All the right questions: do your homework, pry into personality and other key interview moves to get inside the head of a job applicant.

Interviewing and selecting the right people to form part of your company or organization's teams is one of the most important contributions you can make to your firm. How do you rate yourself in this critical area? Whether you consider yourself to be an interviewing pro or in need of honing your skills, BUSINESS MEXICO presents a useful reference guide for making your future candidate selections.

DEFINING THE JOB PROFILE

The job profile is the anchor document in the interview and selection process. It describes what it is you are looking for, and it will establish all the standards against which you will be able to measure prospective candidates. This document should cover the following points: the behavioral demands of the job, the values needed in the job and the required knowledge, experience and skills.

Depending on the job's seniority, these should not extend beyond five or six points at most; but they should be linked to particular levels: strategic, tactical and operative. If the interview is going to make sense, you must know specifically what has to get done in the job and how you are going to measure performance (e.g., percentage change, dollar volume) over time (e.g., monthly, annually).

When working on defining the job profile, try asking yourself questions along the lines of, "If this job is being done successfully, what will the results look like in a year's time?"

Another important part of the job profile that must be done by any manager is mapping the position's critical relationships. These are usually relatively easy to identify and would normally include the following: immediate supervisor, direct reports, co-workers, internal customers (those who receive job output), internal suppliers (those who provide job input) and the company's external customers and suppliers.

Your analysis here should identify all of these critical relationships by name. A useful exercise at this stage is to recall particular challenges or problem areas in the job that have been evident in past years. However, it is important to decide if such problems were the result of behavioral styles or a conflict arising from competing job demands. In the interview, it is crucial that you frame some questions that highlight a candidate's interpersonal and management style which will probe this area. For example, you might inquire, "When you worked as ... what was the most problematic relationship that you were required to manage? What approach did you use?"

Behavioral demands are critical in any job and should also be measurable as far as possible. So, in defining the job profile, you should list those key skills that have to be exhibited on a daily basis. These might include, for example, communication, decision-making, problem solving and supervision. Many managers who interview job applicants fail to pry enough into this vital area of recruitment. Well-crafted questions in the behavioral area can be revealing. Try devising some interview questions such as, "If I were to ask your boss (or any of your direct reports) to describe to me how you managed other people, what would they say?"

Taking into account a company's or organization's work values is an essential part of creating a job profile. This is the area of your corporate culture which will usually be a reflection of what the leaders in your organization think and feel is essential for ensuring success in your company. Of course, a company's culture can vary between different sites and even departments, but it is important to be able to identify the work ethics and behaviors of your corporate leaders.

Clearly, some of your organizational values might be unstated (these do not appear on the mission statement), but whether they are stated or not, it is nevertheless crucial to be able to describe those values which will be required for success in any given job. Again, in the interview, you will want to include some questions that are designed to tease Out a candidate's feelings about corporate cultural concerns. Questions such as, "What were the essential corporate values of the company that you are leaving? Were they adhered to? If not, why not?" can provide a mine of information about how candidates view this fundamental area.

To complete the job definition process, you will need to establish the right mix and balance between the required skills, experience and knowledge that the job requires. Most jobs usually demand an easily identifiable battery of core competencies. It is essential that any list of qualifications and experience for the job be prioritized and divided into two basic categories: a list of "must haves" for the job, and perhaps a longer list of additional attributes or preferences.

COMPILING THE CANDIDATE PROFILE

The candidate profile is the mirror of the job profile, although unlike the latter, it is not necessarily a single document. The job profile states clearly what you want. The candidate profile will tell you what it is that each candidate for the job is bringing to the table.

The candidate profile is a compilation of data that will emerge from both information provided by the candidate (resume, application form, cover letter, etc.) and from information obtained from the interview itself. In the interviewer's toolbox should be a battery of questions designed to gather the relevant information. These will be applied equally to all candidates. Once the candidate profile has been completed, it can be compared to the job profile. Only then can the interviewer make an informed decision about each candidate's suitability for the job. As the candidate's profile should mirror the job profile, you will need to gather data under the same headings.

Past results and career expectations link in to the priority result areas of the job profile. What is the candidate looking for in terms of a new position and what are the proven results that he or she is bringing from previous jobs? Interview questions about a candidate's strengths, weaknesses and recent performance evaluations are indicated in this area. Ask about the type of problems that they enjoy solving, their most important work accomplishments and the factors that contribute to them feeling satisfied or dissatisfied in their work.

In elaborating the candidate profile, it is important to analyze a person's work relationships, an area that is obviously related to the critical relationships part of the job profile section.

In the interview, focus should be on the candidate's interpersonal ability to manage these relationships. Questions of the following sort should be devised: "What have been some of your important accomplishments with people?"; "How do you motivate your team?"; "Which relationships in your past jobs have been satisfying/demanding/challenging?"

How does the candidate naturally behave on the job? How does he or she make decisions, manage or solve problems? It is helpful to ask each candidate to describe for you their style of working, communicating or managing people. Ask them to use as many key words as possible when answering this type of question.

You will also want to check if there is any mismatch between a candidate's preferences in regard to corporate values and what has been established in the job profile. You could ask, for instance, "What specifically are you looking for in terms of values and culture in the next company you go to?"

Every candidate will bring a unique mix of experience and skills to the job. Your goal is to define how accurately what is being offered blends with what the job needs. This is probably the most difficult part of the data-gathering exercise. Your success in getting the information you need about a candidate will be directly proportional to how well you frame the questions at the interview. These can be designed to be as factual and as hands-on as possible: "Tell me specifically how you would ..."; "Please explain in detail how you ..."; "What will you bring specifically from your last job to help in this one?"

MAKING THE DECISION

At this stage, you will probably have narrowed your list of job candidates down to a short list. The final phases of the evaluation and decision are designed to identify the candidate who will be offered the job, a process that can be broken down into four steps.

The first step consists of integrating and evaluating all the information you have accumulated from each candidate. This data covers all the relevant sections of the job and candidate profiles.

In the next step, your short list of candidates should be graded with regard to how closely they meet the requirements of the job profile. For each candidate, you will end up with a list of matches and non-matches that will need to be addressed in any selection decision. This is when a final interview may be necessary for those candidates still under active consideration.

The third step revolves around determining how any differences between the interview profile and candidate profile will be rectified. We identified the candidate profile as a statement of what each applicant is bringing to the table. When deciding how any non-matches between the two profiles are to be resolved, consider how far the company is willing to go in terms of training, coaching and fulfilling expectations. It is important that these responsibilities for development and training are agreed unambiguously between the company and the job applicant.

The final step and the one that surely offers any manager the most relief is making the job offer. Any job offer should concentrate on selling the advantages of the selection decision to both the candidate and the company. It should explain why the fits between the job and candidate profiles are appealing and how the corresponding gaps will be filled. Salary and benefits should also reflect this match and be subject to modifications as the gaps are closed and the corresponding results on the job are achieved.

It should be clear by now the success of this disciplined interview and selection process revolves around how well you do your homework in defining the job profile. Poor input at that stage will only guarantee a poor decision at selection time, or at least a decision based more on intuition than on objective data. Only conscientious efforts will be rewarded.

A well-constructed job profile will be the launch instrument for controlling the development cycle of the person appointed within the organization. It will not only be used in the selection process, but it will be continually referred to in induction programs, on-the-job training, coaching and performance reviews.

Clive Bayne ([e-mail]) works in business and management consultancy in Mexico.