How to Hire Right fit for the organization ?

I asked of them How do you hire right fir for the organization?" over the course of talking to almost 500 leaders for my weekly "Corner Office" series. Their responses are often informative because they have mastered the best methods to help them get straight to the heart of who an applicant is and how he or she can fit in a team after years of interviewing countless job applicants. Via trial and error, learn the techniques these chief executives have built to help you move beyond the polished curriculum vitae, pre-screened references and prepared responses to attract more innovative and successful members for your team. And you can gain insight into what your interviewer is actually looking for in a candidate if you're on the other side of the job hunt.

Avoid the Standard Job Interview

Use these basic principles to avoid the common pitfalls of the interview. With some predictable choreography, a typical job interview is little more than a social call. A meeting in the conference room, a pristine resume and the standard questions: where do you want to be in five years' time? What do you see as your greatest failure? What are your weaknesses and strengths?

Add in some small talk, maybe there is something in common between the candidate and the interviewer, like an alma mater or an acquaintance from an earlier job, and that's mostly it. It seems fine to the applicant, and the references are checked out. So a bid is made, and fingers are crossed that it all works out.

And one month later, the new recruit meets a substantial deadline or begins to complain about the job. Cue the sinking feeling: You start questioning if it was a mistake to employ this guy.

There's a better route, of course. Here are three principles which can help you recruit the right individual:

1. Be creative: For common interview questions, every applicant will be prepared. Find new ways of really knowing how an individual thinks.
2. Be challenging: Put the candidate in environments where they are more likely to demonstrate their true selves.
3. Allow your employees to help: You are not the only one who is going to have this candidate to deal with. There is actually already a group of workers you trust who will have to deal with him or her every day.

Get Away From Your Desk

If you get them out from behind a desk and watch how they are behaving, you would have a much better sense of your candidate.

There are two main attributes to look for when you are sizing up career candidates:

• Is the person truly involved in the organization's work?
• Do they, regardless of their title, treat citizens as equals?

You'll get a better sense of their personality if you send them out of the workplace or meeting room and see how they communicate with others.

Take Them on a Tour

Stay in the building and show the company's candidates and maybe present them to some colleagues. Things to pay attention to:

• Do they ask questions about what everybody is doing and how things are working?
• Are they inquisitive?
• Do they treat with respect everyone they meet, and show interest in what they do?

For Patty Stonesifer, who now runs the Washington nonprofit Martha's Table, the tour is a crucial test for any work seeker.

"Ms Stonesifer, a former top Microsoft executive who also ran the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for years, said, "I can get a very good sense of whether I want to be working with someone when I walk them around the spot.”I'm going to stop and introduce them to half a dozen people, and see if it's just a handshake or if there are some interest and curiosity."

Share a Meal

For lunch or dinner, take a nominee out. Going to a restaurant will uncover all kinds of clues about someone. This is the most significant component of the interview process for many leaders.

The key is to track whether the applicant is considerate of others, an important attribute for good team players.

Stuff to pay attention to:

• Are they respectful to everyone who serves them?
• Do people look them in the eye (a token of respect)?
• Are they annoyed by problems or flustered?
• With smart questions, will they keep a conversation going?
• Are they barreling through the restaurant, or first letting others go?

During a meal, the candidate's personality comes out, offering answers to key tests for Ms Smith: "Will you connect with us?" Are you going to be part of the squad, or are you going to be one of these individual players who would like to get all the credit? Are you pretty good at assistants? ”

Throw Some Curveballs

Unusual questions are going to open up candidates and give insights into what makes them tick.

The Goal

Smart applicants will be prepared for all the normal questions of the interview and will try to find clever ways to turn any negative into positive, worried that any admission of weakness or vulnerability will count against them as a point. Typically, this tactic backfires with chief executives, as it makes a nominee look less truthful and trustworthy.

Many executives have created their own interview questions to better understand what an applicant is in order to get beyond the rehearsed responses.

And we're not talking about brain teaser questions like How many golf balls are you going to fit in an aeroplane?" Laszlo Bock, Google's former senior vice president of human operations, said that although the company once used those kinds of questions, it eventually concluded that they were a total waste of time. "They're not predicting anything said, Mr Bock.”They primarily serve to make the interviewer feel clever."

Here are some unusual questions concerning a nominee that will reveal a lot:

Interview questions to ask

WHAT IS YOUR NATURAL STRENGTH?

The natural strength of a person is not about their current title or what they have been studying in college. It is a special ability or skill that comes as easily as breathing for them but that others can find difficult. Other ways to pose this question are: If someone has any talent in the top 5 per cent of the planet, what is yours? Or what is your skill as a ninja?

WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL WOULD YOU BE? AND WHY?

This might strike you as dumb, but the answer can tell you a lot, especially when applicants explain why a certain animal was chosen. Try it out at the next dinner party if you want to try it before using it in a work interview. Ask enough people this question, and you're likely to hear some interesting answers and gain useful feedback that will tell you if they're right for the job. For instance, the chief executive who often asks this question says that if she hires anyone for sales, she likes to hear a predator as the answer, like a lion. A social animal could be the correct answer if someone is going to work in teams all the time. Why? What? Part of the answer will tell you a lot about their self-awareness level, too.

WHAT QUALITIES OF YOUR PARENTS DO YOU LIKE THE MOST?

Our parents are all affected by us, sometimes more than we'd like to admit. So it is a safe bet that a lot about the nominee will be exposed by the answers to this question. In their daily lives, you may even ask how these attributes come out one chief executive takes this issue a step further and asks people about their parents' qualities that they like the least.

WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST MISPERCEPTION PEOPLE HAVE ABOUT YOU?

The answers to this question will show the extent of the self-awareness of the candidates. Do they know, except in ways that might not be a true representation of which they are, how they come across others? This can also be a bit of a trick question because what really matters is how people view you. There is no such thing as misperception in a sense; perception is truth in this context. This question is also used by Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of Zappos.com."With this approach, here's what he's listening to: "I think it's a mixture of how self-aware people are and how frank they are. I think if someone is self-conscious, then they will still keep rising. I think it's harder for them to grow or adapt beyond how they already are if they're not self-aware.

Get a Second — and Third — Opinion

Talking about a candidate with other individuals will allow you to affirm your perceptions or prove you wrong.

The Goal

Even if you think you are the greatest judge of character, since we all have blind spots, you always take the time to get more opinions.

Brian Halligan, the chief executive of HubSpot, noted that Tom Brady, who was a quarterback for the New England Patriots during seven Super Bowl appearances and five championships, was only picked in the sixth round of the N.F.L. draft. He said, "I think that people overestimate their ability to pick."

Make Them Run the Gantlet

Ask a number of your colleagues to meet with them to get different opinions on applicants. They'll spot stuff no one else sees.

"Peter Miller, chief of OptiNose, a biopharmaceutical company, said Once we're done determining if anyone has the abilities we're looking for and has the expertise we're looking for, we do what we call running the gauntlet.

Mr Miller has work applicants communicating inside the organization with 15 to 20 individuals, and each has what he considers a "blackball vote" to veto any candidate's hiring. Ultimately, the individual you recruit can work with several individuals in your company, so they all have an interest in making sure that the individual is a successful employee.

Go Beyond References

It may take some time, but you can hopefully find a few people you know or your colleagues know who have interacted with the candidate with a little bit of internet sleuthing. In seeking references for an applicant inside your social network, LinkedIn can also be a helpful resource. Often do additional reference tests, not just the ones that an applicant gives. Press these individuals for an unvarnished opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of the applicant, how the candidate performs under stress, how he or she handles his or her peers, and everything else that matters to your company.

University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann also advises colleagues not to put too much focus on interviews. The sources, and what someone has done, are more important than what someone in an interview tells you. Well done is better than well said and good referencing is no replacement for it,' she says.

Push for Diversity

Hiring an innovative team starts with finding people who think differently.

For a variety of reasons, diversity matters. A critical one is that it offers multiple innovations, problem-solving and creative perspectives.

For Douglas Merrill, Zest Finance's chief executive, diversity matters not because it makes his business look amazing, but because it actually benefits his business. With so many industries facing transformation and businesses developing new strategy playbooks instead of adopting old ones, you need as many different viewpoints as possible to find the right solution.

Getting Past Implicit Bias

Hiring a diverse team involves pushing through the unconscious prejudices we all have the ones that can drive individuals to employ "mini-me" versions of themselves. Early on, eliminating implicit bias from the recruiting process begins and should be dealt with at every stage.

Things to consider:

• Does your job description restrict you? To help attract the best candidates, a simple web-tool, text, can help evaluate the language you use in work descriptions. Words like "ambitious" or "driven," in a job description can be seen by female applicants as too masculine.
• Are you casting enough large the net? It is important to have experience doing certain kinds of work, but often people with unique experiences can bring fresh eyes to the task at hand.
• Before you meet the candidates in person, hold an introductory phone interview. That way, initial impressions are more likely than their appearance to be based on the quality of their response.

The challenge of unconscious prejudice is recognized by Christopher Cabrera, chief executive of Exactly. He had to recruit eight team members earlier in his career. His manager, who was African-American, found out when he was halfway through the process that the first four hires were all white, 23-year-old males.

"Mr Cabrera said I was so ashamed because I had surely not done that on purpose. The lesson he learned was that what makes us happy is always only done by us.

'I recall [my boss] clearly saying to me How fascinating do you think your team meetings are going to be when you have 12 23-year-old white guys with the same background? Do you agree that this is really going to be a stimulating and rich learning environment? 'And I remember just thinking,' Man, it's nuts. Why do I want it? 'It stuck with me really.

The president of the Women's National Basketball Association, Lisa Borders, said that she focuses on a variety of skills.

"For the most part, I'm always looking for the opposite of what I am," she said. I think too many of us recruit people who look exactly like us, who have the same abilities we do to compliment us because of implicit bias. That's not at all a compliment. It is a copy. So I also look for a person who can complement the abilities I already have.

Assign Some Homework

See your candidates in action by giving them a small task to complete at home.

You're trying to get a sense of the answer to the question when you're interviewing someone, "I wonder what it would be like to work with this individual?" ”

But why not, instead of guessing, find out?

You would be willing to have them on as a freelancer or a consultant in the perfect world, but in a lot of situations, that's not true. However, you should give them some homework in order to see them in motion. Not only will you get a sense of their work, but rather than just applying for jobs, you will also find out how dedicated they are to working at your company. Moreover, writing samples will also give you a better understanding of how the person thinks and communicates.

"I often give the individual a real problem, whatever I'm wrestling with right now because that way you can learn a lot about a person," said Jane Park, Julep's chief executive. Are they going to be my partner and be able to see and execute on the strategic problem? Are they interested in it, involved in it and curious? ”

Put Pen to Paper

To ask a candidate to answer in writing, some suggested questions:

• How do you expect to excel at work in the first 100 days?
• How can you in 500 words describe yourself?
• In the new position, write a proposal for a particular plan to be implemented.

I've found that when we're going through the hiring process, there are so many prejudices that we make or imagine that this person came from that school or they seem really polished, whatever the biases may be. But you get a much clearer picture of how they think and function when you make them put pen to paper, and compare it against a field of candidates,' said Kris Duggan, Better Works chief executive.

Don't Set a Deadline

Enable your applicants to set the deadline for your assigned homework. This enables you to assess their work ethic and how well their time is handled.

Mr Duggan asks applicants to set their own deadline and then tracks how well they do in relation to that very closely. We may measure their actions in one way: do they get it done on time, or are they making excuses because it's late? "Said he.

Trust Your Instincts

If you have doubts about a candidate, figure out why.

When you have gone through the whole process of interviewing, and followed most of the above recommendations, you have to make a decision. What so many managers have told me is that sometimes they have made the mistake of not listening to the reservations they had about the person they were interviewing.

"What I've found from all the interviews I've done in the last 10 years is that whatever nagging suspicion you have about their behaviour during the interview process will be magnified 10 times after you hire them," BetterWorks's Mr Duggan said.

In recruiting, this is always a tricky balance. You may feel some pressure to quickly fill the role-the job has to be finished, or you're worried that the slot may be withdrawn from you. So you may want to recruit one of the first individuals you encounter.

It is a roll of the dice at some point. Nobody has a flawless recruitment record. But it should help boost your chances by borrowing some of the tactics from all these chief executives.