From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
I thought I had a pretty good strategy going into the interview with the candidate. But I am only one of five people on our interview team. It seems the other four weren’t prepared and came out of their interviews with completely different observations. One said the candidate reminded him of his college drinking buddy. Another was impressed with the candidate’s technical background, from the resume. I think this is a bad decision, but now I have to argue with the opinions of the rest of the interview team.

Response:
This is not unusual. Most interview teams are loosely banded together without any coherent approach. The good news, since you have an approach, you have the power of influence on the behavior of the rest of the team.

The trick is to start early. Get the interview team together to review the role description way before the job posting. The team can be very helpful crafting interview questions together, based on the role description. If you remember, my bias is 60 written prepared questions. If you have five people on your interview team, that’s barely more than 10 questions each, piece of cake.

The next step is a decision matrix with the decision criteria listed across the top and each candidate down the left side. Each member of the interview team should prepare the matrix after their candidate interviews and bring it to the debrief meeting. Now, the conversation is totally changed. It’s no longer opinion, but a true discussion of the facts uncovered during the interviews.
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