Are you underestimating the importance of a well-executed interview process? JR Keller, associate professor of human resource studies at the Cornell ILR School, returns to the Cornell Keynotes podcast to deliver five essential tips for crafting better interviews that lead to more effective hiring.
The performance of a company is linked to the quality of its employees. However, a faulty interview process can unbalance the equation for success in frequently undetected ways. In this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast from eCornell, JR Keller, associate professor of human resource studies at the Cornell ILR School, joins host Chris Wofford to explore five ways to create a better experience for candidates and interviewers:
Additional topics in this episode include:
Did you enjoy this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast? Watch the full Keynote.
Check out a previous episode with JR Keller about hiring internally: How to Mobilize Your Internal Top Talent.
Learn more in eCornell’s online human resources programs, including the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Building a Diverse Workforce certificate authored by JR Keller.
Chris Wofford: On today's episode, we are bringing you five essential tips for conducting a successful job interview with Professor J. R. Keller from Cornell's ILR School. Who among us has formal training on how to actually run an interview? Turns out, not too many of us. That's why this episode is so critical. You're going to learn how to reduce anxiety among all parties, make better use of everyone's time, develop and prepare quality targeted prompts and questions, ensure consistency across interviews and your entire hiring process. And most importantly, you'll learn how to develop an evaluation plan that works for everybody and gets real results. So be sure to check out the episode notes for the details on JR Keller's diversity, equity, and inclusion online Cornell Certificate Program.
Chris Wofford: Here's my conversation with J. R. Keller. So JR, let's set the table a little bit. Not everyone is familiar with your work.
JR Keller: Sure.
Chris Wofford: You work at Cornell's ILR school. You've been researching and working with companies. To understand the way they do business, this is human resource stuff, generally speaking. And you also kind of study very closely how organizations do hiring so tell me a little bit about your work. You do some research in addition to um, some consultation kind of work with a lot of the organizations that you work with at Cornell.
JR Keller: Yeah. Like you said, I've spent the past decade and a half really studying hiring in one way or another. I think it's the most exciting thing. To study in part because it has such important implications for organizations and workers, right? If you make a good hire, it's gonna be great for the organization, and it's gonna be great for the individual who moves into a job where they're going to be able to succeed.
JR Keller: And I've been able to supplement the research or the more sort of technical data driven research with all sorts of conversations with companies through our Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at the ILR School, and also through new work as the Associate Director of Research at ILR Wide, which is a new institute, right, really focused on improving inclusion, diversity, and education in workplaces.
Chris Wofford: So, JR, I mean, is it fair to say that most people aren't good at interviewing? You know, very few of us have had formal training. Is that the case?
JR Keller: It is absolutely the case. Yeah. Right? I could say declaratively here, right off the top, that most people are not good at interviewing. But there are reasons that this is the case. Right? Uh, well, the first is what you just mentioned is that most people don't get formal training on how to do interviews, right?
JR Keller: Even that at the best organizations, right? And I am like an HR cheerleader, right? The best talent acquisition organizations. Most of what they'll do, right? Is they will do an excellent job preparing questions for you as a manager interviewing candidates. Ideally giving you a rubric on how to evaluate candidates, maybe having some tips on a website, but very few organizations actually pull individuals who are going to conduct interviews into a classroom or a Zoom meeting and say, here's the whole aspect of the interview process to create a great candidate experience, to ask really good questions, to engage in constructive dialogue and to evaluate candidates.
JR Keller: And so just nobody gets it. And I think part of the idea is that we simply say, listen, if you aced your interview. That means you should probably be a good interviewer yourself.
Chris Wofford: That's right. Or you're a manager of people. You know, you figure it out.
JR Keller: The other is that we often do this really infrequently. Some of you out there might hire hundreds of people a year. I think more of you are in a position where I am, where I may not even be directly involved in making particular hiring decisions, but I get asked to interview our faculty candidates when they come in. But we do that once a year and I maybe interview four or five candidates.
JR Keller: And so I'm not really getting consistent feedback or practice as I go along. And so it's something that's much harder to get good at, right. Without. Constant practice and feedback.
Chris Wofford: Can you tell me about this MIT Sloan program study? Oh, there's some of the findings in here. I think this is fascinating.
JR Keller: So there's this great study that a group of researchers published in October, 2020 and the MIT Sloan management review. And it was this question of like, do you know who your best interviewers are and how much better are they than the other interviewers in your organization? Right. And I want to share a couple of data on this is that they looked at what they really cared about, a bunch of different metrics, but the big one was the good hire rate, which is this idea of what percentage of the individuals that got hired after interviewing with that candidate did well in their job.
JR Keller: Right. So just to find good in general, it turns out that the worst interviewers, right, only 33 percent of the candidates that they recommended did well in their job. It's pretty low. One third. Pretty low. One, only one third. Yep. Average interviewers were at 39%, But the best interviewers, you're probably expecting a huge number.
JR Keller: It's only 44 percent , had a sort of a success rate in their hiring. And so this is the best interviewers in a company where these managers were interviewing lots of candidates all the time, still only got it right 44 percent of the time.
Chris Wofford: Lots of reasons. We'll go through those tips. Let's open with tip number one. Reducing anxiety. Interviews can be tense. They can be uncomfortable, sometimes for both the interviewer, the interviewee. The air can be really thick in that room. Right. So, how do people learn to conduct interviews? You talked about, perhaps there could be a shortcoming in HR training for this kind of thing. What can we learn about how to do interviews and do them better?
JR Keller: Part of it is just, ideally if you have a chance to do that more frequently, the nerves kind of, you get used to having this conversation. Part of the reason that it's nerve wracking from a manager perspective, right? Is that it's not a typical work, workday workplace conversation, right?
JR Keller: It's something where all of a sudden I am, right, in the position where I have to evaluate somebody, right? And think about, you know, I think sometimes we think about the consequences of that is, I'm sitting interviewing somebody, and my feelings about how I evaluate that candidate impact, maybe if they're going to get that job, what their career is going to look like, are they going to be able to pay their mortgage?
JR Keller: I mean, you can spiral, right, in your head, and you feel like, I am not good enough, right, to be responsible for this level of a decision. So there's that part, right, sort of reducing our own anxiety. But the big piece that, that we could do to be a better interviewer is to reduce anxiety for the candidates, right?
JR Keller: So there's data out there that asks what makes people the most nervous, right? Like what situations, 29 percent of people in the most recent study I could find on this said that a job interview was the thing that made them the most nervous, right? More than a first date, more than going to a dentist and just behind public speaking in general.
Chris Wofford: Right. Well you cite some literature, the Hortzman quote, I think is a really useful one here. As far as surprising candidates uh, managing expectations for the interview itself.
JR Keller: Yes, exactly. Right. So part of the thing is you want to think about what do you want to get out of this interview? And I think the obvious answer is, we want to make a good hiring decision, right? But really closely related to that and something that I think we often gets overlooked is we want to deliver an exceptional candidate experience. If we make that experience for the candidate, well, it's also going to give us the information we need to help. Right? Make a better hiring decision. And one way is to reduce the anxiety because what the data shows is that if you reduce candidate anxiety, if they come into that interview prepared to speak confidently about their skills, knowledge, and abilities, they're going to perform better in the interview, right?
JR Keller: They're going to come away happier. Which means they're more likely to accept the job if you give them an offer. And even if you don't, they're more likely to reapply or tell their friends that they should apply. And most importantly, it's going to give you a better feel for their skills. Right. And we were talking beforehand about this really cool study that a group of researchers at North Carolina State conducted in collaboration with Microsoft, and they identified 48 computer science undergrad and graduate students, right, and divided them into two groups of technical interviews. One group followed the typical technical interview protocol, which is giving the candidate a problem to solve on a whiteboard while an interviewer sat in the room watching them do it. The other, were given the problem. The interviewer left the room, and then came back afterwards and talked through it, right? The candidates, who came up with better solutions, like more effective solutions and those that demanded fewer computing resources were by far those candidates who did not have the interviewer sitting in the room. And the conclusion from this study, which I think anybody listening to this will make sense, is what they were evaluating when somebody was in the room was really a candidate's ability to respond to pressure. When the interviewer was not in the room, it was, let's, we're actually getting a good sense of their technical skills and abilities, the nice thing is though, is that, there are different ways that we can do this for sort of more regular interviews, right? There's different strategies to reduce anxiety.
Chris Wofford: There's that old expression that you don't stand over Picasso's shoulder and tell him to paint.
JR Keller: Yes, exactly.
Chris Wofford: So what are some ways to reduce anxiety? As far as dispositionally or environment, what are some tips for reducing anxiety?
JR Keller: The big thing to note is this actually starts well before the interview, and it's all about clear communication ahead of time.
JR Keller: And so some of these things are basic and some might be a little more provocative. So some of the basic things are. Who is going to participate in the interview and sending people a list, right, of those people in advance so they can look them up on LinkedIn or look them up on the company website and have a chance to feel confident about the company and the people they're going to talk to.
JR Keller: You want to let them know how long the interview or interviews are going to be and what the schedule for the day is going to be, right? How and where will the interview take place? Is it going to be, you know, if it's on Zoom or some other platform, is it going to be recorded? Just so that nothing is a surprise.
JR Keller: Are there going to be one interview or is it going to be a panel interview? I think where companies are really going and what really encourages me is actually going a little step farther and saying, here are the types of questions we're going to ask on this interview, and here's why we do it this way.
JR Keller: Some companies are going so far as to give candidates at least a subset of the interview questions in advance so that they can help prepare their answers, right? And think about the examples they want to share to really showcase the skills and abilities they feel like they have to do the job.
Chris Wofford: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: There can't be any advantage to having any of the process be mysterious to a candidate. You know what I mean?
JR Keller: Exactly. Right. And you know, the same study I talked about with nervousness, the number one thing that people were nervous about going into interview was answering a difficult question. And I think really another way to think about that is they're really worried about gotcha questions. And there just shouldn't be gotcha questions in an interview.
Chris Wofford: You know, even you have a note here that small talk can be helpful. And maybe it's instructive in learning how somebody does small talk if it's part of the job or whatever.
JR Keller: Yeah. And I think part of it is, you know, small talks are really a hotly debated topic in academia and the research on interviews, because you can imagine that if you're talking about shared sports or shared upbringing, then they can introduce bias right into the process that might have you focus more on the things you like about what the candidate does outside of work than their ability to do the job.
JR Keller: But it's a, it's also a really necessary part of setting the stage and setting the environment because people want to be working with people they feel comfortable having conversations with. And so my advice on the small talk piece is really just plan your small talk ahead of time. What do you want to talk about and be consistent across candidates.
JR Keller: And then think about one way to do that is to think about. What are really interesting or cool things that our company does that we can talk about? What's some of the swag that we give out? You know, where was our last company meeting that we did? What's a cool strategy that's going on in the area of the business that might help fill the time before we jump into the sort of the more meat and potatoes.
Chris Wofford: And that enables the candidate also, right? So here are the people that are going to be involved in the interview. You get to check out their stuff, right? And it's funny, Mark, you worked with my colleague so and so, right? I don't know if that could be useful. Totally useful. Alright. Tip number two.
Chris Wofford: Valuing the candidates time. This is important to demonstrate. Why?
JR Keller: Yeah. I mean, this is going to be obvious to everybody, but you want to show people that you care about them as a candidate because that's how they're going to assume they're going to be treated as an employee. Right. I work with especially our undergrad students who are interviewing for internships and full time jobs seemingly around the clock.
JR Keller: And they talk all the time when we have class discussions on this about hiring managers showing up late. About not getting a schedule until they show up, even if they've taken the bus down to New York City to do an interview. And the reason these like things that might seem small to a manager, oh, I'm running five minutes late. I run five minutes late to every meeting for a candidate, right? The interview is an information gathering process to for them, right? They have a really small pool of information on which to decide and evaluate you as a company and a manager that they want to work for. And so those 30 minutes you have in the interview or the five minutes they run late. It can be a, you know, sort of a flashing red stop sign, right? I don't know if I should work here and they're gonna assume right that maybe they're not gonna care about my opinions. They're not gonna listen to my needs. Etc. And so they may be likely even if you like them as a candidate to turn you down or speak negatively, and so the real the key two tips here are pretty straightforward are don't be late and don't be distracted.
JR Keller: And uh, sort of sub tips on those. I know that for a lot of folks out there who do interviews, you can see an interview on your schedule and you almost like take a deep breath. Like I just did. And we're like, I can't believe I have to do another one of these because I have 19 other things.
Chris Wofford: In one minute.
JR Keller: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so to really get in the right head space, to make sure that you're on time and giving candidates the sort of time and respect they deserve, if you have a 30 minute interview that starts at 1 o'clock, block your calendar starting at 12:45. Right? So make sure you have time to prep, time to read through your questions, time to look at their resume. You know, again, this is where I hear students say, I was on a Zoom call with somebody and I saw them holding up my resume like they'd seen it for the very first time. That's not really the impression that you want to give to candidates.
Chris Wofford: Right? And you do take a reputational hit. If it becomes the way that you do interviews, you know what I mean? Word gets around. Let's be honest.
JR Keller: It totally does.
Chris Wofford: The world's always as smaller than you think it is.
JR Keller: Yes.
Chris Wofford: Tip number three. Quality prompts and questions targeted questions.
JR Keller: Yeah. So this is probably the biggest set of questions that I get um, about like what makes for a good question. It's hard to say like, here are the 10 perfect questions because what makes a good question for one job, right?
JR Keller: Maybe different from what makes a good question for another job or another company, but they do all share one big common characteristic is that a good question should help you to evaluate a particular set of knowledge, particular set of skills, ability, or experience that will predict performance in the job that you are hiring for.
JR Keller: That's sort of the guiding light. And one way to think about that is through putting together a three step question. So you mentioned Mark Hortzman, who's wrote one of my favorite books on hiring called the effective hiring manager and when I teach this, I teach this three step process on developing an effective interview question.
JR Keller: I'm gonna tell you all these and I'll give you an example, putting them all together.
Chris Wofford: Go for it.
JR Keller: All right. So the first one is the helpful lead in. So you start the question by saying something like in this job, you're frequently going to have to do X, Y, or Z, whatever behavior that might be. And that's really important because it's giving people a realistic job preview. Here's what you're actually going to do in this job. It's clear about what I'm looking for as a manager and it has face validity, right? So I actually understand why you're asking me this question because I realize it has to do with the job. You're going to try to evaluate me for the other is sort of the typical open ended question, right?
JR Keller: That allows room. So you don't want a yes or no answer. You want to say, tell me about a time when, or give me an example of. And then you pair that with the behavior you really care about, right? So something very specific, which might be like persuaded a client to purchase a new good or service, right? So the idea is you pull all that together and you could say, you know, at Keller Corporation, we sell this main software suite, but we're frequently innovating and adding add-ons that we have to sell to our existing clients.
JR Keller: Tell me about a time when you've persuaded a client to purchase a new product or service. Right, you can see from a candidate perspective, it's really clear why I'm asking that question. I can tailor my examples to that. It also allows you as the manager then to ask follow up questions related to this.
Chris Wofford: "Tell me about a time" feels really high stakes. In fact it, it elicits a little bit of anxiety even within me. So you should probably have some ready to go.
JR Keller: You should have some ready to go.
Chris Wofford: As an interviewee.
JR Keller: As an interviewee for sure. Yes. Right? You can expect this is sort of behavioral based interview question, but the big thing for a manager, right?
JR Keller: As you're thinking about what questions you want to ask, if you can't think of a helpful lead in, if you can't say something like at this company we frequently do this, right? Or in this job you're frequently going to do that, then it's probably not a question you want to ask because you're evaluating some knowledge, skill or ability that's tangentially related to the job.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, exactly. We're gonna we're continuing with quality questions and we're gonna hit the flip side. Okay. Uh, Which questions to avoid? You must have the master list of terrible interview questions that you should avoid at all costs. Yeah. Give us some examples.
JR Keller: Yeah, we can do a comedy podcast on bad interview questions. I'm sure everybody who is listening or watching this can come up with at least one bad interview question they've got.
Chris Wofford: We've probably all asked them or had to answer them. Alright, so compliance, illegality, legality is the first.
JR Keller: Yeah, so, you know, we could go forever on this, but there are clearly illegal questions that you should avoid. You could certainly Google these, you could talk to your HR department about this, but questions about religion, marital status, things like that, those are blanket, off the table, can't be asked, can't consider those factors in a hiring decision. Okay, so that's sort of cut and dry. Go to HR for that. Go to HR for that.
JR Keller: But then we can all think about, these are what I think of as lazy questions. Hopefully not everybody disagrees with me, but questions that everybody's gotten at some point or another. One of these is like, what's your greatest weakness?
Chris Wofford: I care too much.
JR Keller: Okay. Well, this is the thing.
Chris Wofford: I never say no.
JR Keller: This is the thing about that question is,
Chris Wofford: What is it?
JR Keller: Everybody knows that it's coming. There are, there's probably 75 LinkedIn posts that say, here's how to construct an answer for this. And so there's a formula. It's, I have a weakness that's only tangentially related to this job, but I've already been working on it in this really cool way. And so it's not actually going to give you right. Any insight into helping the kids, a canned response, genuine insight. So basically all you're evaluating is did somebody really prepare well for this interview? The other is this question of like, where do you want to be in five years?
Chris Wofford: I asked you before the show, why was that such a terrible question? I thought, I don't know. Yeah. You tell me.
JR Keller: Who the heck knows where they want to be in five years, let alone one year? You know, part of this is if you're thinking about in your organization, the job somebody might want to have probably aren't going to be there in five years. Right? So you can think more, you can't ask a version of this question that's useful.
JR Keller: Because you might want to get at, what skills or abilities does somebody want to develop over time? What experiences haven't they had that they want to get? So it could be, what are you looking forward to learning, right? If you were to hire for this job, what would you really like to learn or how would you like to stretch yourself over the next year or two? That's a very, that's a much more effective way of asking that question.
Chris Wofford: What about, why do you find this job attractive? Are you applying to this?
JR Keller: That is, no, that is a great question. You should ask that in some way or another. And if candidates can't answer that, they're not a good candidate for that job.
Chris Wofford: Perfect. I'm glad I asked. Brain teasers. I haven't bumped into too many of these, but you have.
JR Keller: Oh man. So, you know, I spent, before I got into academia, I was a career counselor for a little over four years. So I spent a bunch of time helping candidates prepare for questions, but also working with hiring managers who were coming in to interview students.
JR Keller: And I'll just give you an example of this that I'll just never forget. There was a partner at a regional accounting firm that hired a ton of accounting grads from the program I helped to advise. And he insisted on personally interviewing every finalist candidate. These are like sort of outgoing college seniors. And he asked every student, if you were part of a hamburger, what part would you be?
Chris Wofford: I was getting ready to say the pickles, but you said no go.
JR Keller: So I love asking that. There's so many good answers, right? I want to be the special sauce. Cause I add some flavor. I want to be the, want to be the tomato because well, whatever.
JR Keller: Right. But yeah, I want to be the bun because I hold it all together. But he, if you didn't say the meat cause you're not a hamburger without the meat, he wouldn't hire them. Great. But there was that question didn't predict performance in that job at all. And back when I was originally interviewing coming out of college Google had really just sort of landed on the map and they were really the company that sort of made brain teasers popular.
JR Keller: Laszlo Bock, who was the senior vice president for people at Google, for a long period of time, wrote about this in his book that he went back and analyze the data on these brain teasers. And I just want to read you this quote. His conclusion was brain teasers are a complete waste of time. They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart. And then I have a friend at the Bowling Green state university, Scott Highhouse, who does this amazing work studying the interview process and he found that the only thing correlated with brain teasers was the level of narcissism and sadism among the managers asking those questions. Yeah. So don't ask those. You're not going to be perceived well, and they're not going to give you any great information.
Chris Wofford: Thank you, JR and our friends at Bowling Green.
Chris Wofford: Tip number four, consistency. Why is it important to ensure consistency? Like in your approach style, the actual questions that you're going to ask uh, a stable of candidates. You know, obviously for fairness, equity, right, that kind of thing but not everybody's the same, right? Yeah. So can you go into the difference in an interview with external versus internal candidates? I don't know.
JR Keller: Sure. Where we know the most in academia or 50 years of studying interviewing is that the best predictor of performance in the interview setting is what we call a structured interview.
JR Keller: And what a structured interview means is that, you have a list of questions that you're going to ask the candidate prepared in advance that those questions tied to knowledge, skills, and abilities related to the job, and that you ask all the candidates you interviewed for that job, the same set of questions, right?
JR Keller: We know that works. Lots of reasons managers don't like to do it. It feels boring. It feels like I'm, You know, I'm being told what to do. I have gut feeling for how to do it. But the reason that is so effective and so important, right, is because you are collecting job relevant information about each of the candidates you're interviewing so you can make apples to apples comparisons when it comes time to decide who you want to hire.
Chris Wofford: Right, because you can imagine, oh, candidate A really cracked us up and that was a lot of fun. Candidate B was all business. It's because you ask them different sets of questions.
JR Keller: Exactly. Now I want to note, right, that it doesn't mean that you have to be super robotic as a manager. We talked about before with these open ended questions that tell me about a time, you can do what we call sort of probing and steering, and you can ask follow up questions. You do want to get a sense of the unique attributes of each candidate. You also want to make sure that they can do the job. And so, the analogy that I like to use is, if you think about a set of interviews as driving along the highway, right? You spend most of your time in the center lane, but you can drift to the left or drift to the right, but you kind of want to come back.
JR Keller: What you don't want to do, is stay sort of along the highway for most candidates, and then go on an off ramp for another candidate. Because then when it comes time to sit down, we can't really compare them.
Chris Wofford: I had a question for you, which is it advisable at all? To play to individuals uh, you know, the perceived styles of talking, of interviewing, of just simply behaving. I'd ask you that, I wasn't sure about the question, but you had a really good answer.
JR Keller: No, I think it's a great, you know, part of what you're doing when you're interviewing candidates is you're also giving them a sense of the company and the people that they would work with. So what you don't want to do in the interview process is strip out the individual personality of the managers.
JR Keller: So, the key isn't that every manager has to act like a robot and ask the exact same question in the exact same tone and tell you you have two minutes for a response. If that's the approach you want to go, you can just use HireVue or some other pre-recorded video interviewing software. So the only thing you want to do is you want to let, you know, each individual manager make sure that when they're interviewing the set of candidates, they're asking similar questions in similar ways, right? So you can have variety across interviewers, but within the candidates, each candidate with each manager should have a pretty similar experience.
Chris Wofford: Good, very useful. All right, we're on to tip five. The evaluation plan. Key part. What do we need to think about? You know, the interviews have culminated. We've got a good set of candidate. What's the workable evaluation plan? How do you think about it? Because a lot of times it's done informally. Yeah, so I think
JR Keller: There are two, two real key things I think can help with this piece. One is, have an evaluation plan, specifically some sort of a rubric prepared ahead of time. You know, when you've interviewed somebody, what am I actually evaluating them on?
JR Keller: How am I going to score them? How am I going to have notes and data that's going to allow me to help compare candidates when it comes time to make a final decision. That's where HR can be a really valuable partner for that. Or you can work together as sort of an interview committee to develop that set of criteria.
JR Keller: The other thing is to do those ratings individually as soon as the interviews over, right? So this idea is, you know, we talked a little bit about before I said, book 15 minutes before the interview. So you're in the right headspace and you're not late. I'd also book 15 minutes after to sit down, write down examples, write down your takeaways, complete the rubric right away.
JR Keller: Also, before you've had a chance to talk to anybody else on your team that might have interviewed that candidate, so you're getting evaluations from everybody on the team, independent of sort of the water cooler gossip that's bound to happen later in the day.
Chris Wofford: So the individual hot take turns out is a very valuable thing that you should really lean into.
JR Keller: Yes, exactly. But then when you come together, we start sitting around a table, everybody spent time evaluating each candidate independently, they're less likely to be affected by somebody coming in and say, right, I interviewed Chris, he's absolutely amazing, I had a really great time, he'd be a good teammate.
JR Keller: We all might have had our different experiences and we don't want to and we also don't just want to talk about Chris, we want to talk about everybody else and we have the data to allow us to do that and have a more structured conversation.
Chris Wofford: I really think this is kind of a key point of emphasis where you recommend avoiding discussing candidates before the evaluation you know, like, not a word.
JR Keller: Yeah, it's really hard to do that in practice. So that's why it's so important to evaluate independently right after. But to the extent, you know, this is part of what we think about logistics overall with the candidate slate. The extent you can bring everybody in, right, on the same day or within the same week, so that you're gathering information and making quick decisions without sort of, evaluating one person one week, another person three weeks later, that becomes a lot more challenging, right?
JR Keller: You're going to have those conversations with other people.
Chris Wofford: I asked you before we started if recording interviews was a legit thing. Is this considered good form, good practice?
JR Keller: It's a really good question. The key is to be transparent with the candidate about what that's going to look like.
JR Keller: I think that one of the, one of the ways that we see interviews transforming, even sort of person to person interviews is right. Obviously a lot more of those are being done by video. So a lot of those are being done by Zoom or teams or sort of Webex, whatever system your company might use. But there's also vendors offering some really cool technologies.
JR Keller: So we have an alum, Benjamin Sasser, who founded this really cool company called BrightHire. And it's an online video interviewing. So, you know, we, you might interview me, but you know, we'd be. It'd be live, right? So not sort of pre-recorded questions, but it's a really cool software because it does two things, right?
JR Keller: If you interview me, it allows you to share snippets of that interview with other members of the team. So instead of me having to go through six rounds of interviews, maybe I go through two, but then the team can share data really clearly. The other is one of the cool things about some of these technologies is they give real time feedback to the, or I guess immediately after feedback to the interviewer.
JR Keller: So they will send out stats, right? Like you talk 60 percent of the time and the candidate only talked 40 percent of the time. We actually want that to be the opposite. You talked about sports for, you know, with all the male candidates and with none of the female candidates. These are really valuable insights to think about what we're doing, what we're doing well, that's working, what we're doing well, that's not so working and how individually and as an organization, we can improve how we interview candidates.
Chris Wofford: There are powerful AI assisted plugins and things like that, that we can use. And what else can you do?
JR Keller: There's lots of tools out there, but one of the things that really struck me about BrightHire that's really cool is the AI plugin in terms of sort of transcribing candidate responses so that, I can actually focus on you when we're having a conversation and not be worried about writing down furiously notes to remember later because the AI is doing that for me.
JR Keller: So little things like that are very cool.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. Good. I want to touch back on this hiring internal versus external candidates. As I mentioned, there's a companion podcast to this that we'll share with the viewers those who are digging my conversation here with JR. Definitely check that out.
Chris Wofford: But what do we need to think about? So internal versus external. Very different conversations.
JR Keller: I'm a huge advocate of internal hiring, right? It is great for motivating individuals. You often make better hiring decisions. Those individuals have lots of great information about how things work in the organization.
JR Keller: But still the failure rate for internal hiring hovers around 40 to 50%. So we make lots of bad internal hiring decisions. And part of that is because we often think that we can or should be less formal in our internal hiring processes. We don't want people to think that we don't value them. So we don't want them to put them through like a competitive, more formal process.
JR Keller: But it is really good for managers and employees to actually sit down and have a true interview for a job, because as a manager, knowing that you're going to have an interview means you actually have to think about the questions you want to ask, which means you have to think about what skills and abilities are actually needed in this job versus, I'm just going to fit this job around the candidate that I have in mind. And I think it also, right, it helps give the candidate a chance to ask questions about what's this job really going to be like? Do I want to work with this manager? Is this the next step for my career? So you're going to end up making matches that are better for the company and the individual and avoid bad choices when we just sort of plug the person that we think we know best into the job.
Chris Wofford: JR Keller, great advice. Thank you for the five essential tips for conducting job interviews successfully.
JR Keller: Yeah, you're welcome. It's super fun to talk about.
Chris Wofford: Happy birthday, partner.
JR Keller: Thank you.
Chris Wofford: See ya.
Chris Wofford: Thanks for listening to Cornell Keynotes. Check out the episode notes for information on JR Keller's online certificate programs to take your interviewing and hiring game to the next level. Thank you again, friends, and please subscribe to stay in touch.