METHOD OF INTERVIEWING

In my last regular job, I was General Manager of a US multinational's European Software Development and Support center. There we adopted a two-stage approach to interviewing people. In the first stage I screened all the r sum s and did preliminary interviews. (Given that we were over 60 people, and that we were very choosy about whom we picked, you can see that this would have made for a hell of a lot of interviews in a year. The rationale was that I was the project leader and I needed to have a large say in who worked on my project.)

Companies all say that people are our most important resource, but how many of them see hiring and people- related issues as belonging to the personnel or human resources departments? People are how we get our projects done. That is why they are our most important resource.

The interviews were generally short (half an hour ), and really only asked three questions:

• What have you done?

• What do you want to do?

• What are you like?

A result of the same person doing all the screening is that over a period of time, such a screening process guarantees a consistent type or types of person getting through to the second interviews. It may result in people who would have been right, being excluded. On the other hand, if you've found a type or types that work for you, why change?

In the second interview, which could last 3 or 4 hours, the person got to meet as many of the other team members as possible: peers, subordinates , managers. We encouraged the person to walk around and talk to people, particularly to people doing a job similar to the one this person would be doing. The person did this in a totally uncensored way, that is, he could talk to whoever he chose and the person to whom he talked could say whatever he liked . There was no rehearsal or party line. We took the view that we had nothing to hide, that people needed to see us warts and all. We wanted people to feel what it would be like to work in our team, and that was why the interview lasted so long and the candidate saw so many people: it was the closest they could get to us short of actually coming to work there.