Additional hiring follow-through
by Miki SaxonA few days ago when I wrote Hiring follow-through I forgot to include an essential ingredient that both assures your new people that you value their input and enables you to improve your hiring process still more.You initiated a bonding process during the interviewing and offer stage, escalated it during your post acceptance actions and set the stage for it to swing into high gear on start day.
Normally a new employee spends much of the first day or two setting up her space, voicemail, email, etc. and filling out forms-insurance, IRS, and so on.
One form worth adding to the list is an interview evaluation form.
Handled correctly it will accomplish two major goals.
- Making her comfortable with the idea of critiquing peers and bosses at the beginning of her tenure creates a strong bond of trust and tells her that her feedback is important.
- Gathering the information while it’s still fresh from people who successfully navigated your hiring process offers a totally different perspective from that of those on the inside and is invaluable in improving and fine-tuning the process.
Here’s a sample form; you should tweak it for your own situation.
Interview Evaluation
In order to compete in today’s business climate, it’s critical that we’re able to hire the best people possible-people like you! As part of our continuing effort to improve our hiring process, we ask that you take a moment and fill out this form. Please be candid; if there is information that you feel is pertinent, but you’re not comfortable writing it down, we hope that you’ll discuss it privately with whichever manager you chose.
Name:____________________________________________________________
Position:__________________________________________________________
Manager:__________________________________________________________
Date of: Phone int. ____ First int.____ Second int.____Hired _____
We’d like your honest opinion of the following:
How was your phone interview; and
how can we improve it?
How was your in-person interview(s); and
how can we improve it/them?
Was the information about the position and its potential comprehensive and consistent among interviewers?
Was the information about our culture comprehensive and consistent?
How was your after-interview process; and
how can we improve it?
Additional comments, including any thoughts on making our hiring process better!
Use this evaluation with every hire, not just certain levels or positions. For example, you learn more when you find that an admin candidate was poorly treated in an unexpected way than when an exec is kept waiting a few minutes. Both are useful information, but the first may uncover attitudes that conflict with your culture and wouldn’t show up in the normal course of things.
