We provide competency-based behavioral interviewing training for interview teams including hiring managers, recruiters, and interviewers. We have been publishing articles for over 40 years to address the myriad of issues encountered in the process of hiring top talent.
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of 280 Articles Found
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Jan 2022
Hiring Successful Leaders for a Hybrid World
A hybrid environment creates a new set of leadership challenges. The lack of consistent access to the entire team makes it harder for leaders to assess performance, build teams, and inspire performance. Managers will have to adapt their leadership styles and find a balance between face-to-face and remote leadership to create an equitable and supportive workplace.
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Oct 2021
Are Bad Interviews Costing You Good Hires?
Given that competition for talent will remain high, to make successful new hires, organizations need to ensure that interviewers do more than just assess candidate qualifications. They also need to know how to assess candidate fit and potential, create a good candidate experience, and sell to candidates.
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Feb 2021
Conducting Effective Performance Reviews Virtually
Interview questions from our Effective Interviewing!® training can make the performance evaluation process more constructive and effective. And these questions are especially helpful for virtual performance reviews.
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May 2020
Virtual Interviews: The New Benchmark
The option of hiring virtually, rather than through typical in-person interviews, has graduated overnight from a technological convenience to the new norm. Companies that hope to succeed in a virtual setting must rapidly adopt new best practices.
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Feb 2020
Overcome Unconscious Bias in Job Interviews
By having the right interview techniques in place, you can overcome unconscious bias in hiring decisions and the workplace, and build an even more successful company.
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Sep 2019
Behavioral Interviewing Training Reinvented
Can a successful, but static business practice gradually lose its effectiveness? In the case of behavioral interview training, a technique that predicts-on-the-job performance far more accurately than other interview training methods, the answer is yes.
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Jun 2019
How to Interview Sales Candidates
Sales candidates often excel at selling themselves, but that doesn't mean they can successfully sell on behalf of your company. Competency-based behavioral interviewing is an important skill every sales manager should master to ensure they hire the right candidate.
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Mar 2019
Tech Hiring Fails Without Behavioral Assessment
Global giants like McDonald's and BMW once seemed invincible. But now, under increasing pressure to stay relevant and ward off competition in the digital age, legacy brands are looking to Silicon Valley for inspiration. As Atif Rafiq, McDonald's former chief technology officer, said in a recent interview, “We think, ‘How would Google do this? How would Amazon do this?’ ”
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Jan 2019
A Case for Attorney Interviewing Training
Behavioral interviewing training helps attorney interviewers interpret the “how and why” behind a candidate’s answers to their questions. This equips them to predict future performance in those selected to join the firm. Read more articles on the attorney hiring process at Interviewing Training for Lawyers.
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Nov 2018
Questioning Panel Interviews
Replacing the traditional panel interview with an effective team interview has a lot of advantages.
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Jul 2018
Fallacy of "Give Me an Example" Questions
If you want to get at the truth about a candidate – any candidate – we caution you against relying on “give me an example” questions.
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May 2018
Real Cost of Hiring Mistakes
Some costs of a bad hire are obvious, such as the time and personnel needed to recruit, interview, coach, mentor and develop a replacement. But hidden costs, which don't show up on your profit-and-loss statement, can be far more damaging in the long run.
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Mar 2018
The Flawed Interview Process
Graduate students are spending too much time learning how to take an interview but rarely learn how to conduct one. Look at the problems this presents once those students enter the workforce.
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Jan 2018
Building Relationships with Candidates
More and more organizations are building sustainable relationships with target customers. In this talent-scarce market, we think they should also build the same kind of relationships with candidates.
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Dec 2017
Competency-based Behavioral Interviewing Training
Competency-based behavioral interviewing training is based on the idea that candidates' past and present behavior is the best predictor of how they will behave in the future.
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Oct 2017
Early Social Competencies Lead to Success
A joint project of researchers at Duke and Penn State found that kids who showed specific social competency traits in kindergarten were four times more likely to graduate college and have a full-time job by age 25.
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Jun 2017
Google Research Validates Behavioral Interviewing
In a wide-ranging interview that appeared in The New York Times, Lazlo Bock, Google’s former Senior Vice President for People Operations, praised behavioral interviewing, panned brainteaser questions, and noted that academic accomplishments don't always translate into success.
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Mar 2017
How to Interview the Technical Candidate
Here are just three of the several approaches used by technical experts at our client companies to assess technical competence.
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Dec 2016
Effectively Interviewing New College Graduates
Hiring new college graduates requires some recalibrating of the interview process. Here are some questions to draw upon in your next interview.
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Sep 2016
Why Stress Interviews Don't Work
There is absolutely no evidence that the ability to deal with a stressful interview situation is an accurate predictor of the ability to deal with job stress. In fact, the opposite may be true.
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Apr 2016
A Tribute to Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
Bill Campbell, a person the media labeled as the most influential background player in Silicon Valley, passed away this month at the age of 75.
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Jan 2016
Competency Interviewing Narrows Skill Gap
Some argue there are currently plenty of qualified individuals in the workforce and that employers routinely overlook top candidates and artificially create a skills gap.
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Dec 2015
Sell the Job with Three Paychecks
Encourage employees to think twice about changing jobs to correct just one paycheck.
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Sep 2015
Pitfalls of Competencies in Behavioral Interviews
Selecting competencies as part of the hiring process can be a problem for hiring managers and interview teams who jump on the "competencies bandwagon" too quickly.
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Jun 2015
Increase Team Performance By 40%
If you don't think a single lazy or incompetent employee can damage an entire organization, think again. Research conducted at several major universities shows that adding just one "bad apple" to a group can drive down performance by 30 to 40 percent.
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Mar 2015
NCHRA:Does Behavior-based Interviewing Still Work?
Behavior-based interviewing that relies on give me an example questions is in jeopardy. A number of factors including ongoing talent shortage, increasing diversity, savvy candidates, and declining authenticity threaten the continued effectiveness of this form of interviewing.
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Jan 2015
Why Bizarre Interview Questions Go Viral
Brainteaser questions have little value in predicting future performance. In the long run, they may actually discourage top candidates from accepting an offer—the opposite of their intended purpose.
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Dec 2014
Training Magazine: Invented Lives
Do you ask job candidates to describe real situations they've faced and problems they've solved? Good idea. But what if the stories they'are telling are bogus?
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Oct 2014
SHRM: Unconscious Bias in the Hiring Process
After interviewing the interview expert Jim Kennedy, Michelle Martinez explores how to eliminate hidden interviewer bias and make better hiring decisions.
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Jul 2014
How Bad Interviews Impact Hiring Results
An interviewer can profoundly affect top candidates decisions to join or not to join a company.
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Mar 2014
Top Business Leaders Hire for Competencies
A growing number of top business leaders are endorsing hiring practices similar to our Effective Interviewing!® techniques, which emphasize behavioral qualities over conventional accomplishments.
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Dec 2013
Getting Beyond the Resume to Predict Success
Shift focus away from resumes and credentials and learn more about how and why a recent graduate excelled in their studies and relevant activities.
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Aug 2013
Competencies for an Evolving World
To make successful hires, organizations should be determining the competencies they need to move into the future.
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May 2013
Hiring Committees Need Trained Interviewers
In hiring decisions, a huge number of individuals on a selection committee never replace knowledge and judgment gained from trained interviewers using effective techniques.
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Mar 2013
How To Interview and Hire Engineers
What separates top performers from average performers in engineering jobs?
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Jan 2013
Silence of the Interviewer
Silence can be a valuable tool to an interviewer when used correctly in an interview.
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Aug 2012
CEO Competencies Needed at Yahoo
After running through six chief executives in five years, struggling web giant Yahoo hired a seventh: Google veteran Marissa Mayer. Although some pundits are betting against Mayer, we think she stands a chance of turning Yahoo around—but only if she was vetted properly.
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Jul 2012
Interviewer Training Addresses These Challenges
Here are two of the most commonly cited problems interviewers face and some solutions provided in our interview training.
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Mar 2012
Three Questions to Keep Your Interviews Legal
Here is a quick check you can use on your favorite interview questions to make sure they are legal. There are three criteria to consider when deciding whether or not to ask a question in an interview.
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Jan 2012
Oddball Interview Questions: All Risk, No Reward?
A huge surplus of talented workers and the growing recognition that standard interviewer training techniques don't work very well appears to be spurring the oddball question movement. But do these questions actually achieve what they're supposed to?
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Dec 2011
Interview Team Discussion Fiascos
If you think you've experienced some bad meetings, consider the unorganized discussions of candidates that can sometimes take place at the end of an interview schedule.
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Aug 2011
Overcoming First Impressions in an Interview
Your initial reactions to a candidate can be powerful and persuasive, but they can also be spectacularly wrong. Find out how to avoid the pitfalls of snap judgments in an interview and hire effectively.
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Jun 2011
Expand Your Cultural Comfort Zone in the Interview
Have you ever been in an interview situation where you experienced discomfort with the candidate because of some difference between the two of you? We teach individuals to recognize this feeling and how to expand their cultural comfort zone in order to reduce bias in the interview.
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Apr 2011
Evaluating Major League Talent
Major League Baseball is currently rolling out a new technology that tracks each player's on-field performance second by second.
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Dec 2010
False Credentials for Sale
These days, job seekers intent on gaining any advantage in a tough market don't have to falsify their resumes. They can hire the "experts" at websites such as careerexcuse.com to do it for them.
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Aug 2010
Hiring at Apple for Culture Fit
The cultural or organizational fit of a candidate is a critical element in any hiring decision. Let’s look at Mark Papermaster, who left Apple just fifteen months after joining them from IBM.
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Jun 2010
Interviewing Millennials Entering the Workforce
Many employers struggle to adapt to the Millennial generation – which comprise the fastest growing segment of the workforce. Getting to know Millennials better can help you prepare for them in the interview and in the workplace.
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Mar 2010
Helicopter Parents Take Flight
We've been studying behavioral interviewing practices for 35 years, and we've seen some very strange trends, but it’s hard to top the following: parents are beginning to join their child in their job interviews.
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Dec 2009
When Bad Things Happen to Good Questions
You're interviewing a candidate who has just moved here from the East Coast. It seems natural enough to ask about the move, but instead of just breaking the ice, your question unleashes a flood of personal information. What do you do?
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Sep 2009
YouTube Impacts Behavioral Interviewing
There's been exponential growth in interview coaching services—from outplacement firms to the Internet and now to YouTube.
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Mar 2009
Talent Management Disaster at AIG
What has infuriated most Americans is the $165 million in bonuses paid to the AIG executives who caused the company’s near-collapse. As I see it, AIG isn’t just a financial fiasco; it’s a talent management disaster.
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Jan 2009
Skeptical of the Candidate? Try Three Questions
Suppose you're interviewing a great candidate: top school, top of the class, top references. But suddenly something is said that sets off a few alarm bells, something that seems a little over the top, even for a wunderkind. What do you do now?
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Nov 2008
Phone Screens: Time Savers for Busy Managers
The phone screen takes only 15 to 20 minutes of your time, and can save you, and unqualified candidates, hours of wasted effort later on.
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Sep 2008
How to Interview Political Candidates
Job candidates and political candidates have something in common: they do not like to answer tough questions. One technique they use is to hand a tough question back to the interviewer with a new question of their own.
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May 2008
Selling the Job to the Candidate's Motivation
These days, interviewers need to know how to push a candidate's "hot buttons" - that is, appeal most directly to her wants and needs - by describing a job and the company in terms of that candidate's specific accomplishments, competencies, and goals.
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Dec 2007
25 Years of Interviewer Training
We offer a quick look at some of the greatest changes of the past 25 years and how we've responded to them with our Effective Interviewing!® interviewer training. We also note a few practices and beliefs that we think could use improvement.
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Sep 2007
Doing 20% of the Interview Assessment
Imagine what would happen if corporate methods of assessing candidates were adopted by Olympic judges.
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Apr 2007
Candidates Don't Know What They Don't Know
According to a study at Cornell University, interviewers should be aware that people who lack certain skills may be more confident of their abilities than highly skilled people.
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Jan 2007
Interviewing the Real Candidate
The problem interviewers face is getting beyond the flawless facade to the real candidate. One extremely effective way of doing this is to make behavioral events the focus of the interview.
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Dec 2006
Addressing the Job Search Marathon
Selecting the right candidate takes time, but if it’s too drawn out, an organization risks losing qualified applicants.
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Mar 2006
Analyzing Hiring Mistakes at Harvard
Larry Summers had superior credentials for the coveted position as Harvard University's president, but his inability to fit in with Harvard's culture illustrates a problem seen all too often when analyzing hiring mistakes in corporate America.
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Nov 2005
Uncovering Incompetent Candidates in the Interview
Here are five qualities that interviewers frequently encounter in incompetent candidates: resume fraud, failure to take responsibility/blaming others, evading questions, counter-attack, and a complete lack of the core competencies needed to do a job successfully.
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Sep 2005
Resume Screening Would Have Avoided FEMA Fiasco
We teach techniques to determine a candidate’s authenticity. Among these is carefully screening the resume before any face-to-face behavioral interview.
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Jul 2005
Interviewing a Supreme Court Justice
We view the assessment of Judge John Roberts for the next Supreme Court position as falling into two phases - credentials and competencies.
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Apr 2004
Donald Trump and the Ultimate Job Interview
Donald Trump has seven rules of business success that he applies to his show The Apprentice. Our interviewing method is just as successful at revealing problems with prospective job candidates as Trump’s methods.
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Apr 2003
Hiring for Credentials vs Competencies at the NYSE
The March, 2003 scandal at the New York Stock Exchange underscored the importance of defining competencies before you interview a candidate.
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Jan 2003
20 Years of Interviewer Training
Take a look back at the 20–year history of Interview EDGE®.
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Aug 2002
Defeat Deceit in Interviews
Worldcom's accounting scandals shook investor confidence and brought down once-mighty companies and individuals. Discover how to potentially avoid a similar scandal by detecting if an individual is unethical during the interview process.
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Oct 2001
Coaching Connie Chung on Interviewing
When it comes to interviewing, we can learn from the pros - even if that only means avoiding their mistakes. Connie Chung's highly publicized TV interview with U.S. Representative Gary Condit is a case in point.
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Apr 2000
College Applicants with an Unfair Advantage
It seems there is no limit to what certain students will do to get ahead. The latest ploy among some college applicants is to claim they need more time to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the primary college entrance exam.
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Apr 2000
Top-Tier Firms Interview Second-Tier Schools
For the first time in nearly a decade, enrollments at the nation's elite business schools - Stanford, M.I.T., Dartmouth, and the University of California, Berkeley - are down, in some cases by as much as 11 percent.
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Apr 2000
Interview References: Conspiracy of Silence
Corporate America has its own "conspiracy of silence" when it comes to high-level executives who leave their firms under less than favorable circumstances. Learn techniques for getting a more thorough review of a candidate's past behavior.
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Apr 2000
Kiosk Interviews to Assess Candidates
Some big-name retailers are now using in-store computer kiosks to help attract and retain good workers.
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Apr 2000
Candidates Prepare for Behavioral Interviews
There is another new trend among young job candidates, according to our high-tech clients. It seems that students called back for in-firm interviews now ask recruiters, "Will I be having any behavioral interviews?"
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Apr 2000
Coca-Cola's Hiring Mistake
Hiring flawed candidates with the expectation that they will improve once they are on the job can be a big mistake.
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Mar 2000
SF Examiner: The Rising Decline of Authenticity
Evidence shows that a growing number of job candidates deliberately mislead potential employers.
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Oct 1999
How Traditional Consulting Firms Attract Talent
In an effort to halt the "brain drain" from prestigious consulting firms to obscure startups, traditional consulting firms are resorting to radical new tactics.
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Oct 1999
Trends Revolutionizing the Job Search
This is our last newsletter of the millennium so we thought it was fitting to take an in-depth look at three trends that are revolutionizing the job search.
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Oct 1999
Make Hiring a Priority
In the eighteen years since Interview EDGE® was founded, recruitment and hiring practices have changed enormously. Unfortunately, one thing that hasn't changed is senior management's lack of commitment to hiring people the right way.
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Jan 1999
Good News for Reference Checking
Hawaii became the thirty-second state to enact new reference checking laws. The intent of this legislation is to provide immunity to employers who in good faith provide "information or opinion" about former employees.
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Jan 1999
Decline of Authenticity in the Interview
The combination of well-prepared or disingenuous job seekers and inadequate interview procedures has made many employers vulnerable during the entire hiring process.
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Jan 1999
The Ethics Problem
USA Today reported that a significantly greater number of teens admit to cheating and lying now than in the past. This make the problem of dishonest candidates much worse.
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Jan 1999
Be Prepared for Prepared Candidates
Traditionally, students have been able to find information about prospective employers through their school's Career Placement Office.
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Jan 1999
Job Candidate Deception
Deception among job candidates, which can range from misleading statements on resumes to outright lying in interviews, is shockingly widespread.
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Jul 1998
Interviewer Training and the Escalation Game
One of the most consistent trends in interviewer training is the ongoing need for interviewers to stay ahead of increasingly shrewd and sophisticated candidates.
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Jul 1998
Degree or Not Degree
Approximately one out of every 12 applicants, even those who are seeking executive level positions, will claim to have college degrees they do not have.
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Jul 1998
Cost of Hiring Mistakes
As salaries for top business people continue to climb into the stratosphere, companies will find themselves paying increasingly high prices for poor hiring decisions.
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Jul 1998
Felicity = Duplicity
One of the most talked-about stories in Hollywood these days is an eye-opening example of what can happen when interviewers make unverified assumptions about candidates. It's the saga of Riley Weston, until recently a writer for the teen drama Felicity.
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Jul 1998
Falling for the Credentials Trap in the Interview
Before you promise a candidate a salary higher than that of some NBA players, consider the case of Craig Spradling, a former associate at a prestigious New York law firm who made $48,000 his first month on the job by illegally trading securities.
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Jul 1998
MBA Graduates - Rules of Interviewing are Changing
It seems that MBA graduates are getting smarter every year - if not about mergers and derivatives, then at least about the ins and outs of interviewing.
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Apr 1998
Taking Guesswork out of Hiring
According to a recent article in The Harvard Business Review, nearly 40% of new management hires fail within the first year. Why the high failure rate? Research suggests, in the majority of cases, the answer lies in a poor fit between new employees and their corporate cultures.
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Apr 1998
Competency Madness?
We have been promoting competency-based interviewing skills for so long, we sometimes forget how new and exciting this approach is for some companies. And while we're happy that so many businesses are adopting what we believe is a superior approach to interviewing, we're also disturbed by the extremes to which some organizations have gone.
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Apr 1998
Interview Technique to Assess Information Seekers
We recently heard about a simple interview test one high-tech company uses to separate information seekers from assumption makers. We highly recommend it - it's fair, job related, and effective.
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Apr 1998
Interview Wheel of Death
There is no established correlation between a candidate's ability to withstand job stress and the stress of an interview.
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Apr 1998
Negligent Hiring: Hire at Your Own Risk
The recent epidemic of work-place issues from harassment to violence has spawned a whole new kind of litigation - criminal prosecution aimed not just at offenders, but at the people who hire them in the first place.
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Apr 1998
Credit Checks: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
Although it seems almost everyone has access to your credit history these days, there are strong legal restrictions on how credit information can be obtained and used in hiring.
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Apr 1998
Negligent Non-discloser: No News is Bad News
Suppose you learn that a former employee has threatened a co-worker at his new company. Can you be held liable? The surprising answer is "maybe."
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Apr 1998
The Net Generation Grows Up
These days, almost everybody in business has their eye on the "Net Generation," the aptly named, computer-savvy young people born after 1978.
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Jan 1998
Building Networks for Diverse Candidates
All candidates bring unspoken questions to an interview, but diverse candidates have unique and specific concerns.
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Jan 1998
A Second Look at First Impressions
In our Effective Interviewing!® training, we try to stress how unreliable first impressions can be, and how easy it is to be misled by a single encounter with a candidate.
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Jan 1998
Participative Learners vs Reflective Learners
Experienced trainers know that participants bring varied learning styles to interview training seminars.
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Jan 1998
Online and "Just-in-Time" Interview Training
Our online interview training and interview tools provide a responsive and ongoing process with interview tools and techniques that are available when you need them.
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Jan 1998
Interview EDGE® Featured as Website of the Month
The leading publication of the executive recruitment industry, Executive Recruiter News, recently chose interviewedge.com as its "Web site of the Month."
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Jan 1998
Desperately Seeking Skilled Workers
More than ever, employers are finding that it pays to focus on skills, not ethnicity or gender. As one CEO puts it, "You simply want the best people you can get."
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Oct 1997
GPA: What Does It Really Mean?
Educational achievement should not be the sole criterion for deciding who to interview on campus.
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Oct 1997
Welcome to HirePath® Online Interview Tools
Introducing HirePath® online interview tools: a unique concept designed for subscribers to access online interviewing tools that help them update their interviewing skills quickly and easily.
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Oct 1997
15 Years of Interviewer Training
Interview EDGE® takes pride in completing 15 years of successful business with this past year being the best year yet.
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Oct 1997
Meet the Integrity Check
The Integrity Check Interview, developed by UCLA psychiatrist Mark Goulston, is based on the idea that it requires real concentration to tell a good lie.
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Oct 1997
Automated Phone Screens: Press the Star Key
It was probably inevitable that someone would come up with the idea of automated interviewing. But automated interviewing has a few major drawbacks.
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Oct 1997
Now You've Got Them, How to Keep Them
You've worked hard, spent a lot of money, and beat out some pretty impressive competition to hire that young genius from Stanford. But now that you've got her, is there any guarantee she'll stay for even a year or two? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding "No."
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Jul 1997
Competency Cards
Once again, necessity proves to be the mother of invention. In this case, one of our clients wanted our menu of behavioral competencies on forty-eight separate cards. They thought – and they were right! – that this would help their employment group and department managers reach a quick and clear consensus about what qualities an ideal candidate should have.
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Jul 1997
Diversity Competition Will Heat Up
A little over a year ago, voters in California and the Texas courts struck down affirmative action programs in their state university systems. The impact on the pool of diverse candidates was disastrous and swift.
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Jul 1997
Diversity Interview Training
Ever wonder why companies with a "check-off" mentality don't see much change in behavior around the diversity issues? It may be because they are not committing the necessary time to diversity interview training.
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Jul 1997
Interviewer Training for the Pros
Interview EDGE® has again been selected by the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) to deliver our Effective Interviewing!® seminar to its member firms.
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Jul 1997
Competing With Microsoft For Talent
It may not be the most ethical way to compete for prospective employees, but Silicon Graphics' approach is certainly creative. They use their Web site(sgi.com/staffing/University/Career Resource/sample questions.html) to post the standard interview questions used by their larger competitors like Microsoft and Intel, along with the appropriate answers.
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Jul 1997
Detecting the Con Artist in the Interview
We recently had an experience that proves the importance of checking a candidate's references. We learned the hard way that even the most experienced interviewers - in this case, us - can almost be taken in by an expert and determined liar.
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Jul 1997
Assessing a Quick Study in the Interview
In a fast-paced, technology-driven workplace, it's not enough for employees to know their stuff. They also have to be quick learners who can easily assimilate new information and then use it in fresh and unexpected ways.
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Jan 1997
Behavioral Interviewing Assesses Management Style
Management style matters. What works in one theater of operations can bomb in another. That's one reason why behavioral competency interviewing is so important and effective.
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Jan 1997
CEO Feedback on Effective Interviewing!®
Executive watchers were shocked to learn that Alex Mandl, president of AT&T and heir apparent to the CEO job was leaving to join a tiny technology firm. He's the number two guy at a $50 billion company who is essentially moving to a start-up with no customers.
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Jan 1997
Pushing Back on Canned Answers in the Interview
According to an article in the New York Times, job gurus advise their clients to avoid revealing anything unflattering or personal. The result? Thousands of executives now approach interviews armed with an arsenal of slick, self-serving responses.
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Jan 1997
Spiro Agnew: A Really Bad Hire
It's said that if you can remember the 1960s, you weren't there. Probably no one better proves the truth of this adage than Spiro Agnew, one of the most forgettable characters in the corrupt Nixon administration.
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Jan 1997
Spotting Dishonest Candidates
It's harder to be deceptive in an interview where even the most polished dissemblers may be betrayed by their bodies.
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Jan 1997
Beware the Workaholic
It pays to be wary of job applicants whose resumés experience is top heavy with overtime; people who consistently work fifty to eighty hours a week may not be such superstars after all.
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Jan 1997
Competencies: Self-confidence or Arrogance?
A thorough understanding of behavioral competencies and sophisticated interviewing techniques can go a long way toward determining which candidates are hot prospects and which are just hot air.
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Jan 1997
Revving Up for the Talent Shortage
The shortage of engineers and developers is forcing companies to woo workers with the kind of extravagant promises usually reserved for professional athletes.
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Jun 1996
Waiving Liability for Employee References
A recent court decision (Cox v. Nasche, et al.) limits the risk of defamation suits when an employee signs an information release waiving liability against the provider of information about his or her employment. We recommend that employers use these releases.
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Jan 1996
Executive Recruiting - How To Spot A Falling Star
Former Kodak CEO Christopher Steffen is a prime example of what can happen when management focuses exclusively on the contributions a strong candidate can make and ignores that candidate's inevitable limitations. We believe that in evaluating any candidate - no matter how desirable or dazzling - it is essential to consider limitations as well as strengths.
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Jan 1996
Competency Chasers
We believe in scheduling interviews so each interviewer learns as much as possible about every candidate. All interviewers elicit a wide range of competencies that reveal strengths and limitations, and they look for repeated patterns of both.
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Jan 1996
Detecting Derailers in the Interview
In our ever-optimistic American culture, the emphasis is usually on the positive. It's no wonder, then, that most hiring decisions focus on a candidate's strengths. But as several articles in this issue show, it's imperative also to consider limitations - things that can really derail someone on the job.
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Jan 1996
Diversity Interview Training: Changing Attitudes
We are always looking for ways to assess the impact of our training programs, so we began measuring changes in attitude among participants in our diversity interviewer training seminars.
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Jan 1996
Keeping Your Interviews Legal
Unfortunately, the advice some attorneys give their corporate clients may make it impossible for managers to realistically assess any prospect, and for any candidate to get a fair hearing.
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Jan 1996
Savvy MBAs Ace Behavioral Interviews
These days, future MBAs learn more in the classroom than accounting and marketing. Many prestigious business schools now offer courses in behavioral interviewing, career planning, and networking as part of their regular curricula.
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Jul 1995
Bill Walsh on the Hiring Process
Former San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh considers the hiring process "possibly the single most important act of top executives," but he also calls it a "crap shoot." He has some sound advice for improving the odds.
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Jul 1995
Unconscious Bias in the Interview
If you think you are impartial and open-minded, think again. The latest research on unconscious bias and how we form impressions about those we first meet suggests we do this much faster than we realize.
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Jul 1995
Hiring More Women in Technology
Female executives traditionally have been in short supply in high tech firms, but technology-driven companies are currently hiring more senior executive women than ever before.
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Jul 1995
Job Candidates - When English is a Second Language
Interviewers need to be careful about the use of idiomatic phrases, slang, or jargon when interviewing applicants who speak English as a second language.
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Jul 1995
The Interview: Friendly or Adversarial?
An interview should not be a cross-examination, and interviewers need to refrain from the kind of courtroom theatrics that bring witnesses to their knees.
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Jul 1995
Computer Snoops Find "Delete" Doesn't = Gone
"Computer snoops" retrieve "deleted" information - some of it presumably erased years ago - from hard drives.
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Jul 1995
Poor Pilot Screening: The Real Fear of Flying
For years, economists have been predicting that the United States would experience a shortage of competent employees by the end of the century.
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Jul 1995
Body Language Indicted in OJ Simpson Trial
As evidenced by the reading of the O.J. Simpson verdict, body language is "guilty" of failing to accurately predict behavior.
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Jul 1995
Selling to the Technical Candidate
If there is strong competition to fill technical positions, you may be required to sell candidates on your organization before you interview and evaluate them.
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Apr 1995
Spotting Competencies in Harvard Graduates
John Kotter, Harvard Business School professor, spent twenty years tracking the careers of 115 MBAs from the Harvard class of 1974. In his book, The New Rules: How to Succeed in Today's Post-Corporate World, he describes how these students survived the downsizing, restructuring, and globalization that characterized two of the most volatile decades in American business history.
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Apr 1995
First Impressions in the Interview
For better or worse, first impressions count. They influence our choice of friends - sometimes even of partners - and they play a major role in the hiring process.
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Apr 1995
Diversity: The New Bottom Line
Despite rollbacks in affirmative action, nothing can alter the fact that today's global economy demands a diverse workforce.
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Apr 1995
Diversity Equals Productivity
Two comprehensive new studies offer convincing evidence of a link between diversity and profit.
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Apr 1995
Required: A Passport Plus Competencies
As the economy becomes increasingly global, adaptability, patience, and tolerance – all qualities that effective interviewers already look for – will become a standard part of every job description.
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Apr 1995
More Crazy Interview Questions
If you're asking any of the following questions, it may be time for your company to address its interviewer training needs.
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Apr 1995
Avoid This Illegal Question in the Hiring Process
A hassle arrest is an unwarranted police harassment that never leads to a conviction. This is a fact of life in minority communities and one of the reasons why it is illegal to ask job applicants about their arrest records.
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Apr 1995
Using Technology to Simplify the Hiring Process
Major employers - such as Disneyland and Ford - are increasingly relying on technology to simplify the hiring process.
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Jan 1995
Padded Credentials by Colleges
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reports that colleges routinely exaggerate the average SAT scores of incoming students.
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Jan 1995
Hire at Your Own Risk
The financial world has recently been rocked by a series of events that underscore both the risks investors run in the marketplace and the risks management faces when making hiring decisions.
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Jan 1995
Top Ten Candidate Bloopers
A recent survey asked managers in more than 100 large corporations to describe their most unusual experiences interviewing prospective employees. Here are some of their replies.
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Jan 1995
College Degree Required?
These days, most job descriptions - even the most entry-level - call for a college degree. This makes complete sense from a screening standpoint, but the risk is that the pool may grow too small for some really big fish.
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Jan 1995
Measuring Candidate Motivation in the Interview
It can be a real mistake to equate a lack of company knowledge with a lack of motivation. Focus instead on selling top candidates on the talent of the team they will join.
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Jan 1995
How to Assess and Hire Top Engineers
What could Thomas Edison, who was known as the "world's greatest inventor" a century ago, have in common with today's top software engineers? Quite a lot as we recently discovered.
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Oct 1994
Competency-based Interviews Predict Job Success
We explore Harvard behavioral scientist D. C. McClelland's work on competency and predicting job performance based on people who are clearly successful in their jobs.
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Oct 1994
Conducting the Behavioral Event Interview (BEI)
One method of developing the competencies described by D. C. McClelland is by conducting Behavioral Event Interviews. The objective of a Behavioral Event Interview (BEI) is to get very detailed behavioral descriptions of how a person goes about doing his or her work.
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Oct 1994
Making Competency Work
The first annual Competency and Performance Conference (Boston, November 1994) revealed the growing interest in competency-based tools by private and public sector organizations in America and internationally. Related issues in the use of these tools were also highlighted at this meeting.
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Oct 1994
World Cup Competency
When Brazil defeated the U.S. team in the World Cup Soccer playoffs this summer, they illustrated a key principle behind the focus on competencies.
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Oct 1994
Hollywood Calling for Interviewer Training
We recently received a call from a major Hollywood studio asking if we could help improve a new TV talk show host's interviewing skills with tips from our interviewer training. We gladly responded to the request.
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Oct 1994
More Crazy Interview Questions
At the start of each recruiting season, we publish some of the surprising questions we discover are still being used by interviewers.
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Apr 1994
Organizational Culture and Candidate Fit
Despite the importance of the concept of organizational culture, many companies find it difficult to accurately define theirs. In his recent book, The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work, William E. Schneider, Ph.D., uses four models or types to define corporate culture.
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Apr 1994
Useful Information or Stereotyping?
Sometimes there seems to be a fine line between providing useful information and using stereotypes to describe groups of people.
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Apr 1994
The Biggest Minority
In many U.S. cities, the white population is no longer the majority. In fact, current demographics predict the ethnic population will grow seven times faster than the white population.
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Apr 1994
Gender and Technology
If women and men communicate differently, is this difference reflected in their attitudes toward computers? Some gender communication experts emphatically say yes.
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Apr 1994
Behavior-based Interviews Predict Future Success
Two bi-coastal studies on MBA graduates support thorough behavior-based interviews of potential employees rather than grades, exam scores or other numerical values.
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Apr 1994
Hiring by Computer Models
Leading business schools are now using computer models to analyze certain management issues, such as hiring decisions. By combining mathematical equations with game theory, they can model the behavior of corporate leaders whose decisions affect others in the company.
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Jan 1994
Just Wondering...Who's Interviewing?
When Bobby Ray Inman withdrew his candidacy for the post of Secretary of Defense, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas remarked, "You kind of wonder how they picked this person. Seems to me that maybe the President or somebody who recommended him to the President should have had a closer look."
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Jan 1994
Behavioral Interviewing Lessons From a 16 Year Old
An effective interview progresses from knowing what someone did to understanding how and why he or she did it. This second level of understanding adds value to any interview and is the basic premise behind behavior-based interviewing.
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Jan 1994
Jimmy Johnson's Resume Doesn't Predict Success
The Resumé Factor is least likely to predict on the job failure. A better predictor is the Performance Factors - Intellectual, Interpersonal, and Motivation.
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Jan 1994
Gender Bias Starts Early
Why are there fewer females in science, math, engineering, and technical disciplines? At least one reason may be the way girls are treated by their teachers.
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Jan 1994
Costly Assumption About Disabilities
The Rhode Island Department of Mental Health lost a discrimination lawsuit to the tune of $100,000. Why? Because the Department made the assumption that an obese woman was disabled and thus would not be able to perform the job for which she had applied.
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Jan 1994
Start the Interview Right
Many interviewers believe it is efficient and appropriate to start an interview by telling the candidate exactly what they are looking for. That might be a good way to buy a house, but it's not usually a good way to hire an employee.
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Jan 1994
The Continuum Question
We've heard that college placement officers and outplacement counselors have begun to advise candidates on strategies to counter the "continuum question."
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Jan 1994
Software Changes Corporate Culture
A new form of software called "groupware" may be changing corporate culture by freeing employees from the limitations of traditional hierarchies and creating new ways for people to work together.
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Jan 1994
Hiring Managers Make Every Decision Count
In previous years, hiring managers reduced and expanded staff in response to the ebb and flow of business. But that cyclic pattern of layoffs and rehiring has changed.
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Oct 1993
Hiring Committees Shared Values
Much has been written recently about the need for shared values as a way to provide direction in reorganized companies. If all hiring committees shared certain values, we predict there would be fewer meetings, faster decisions and better selections.
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Oct 1993
Values Can Prediction Motivation and Behavior
Effective interviewers know that learning a candidate's values can lead to better predictions of motivation and behavior.
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Oct 1993
Legal Lunacy at Stanford
Recently, a self-defense class for women at Stanford University was cancelled after an anonymous complaint of discrimination against men.
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Oct 1993
Double Standard Still the Standard
Forty years ago, overt racism was acceptable and Jim Crow laws distinctly marked the lines between races. Although the U.S. has changed laws and educated workers to embrace diversity, subtle discrimination occurs every day.
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Oct 1993
Adjusting Interviews for Generation X Values
Interviewers need to be ready to adjust their questions and techniques for a generation of workers with different values who have entered the workforce.
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Oct 1993
Will the Real SAT Please Stand Up?
The acronym SAT now stands for Scholastic Assessment Test, not Scholastic Aptitude Test. This change is a response to criticism that the SAT does not measure a person's "aptitude" for higher education.
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Oct 1993
Insiders' Interview Questions (Part II)
Jim Kennedy asked Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) members to submit their favorite interview questions. Here is part two of some of the most interesting questions he received.
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Oct 1993
Assessing Candidate's Ability to Work Nights
In today's 24-hour market-place more companies are turning to shiftwork schedules to respond to customer needs.
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Oct 1993
Are Promises Made in Interview Legally Binding?
Employees have gained new legal ground in holding recruiters to promises made during the interview. "Under-promise, over-deliver" seems to be the message to recruiters from recent lawsuits.
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Oct 1993
Hiring for Negative Competencies?
Brooks Mitchell, founder of Aspen Tree Software, has come to the conclusion that positive qualities don't always make for good employees.
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Jul 1993
Talent...It's the Real Thing
Have you ever wondered why some highly experienced people you hired in the past simply did not work out? Sure, experience is important but what's often more important is the talent to do the job.
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Jul 1993
Equal Pay All Talk, No Act(ion)
Thirty years after the Equal Pay Act, women's salaries still lag far behind men's. At times, the pay gap has actually widened from one year to the next.
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Jul 1993
Insiders' Interview Questions (Part I)
Jim Kennedy asked Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) members about their favorite interview questions and wrote the results into an article for Executive Recruiter's News.
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Jul 1993
Wanted: Transferable Skills
As companies attempt to reengineer the way work gets done, HR professionals and managers find they must be able to evaluate transferable skills when interviewing candidates.
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Jul 1993
Worker Burnout:Tick, tick, tick . . Kaboom!
The drive for better margins in a low inflation economy has forced many companies to cut staff. But as people leave, the work remains. Employees who get to keep their jobs find they have more work and fewer resources.
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Jul 1993
The Challenges of Internal Hiring
Interview EDGE® has observed that in an effort to make the best use of their most valuable resources, current employees, companies are shifting their hiring focus from external to internal candidates.
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Apr 1993
An Optimistic Outlook
Dr. Martin Seligman's research shows that success is not necessarily achieved by the most talented individuals. Rather it is realized by talented people who are also very optimistic.
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Apr 1993
Behavioral Qualities Required for Culture Fit
The turnover of an Eastman Kodak CFO after just three months on the job dramatizes the issues companies face when hiring outside people for senior positions.
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Apr 1993
"Pssst Employees...Here's How to Sue Us"
California might be in the forefront of what may occur across the nation regarding sexual harassment. As of January 1993, a law in California requires every employer to teach their employees about sexual harassment.
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Apr 1993
Brooks Brother's Blunder
In a recent job bias suit, Brooks Brothers was accused of discriminatory hiring practices, and in order to settle the embarrassing case out of court, had to pay some hefty fines.
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Apr 1993
Men are From Mars
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is the intriguing title of a current New York Times bestseller authored by John Gray, a neighbor of ours in Marin County, California. The ideas in his book confirm many of our own experiences in relationships, and have relevance to principles we teach in two of our seminars Interviewing Today's Workforce® and Diversity at Work.
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Apr 1993
Glass Walls Support Glass Ceiling
While women and people of diverse backgrounds have been pounding on the infamous glass ceiling, glass walls have been built up around them.
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Apr 1993
Clinton Knows "No"
Following President Clinton's recent meeting with Boris Yeltsin in Vancouver, a reporter released some notes from this event. According to the reporter, one of Clinton's comments to Yeltsin was, "Sometimes the Japanese tell us 'yes' when they really mean 'no.' "
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Apr 1993
Gambling on Gerstner
Louis Gerstner, former chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., was chosen to take over "Big Blue." Hoping to dig out sagging stock values and failing profits, IBM board members chose Gerstner to start shoveling.
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Jan 1993
Answering Unspoken Questions
Many interviewers base part of their assessment of a candidate on the quality of the questions the candidate asks in the interview. However, how many interviewers realize that in the face of increasing diversity, more candidates will be seeking answers to "unspoken questions?"
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Jan 1993
Success Strategy of a Presidential Interviewer
Larry King made a mark on the world of politics when he interviewed all three major presidential candidates. What made his interviewing style so successful and so unique? It was his ability to gain the trust of the candidate.
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Jan 1993
Abandoning Responsibility in the Interview?
Concerns about a person's honesty and judgment are important to any employer, yet questions about family and personal life are illegal in job interviews. Find out how interviewers can legally gain valuable facts that can help them avoid situations like the following unpleasant story?
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Jan 1993
Double Bind on Campus
Now more than ever, recruiters must be educated before they arrive on-campus. Such training should include techniques for understanding and responding to the growing diversity among students.
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Jan 1993
Productive Phone Screens
Here are a couple of ideas for productive phone screens for candidates when time is limited or the number of prospects is large.
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Jan 1993
The Hiring Thaw
Previously stagnant employers may be surprised by the surge of job openings, and by the nature of today's diverse workforce.
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Oct 1992
Breaking the Ceiling
"The Glass Ceiling Initiative," a study done by the U.S. Department of Labor, found that there are three significant factors contributing to the glass ceiling in American corporations.
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Oct 1992
15 Percent of What?
Only 15 percent of net new workers will be white males. How often has that phrase been quoted since the publication of Workforce 2000?
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Oct 1992
Wedding Rings Off or On?
Felice Schwartz found that married women students routinely removed their wedding rings before job interviews with on-campus male recruiters. Why? The women students believed that male recruiters used this formula: "Woman = Baby = No commitment."
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Oct 1992
Wrong or Just Different?
In our diversity interviewer training, participants learn a number of techniques for expanding their "cultural comfort zone." One such technique is to view differences as merely "differences," without labeling them right or wrong.
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Oct 1992
Women Take Action
In a recent and highly publicized scandal, sexual harassment charges against the Navy Tailhook Association resulted in two Navy admirals losing their jobs and a third being reassigned. Add to this the earlier resignation of the Secretary of the Navy and it is obvious that considerable damage has been done to the Navy's reputation.
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Oct 1992
On-campus Interviewers See Grade Inflation Soar
Interviewers will need to see more than a high grade point average (GPA) during college recruiting. Grade inflation has been occurring in America for the last twenty-five years according to Newsweek.
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Oct 1992
10 Years of Interviewer Training
Interview EDGE® will celebrate 10 years of business this December, and what a decade it has been!
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Oct 1992
Facing Intuitive Concerns
An interview is ending, but you still have an intuitive concern about the candidate. You suspect that the candidate is holding something back, misrepresenting achievements or truly lacking a required skill. Your intuition is telling you something is wrong. What do you do?
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Oct 1992
Off-the-Wall Interview Questions
What are Madonna and a Big Mac doing in an interview? Effective Interviewing!® seminar participants continually recount off-the-wall questions that they hear in interviews.
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Oct 1992
How's This for Quick Response
On-campus interviews provide a great opportunity for companies to make an impression on soon-to-be graduates entering the workforce.
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Oct 1992
Interviewing Internal Candidates
The internal interview is a very different type of interview. Consider training your managers to handle this unique and potentially beneficial opportunity.
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Jul 1992
Sexism - From Denial to Action
Awareness and action on feminist issues seems to be moving along a continuum that has important implications for interviewers. Recognizable touchstones along this continuum are Denial, Collusion, Awakening, Anger, Action.
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Jul 1992
Cookie Cutter Interviews
Many campus interviewers use the same questions all day long. By learning in advance how the interview will be conducted, savvy students gain a definite advantage over other students seeking the same job.
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Jul 1992
ADA: Coming Down the Pike?
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires "physical accommodation" of disabled workers and new behavior in the interviewing and hiring process. Find out how companies that don't comply may face protests and negative media coverage.
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Jul 1992
ADA: General Guidelines
Four specific actions to prepare interviewers for the ADA are briefly summarized here. Informed interviewers will be responsive and make better hiring decisions.
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Jul 1992
Improve Your ROI 56%
By building family concerns into worker benefits, accommodating companies are starting to decrease female turnover.
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Jul 1992
ADA: Essential Functions
Although the Americans with Disabilities Act repeatedly refers to "essential functions" of a job, nowhere does the Act actually define "essential functions." The ambiguity of language may be a problem when employers write job descriptions.
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Jul 1992
Interviewing and the ADA
8 answers to common questions about the American Disabilities Act, a comprehensive piece of legislation designed to protect 43 million American against discrimination in the hiring process.
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Jul 1992
Looks and the Law
Santa Cruz, California is the first, and only, town in America to pass a law forbidding discrimination in employment practices based on appearance.
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Jul 1992
ADA: Legal Interview Questions
With the ADA, interviewers are concerned about the legality of some common interviewing questions. Follow these guideline to keep your interview questions legal.
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Jul 1992
ADA: Reasonable Accommodations
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the requirement for "reasonable accommodations" in the workplace for persons with disabilities.
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Jul 1992
The BMW Message
As product life cycles continue to shorten, the need for frequent and continual retraining of workers will increase. Moral: hire retrainable workers.
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Apr 1992
The Billion Dollar Parking Ticket
When America worries about quality in the workplace it really is an issue of quality service as well as quality products.
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Apr 1992
Slang Expressions in Business Impact Job Candidate
Next time you ask your staff to run the competition out of the water, think about the dictionary definitions of the words you are using.
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Apr 1992
Diversity at Work
Managing an employee from any type of diverse background can be a challenge. Be aware of your personal communication techniques, so you can help improve understanding in the workplace.
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Apr 1992
Three R's at Work
When English is spoken as a second language (ESL) there are likely to be problems in communication and understanding. But what about EFL when English is a first language?
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Apr 1992
Initiative - Who Has It?
Most college recruiters search for some evidence of initiative in candidates. If you don't find examples, could you say the person lacks initiative?
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Apr 1992
Check References to Avoid Dishonest Candidates
Recently, Fortune performed some research on the "New Crisis in Business Ethics" (April 20, 1992). Their research showed that 50% of respondants under 30 cheated in college and 12-24% included false information on their resumé.
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Apr 1992
Write or Wrong?
You have a right to know if a candidate can write well. It's better to learn this in the interview process than after you hire them.
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Apr 1992
"My Time to Relax"
The selection interview is one of the most demanding tasks you will face any day. If you think it's a time to relax, we suggest you look for better ways to build a break into your day.
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Jan 1992
Diversity: As American As Apple Pie
Diversity means taking advantage of new and multiple opportunities. In a historical perspective, this is how American business has benefited from diversity.
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Jan 1992
Diversity Interview Training and Job Candidate Fit
In our diversity interviewer training, we mention a current trend whereby some candidates are less willing to be acculturated to mainstream standards.
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Jan 1992
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
The ADA aims to eliminate barriers to employment attitudes of employers as well as physical access. As interviewers we need to focus on what the job involves, not the disability of the applicant. It is also timely for all of us to check our attitudes and assumptions about disabled workers.
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Jan 1992
Testing Today, Interviewing Tomorrow
As current students learn to handle open-ended questions in school exams, they will also be more confident and effective when hearing them in job interviews. Eventually, interviewers will start to meet more savvy candidates who are tested in school for thinking ability and will be applying it in job interviews.
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Jan 1992
"No Excuses Interviewing"
When a CEO talks about the quality of interviewing in his company we listen. Business Week made this easy with a cover story on T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor as "Bad Boy of Silicon Valley."
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Jan 1992
Private Lives, Public Laws
The California Court of Appeals ruled in favor of an applicant at Target Stores saying questions about his religious and sexual preferences invaded his privacy.
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Jan 1992
Managing Microinequities
The following remarks about treatment of women in the workplace were recently delivered at a luncheon speech in San Francisco by Francis Conley, Professor of Surgery at Stanford University.
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Jan 1992
Civil Rights Act of 1991
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 elevates senior management interest in the way interviews are conducted in their companies.
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Jan 1992
Interviewing - For Better or Worse
In a seminar for a company's college recruiters, our client introduced our Effective Interviewing!® training by quoting research from the College Placement Council on student attitudes about interviewing.
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Jan 1992
HR Ratios
T.J. Rodgers at Cypress Semiconductor stresses the importance of knowing the company's revenue per employee and using this to measure yourself against the competition.
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Oct 1991
Hire to Your Weaknesses
Interviewing is something you do for the rest of your career.
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Oct 1991
Diversity in Response to Diversity
Perhaps because we have the only program in the United States on how to interview a diverse workforce, we are seeing a range of response by corporate America to the issue of diversity.
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Oct 1991
Reduce Unconscious Bias with Interviewing Training
We encourage managers to consider interviewing training that calls for seeing each person as a unique individual. This entails becoming aware of your own cultural filters so that you are better able to manage your assumptions and reduce unconscious bias.
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Oct 1991
Workforce 2000 Woes
Most of our readers are familiar with this figure from the Department of Labor Study, Workforce 2000: 85 percent of new hires in the 90's will be women, minorities and immigrants.
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Oct 1991
Pay Now or Pay Later
Take the time now to prepare for a good interview, or go through at least 10 times the work later to manage and perhaps even terminate a wrong hire.
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Oct 1991
Staffing Up When Staffing Down
Gloomy headlines across the country about staff cutbacks seem to mask a trend that partially explains why we are now so busy coaching organizations on how to improve their interviewing and selection skills.
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Oct 1991
It Can Be Illegal To Be Polite
With the ADA, interviewers must not ignore obvious physical disabilities. Instead, they must explore with the candidate how their disability can be accommodated on the job.
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Oct 1991
Ambiguous Recommendations
The "Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations," LIAR for short, is a compendium of recommendations for conveying unfavorable information while avoiding wrongful termination suits by disgruntled employees.
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Oct 1991
Impact of the Peace Dividend
The end of the cold war and easing of tensions between East and West means about 500,000 men and women currently in the U.S. Armed forces will be released into civilian jobs. This represents some 25% of current armed services personnel.
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Jul 1991
Search Firms Assessing Competencies?
In The Career Makers, author John Sibbald profiles the top executive search professionals, many of whom claim to measure an amazing array of competencies in the candidates they present to their clients.
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Jul 1991
Tips to Keep Your Interviews Legal
The ADA provides workplace protection to roughly 43 million Americans with disabilities. Here are a few tips for keeping your interviews legal according to ADA guidelines.
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Jul 1991
Managing Diversity - Leaders or Managers?
Managing diversity learning how to work with people different than ourselves will not come as easily to those who have the traits of a manager as it will to those who have the traits of a leader.
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Jul 1991
Bias in the Interview
A study by the Urban Institute showed a 3-to-1 preference for white over black candidates, demonstrating clear bias in the interview.
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Jul 1991
Avoiding Hypothetical Answers in the Interview
One participant in our Effective Interviewing!® seminar stated that he asks candidates, "How would you contribute to your area in our organization." This results in a lot of hypothetical answers in the interview.
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Jul 1991
Asking the Interview Question "How Much is 12X24?"
Participants of our Effective Interviewing!® seminar will recognize this interview question and the answer. They also know it shows how a candidate's mind works.
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Jul 1991
Pitfalls of Internal Interviews
So what do you do when you interview a co-worker? Go back 5-10 years and ask candidates to discuss education and prior work experience up to their current job.
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Jul 1991
10,000 Reference Checks . . . After the Fact
Imagine you just filled a six-figure executive position with an out-of-state candidate. Then you received 10,000 copies of a front-page story from the candidate's home town pointing out he is a 20-year crook.
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Jul 1991
Defining a Changing Organizational Culture
It's our belief that employers must thoughtfully define their current organizational culture before they can effectively predict candidate fit and make the right hire.
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Jul 1991
Addressing the Candidate's Concerns
When a valued candidate shows resistance to a job offer, it is important to classify the nature of the candidate's concern. Then you can apply the most effective response.
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Jul 1991
U.S. Motivation Waning
With motivation and work commitment waning, assessment of candidates is even more critical.
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Apr 1991
How Management and Leadership Competencies Differ
For certain clients, we use Professor Kotter's concepts in our Effective Interviewing!® seminar to define the competency differences between Managers and Leaders.
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Apr 1991
Gender Differences Impact Interviewing and Hiring
A study of high-level executives by the executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates revealed a key finding that counters the common perception that women rarely advance to top corporate levels because they lack leadership qualities.
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Apr 1991
Avoid Jargon Confusion in the Interview
Remind your Interviewers of the jargon in your company or industry that can confuse candidates whose native tongue is not English.
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Apr 1991
Hiring for Diversity at the Top
Diversity can be achieved by training managers to make sure they recognize and set aside cultural and gender stereotypes that obscure good staffing decisions.
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Apr 1991
Implications of the New Immigration Law
The 1990 immigration law was an important step in creating a larger pool of talent for American business to draw on.
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Apr 1991
When Does 100-85=32?
A widely quoted figure is that 85% of the net growth in the labor force from the years 1985 to 2000 will be women, minorities and immigrants. This leaves only 15% who will be white males.
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Apr 1991
Interviewing Egypt's Mubarek
As is true with interviewing anyone from a culture different than ours, understanding cultural values is the starting point to understanding the individual.
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Apr 1991
So You Have An Interview Tomorrow?
Tomorrow you have an interview and it's been months since you conducted one. Here are seven quick ideas from our Effective Interviewing!® training to get you ready.
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Apr 1991
Discrimination Detectives
Imagine civil rights groups using testers posing as job applicants to combat employment discrimination. That's just what the EEOC is requesting.
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Apr 1991
Empowering Team Interviewers
A sign we see in the maturity of a work team once it is trained in interviewing skills is a willingness to delegate the selection process to some members of the team and not require that a prospective candidate be interviewed by every single member.
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Apr 1991
Hiring Amidst Layoffs
It should be easier to hire when so many layoffs are occurring, right? Wrong. While whole layers of management are going out the window, a confusing trend is developing. Despite layoffs, firms are finding some jobs hard to fill.
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Apr 1991
Responding to Declining Productivity
To improve quality hiring, always compare candidates to the behavorial-based job description you develop ahead of the interview.
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Apr 1991
More Ammunition for Candidates
Knock 'em Dead by Martin Yate joins the endless list of books for candidates on how to control, win and dominate the job interview.
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Mar 1991
Introducing the Interview EDGE® Newsletter
Between our staff and clients, we know about interviewing. Our goal with this newsletter is to share this knowledge and help keep you sharply focused for a critical management activity.