plays into diversity, so we want to level that playing field so all candidates have the same fairness. When I talk about organizational branding, I'm talking about HR, as well as that interfacing with the candidates. I'm going to tie this back to mission, vision, values. How do we do that? How do we live that? How do we explain that and explore that with our candidates? We have good versus bad interview questions. The good questions, these are going to be the questions that we covered on the last slide. Behavioral and situational perfectly fine. Whether we want to stick to one style of questions or whether we want to do a combination of both. This is great way to assess a candidate, so again that behavioral, those questions are going to rely on a past experience and how that was handled. Then for the situational, that's where we have a hypothetical situation. How would you handle X or how would you handle Y? When we get into bad questions, these are discriminatory. These could be based on race, age, family status, I know and it's still asked to this day that people sometimes start to ask questions on someone's family status. Oh well do you have kids? Oh, well do you have to take care of your kids? Do you have to transport your kids? Do you need flexible workings so that you can take care of your kids? Those are not appropriate questions to be asked. If the candidate volunteers information and says," You know what, I have to take my children to school or drop them off at day care or whatever that might be, would I be able to work flexible schedule to be able to accommodate that?" That is certainly okay. But it's not our space to prod and it's not our space to take it further. I have had an experience way back, where one of my senior officers was interviewing a candidate who had disclosed that she had an ongoing illness to which point he came back and said to me that he was worried about her candidacy because she had disclosed that. That is not appropriate and we are not to make a decision based on that. She's interviewing for the position because she's able to do it, because she wants to do it, because this is of interest to her and that's where we need to focus our energy. We did end up hiring her, and she's tremendous, tremendous person, tremendous worker. Those things sometimes, even on the candidate's side, when we volunteer that, even if that gets volunteered, I don't want it to get prodded any further. It's just not appropriate, it's not the place. I do feel that the most common place we see this is within people's family status, but I do know that it plays a role a lot as well within religion, so just be cognizant of that. That's why we want to go back. When I go back to those other slides when we talk about training your interviewers, this is why we want to train them. We want to get them to stick to these behavioral and situational questions, and get them away from these bad questions. For our interviewing timetable, we're going to see different things depending upon the HR department or the company, maybe the size of the company. If you're at a smaller company, you're really probably not going to see metrics and expectations. Obviously, they're going to be, "We want this person in today or yesterday," but you may not be held to strict metrics or strict timeline deliverables. Versus some larger organizations, or maybe staffing firms, where we are going to see those expectations, and your bonus and your payment is dependent upon you delivering in that timeline. That's just something to keep in mind. A nice middle of the road is in my past, we have calculated these metrics and we've kept track of these metrics. We opened the position on X, we posted it on Y, we started interviewing Z, and then we filled it over here on A. Whatever that might be, but it really gives you an overview and a nice screenshot, as far as how long it's taking you to fill these positions, and what's involved. When you have higher-level positions, generally, we're going to see this timetable stretch out a little bit more. When you have harder to find positions, maybe hiring a doctor, a nurse, or something like that that requires a very specific skill set or focus and therapeutic area, that's going to take longer. We want to really be sure that we have a candidate evaluation form out to that interview panel prior to any of those interviews happening. Maybe it's a form, maybe it's a method, maybe you've created your own, that's brilliant, but we definitely want to provide and train those interviewers prior to that first interviewing ever happening. We want to be able to provide clarity and direction, this is what gives us that fairness amongst the candidates, and it helps us achieve that diversity within our hiring process. All candidates were measured on these set of expectations, all candidates are ranged on this form according to this method. Maybe you're ranging the candidates that you interview from 1-5, or maybe you're giving them a letter grade. I've seen it a bunch of different ways. Again, I go back to I don't think one size fits all, but I definitely think if you have a standard template to be able to work with your hiring manager to maybe assess what's most important for the position you're hiring. It's going to help you, it's going to enable you find the best hire, and then it's also going to level that playing field so that you're not playing favorites in any way, shape, or form. Finally, we definitely want to have a follow-up meeting with the interviewers, and maybe it's just about collecting the forums, but I would still emphasize or try to go the direction of getting everybody together to talk about things. Sometimes what I've seen is that you've maybe found something that maybe doesn't sit right or bothers you a little bit, but when you got together in a Zoom Room or at some point again, when we can get into a conference room, if everybody has that sense, it comes to light, and it shines a totally different take. Versus if you were just emailing a form over, maybe you wouldn't have thought to include that. I've seen it in the past, where there's just this little thing where it's not quite 100 percent or something might be off, and if you just have that, maybe it's not a big deal, but when you get together and you see it amongst, say, eight or 10 panelists, that's a big deal.
