Online interviews and web conferencing
Posted by D D Ganguly on Tue, Jul 07, 2009 @ 03:22 PM
If our hiring process was the same as rest of our industry then we would build an organization like the rest of the industry. We aspire to do better. We want to attract exceptional players and build a great team. And I can guarantee you that Dimdimmers are exceptional not only in terms of skills but also in terms of being a team.
It is my belief that organizations fail not because they lack vision. Look around you and you will find that for each successful company that had a great vision there are dozens of failures with the same vision. Organizations fail because they cannot execute. And organizations cannot execute not because of the lack of talented individuals but because these individuals are not able to play as a team. The main reason for great players not playing as a cohesive force is culture. So the cultural fit between the individual and the existing team is of utmost importance.
When it comes to interviewing there are two different philosophies for determining cultural-fit between the candidate and the company. The first is called the behavioral method. In this method the candidate is asked a series of insightful questions, such as - “Are you a team player?”; What does the interviewer expect to hear? “No, I am not a team player?”; Some interviewers get sophisticated by asking, “Give me an example from your past experience when you played as a team player.”; Again, what’s the expectation here? Does the interviewer expect the candidate to say, “I am sorry I am drawing a complete blank on that one?”; If the candidate does say that then the interviewer can see that there isn’t an alignment between the company’s goals and the candidate’s goals. But a smart candidate knows what the interviewer wants to hear. And so the interviewer is faced with a dilemma - “I am being told this answer because the candidate knows that this is what I want to hear? Or is this really true?”; The interviewer can never make a positive decision based on the answer - unless he’s a trained psychoanalyst and most of us are not.
The second method is a task oriented approach. This is what we use at Dimdim. In the first conversation, the candidate is not asked any questions. He’s urged to ask us questions with the second conversation in mind. In the second conversation, the candidate delivers a presentation on a certain topic. For example, a potential VP of Sales might be asked to present a sales plan for the first six months. An engineer might be asked to learn and present on a topic that he knows nothing about.
We have seen that candidate’s questions tell us much more about her than the answers to those insightful behavioral questions. Which should not be surprising because questions are more interesting than answers - aren’t they?
During the presentation (which of course, is done using the candidate’s Dimdim Free web conference account) we look for 3 abilities. 1. Communication ability 2. Ability to learn 3. Ability to execute. We are usually able to decide within the first few minutes whether we have a hire or not.
This is the process we have followed for every hire. We know it works and btw, we are looking for a great VP of Sales.