The Interviewer (agency manager) provides more information than the candidate does
Ideally, the candidate should give 4 times as much information as the interviewer.
Far too often, we start to sell the job before we have found out the information we need to know to allow us to make quality judgments.
One of the largest areas of distortion from sales managers is that, as trained sales people, they are excellent at getting people to agree with them. They have spent a lifetime getting “yes” and leading clients using sales techniques.
This often means that when they are conducting selection interviews, they inadvertently tell the candidate how to answer the question by the way they phrase it.
Frequently they go on to express surprise when the candidate later fails and will make comments like,” He got everything right at interview and told me all the correct things, what happened !"
When managers select people, they must always use a totally different approach to selling. The onus is on the candidate to sell himself to us, without us giving them too many clues about what we are looking for.
Immediate answers to questions don't always provide all the necessary information
An example of this is a candidate who will tell the interviewer ‘what’ he has done when the more important facts may be ‘why’ he did it, ‘how’ it was done, and what he has learnt.
Interviewers must learn to probe for further information using open and closed probes. The follow up questions are far more valuable and important in an interview than the first, or opening question.
Interviewers frequently make decisions far too early in the interview
"This person looks OK." Far too often the interviewers mind is made up on the basis of “first impressions”.
He collects a small amount of data, decides whether he likes the person sitting in front of him and stops being objective with his questioning. These first impressions are frequently formed within two or three minutes of the start of the interview. The interviewer then immediately start looking for the information to support the decision he has already made