Unlocking the Full Picture: A Four-Step Guide to Confident Hiring Decisions

April 30, 2024

Are you frustrated because you feel like you’re not getting the full picture from job candidates?
Do you feel stuck because you don’t know the right questions to ask candidates to assess their personality fit for the role?
Do you have that dreaded feeling that you’re going to make poor hiring decisions because you are missing critical information about your candidates?

We’ve all been there. There are so many questions you could ask a candidate with so little time. Sometimes no matter which questions you ask you’ve got that nagging feeling you’re still in the dark about the candidate and you feel like it’s a big risk to move forward. In many cases this happens because we haven’t done a proper role analysis at the start and we’re not using the right tools during the process, leaving us with questions and answers, but not the right questions and answers.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could get the full picture from candidates?

How relieved would you feel if you had all the right questions you needed to ask candidates in interview?

Can you imagine how incredibly capable you’d feel if you were able to get all the information you needed from candidates and felt confident that you were making good hiring decisions?

Let me take you through an example you are probably familiar with. You have a job description and an idea from your observations about what you need in a new hire. However, your colleagues also have their views and they differ from yours. You get together and share a range of questions that each of you want to ask the candidate.

The first interview comes and goes and as the panel re-groups it suddenly dawns on you that you are only now becoming clearer on what you need in a candidate.

As you revisit what you need you tell the panel you need someone who is going to be decisive, assertive and influential. Another panel member says you need someone who is going to be able to collaborate but also able to make the hard calls. Another panelist says you need someone who has a vision but is also capable of being across the detail. You chime in again and tell the panel you also need someone who is confident but not a risk taker, responsive yet also calm in a crisis. That’s quite a profile. You’re now overwhelmed, confused and concerned.

The panel has been too ad hoc in coming up with what you need in a candidate. Wouldn’t it be far better to agree on the behavioural style you’re looking for in a candidate before you start the process so that you are not wasting your time in the first interview with panelists working at cross-purposes?

Enter Step 1 to Unlocking the Full Picture: Define the preferred behavioural style.

Of course, you need a tool to do this and so the Performance Intel Assessment uses the Facet5 personality assessment as the tool of choice. In this case, with guidance from Paul, the panelists would create a Role Definition template they can agree on, which creates a preferred behavioural style for the role. Now you have a clear, unified definition of the required behaviours and you are much better prepared to ensure you get the right information you need from candidates and much better positioned to find the candidate who will most closely match the requirements to be effective in the role.

You decide to take two candidates forward for second interview but by the end of those interviews you still feel like you don’t really know the candidates. You’re not sure their answers to behavioural questions are a true indication of how they are going to respond to critical scenarios in the role.

Enter Step 2 to Unlocking the Full Picture: Candidates complete the Facet5 personality questionnaire.

Having defined the preferred profile via the Facet5 Role Definition Questionnaire, you have an opportunity to compare the candidates to that preferred profile to gauge their degree of fit to the role. As such you invite candidates to complete the Facet5 personality questionnaire. This step is critical because without it you will be unaware of each candidate’s natural style, which explains a lot of their actual behavior. You would then receive two Facet5 reports – the Facet5 Personal Profile Report and the Facet5 Audition Report.

Personality data gives the hiring panel a very good read on how candidates will respond on each important behavioural dimension across multiple scenarios over long periods of time. Behavioural interview responses will usually only give you their response to one scenario and this is likely to be the scenario they have cherry picked to give you the best impression of them.

Enter Step 3 to Unlocking the Full Picture: the Performance Intel Assessment Debrief.

This is where you’ll truly see the full value of this process. I take you the through the Facet5 reports and explain to you the results, going in-depth to give you a comprehensive understanding of each candidate’s natural style and helping you analyse each candidate’s degree of fit to the role so we can identify strengths and potential gaps. By the end of the debrief you will walk away with incredible insights into your candidates and confidence you won’t have experienced before in knowing exactly who your candidates are, how they will approach the role, and who is the right fit.

Enter Step 4 to Unlocking the Full Picture: Determining the interview questions

This is where we work together to define behavioural questions based on the Facet5 results. This can happen in the same conversation as the Performance Intel Assessment Debrief and is specifically focused on defining the best questions to ask candidates to gauge whether they have the capability to bridge the gap between their style and the preferred style. Rather than just hoping you can get some good information from the candidate, this process is data-informed and targeted, helping you home in on exactly the right questions to ask to get those crucial final data points you need for a complete picture of the candidate.

Hiring people has never been easy. We’ve typically relied heavily on interviewers to somehow come up with good questions to ask candidates in the hope we’ll end up with some good information. With the process and tools I have outlined in Unlocking the Full Picture: A Four-Step Guide to Confident Hiring Decisions, you take the gamble out of hiring and have a clear, scientific, efficient and very effective way of getting the right information to make the right hiring decisions.