In short, 6 variables in the interview process explain a candidates’ performance over time: unstructured interview questions, reference checks, years of work experience, a work sample test, cognitive ability, and structured interview questions. The last three (work sample test, cognitive ability, and structured interview questions) explain a full 81% of the hires performance over time.
Unstructured interviews? Only 14%.
I think this sums up nicely why anyone should consider building a new interview process. The current way most companies hire means they are only 14% likely to get an A-player on board. But if we shift to hiring for aptitude, we can have an 81% capture rate.
81%!!!
In a nutshell, once you stop worrying about the skills and experiences your job candidates have and start focusing on their ability to solve the types of problems your company faces daily, you will build a team of A-players that can be deployed on almost any project, put in front of any customer, and learn new skills that will carry your company into a successful future.
So how do you go about hiring for aptitude? Let’s build the process from the ground up.
1. List Your Problems
Get out a pen and paper and list your problems.
List the problems your company runs into on a daily basis. List the problems your customers bring to you. List the kinds of problems your engineers grapple with when building your companies’ products. If you are hiring for a specific position (e.g., Software Engineer), list the problems they are going to have to solve for foreseeable projects and in general.
Don’t just focus on the problems you need for one position. List ALL the problems you face.
Do all this BEFORE posting your job.
Without these problems listed, you really don’t know who you are hiring. Your job posting may be specific, but it will be specific to a title and not ability (e.g., Engineering Manager, Documentation Specialist, etc.) You’ll find yourself looking for skills and experiences. But we want to look for the aptitude to learn and grow and build a better company with you.
Your list is going to be the basis for your aptitude test, your structured interview questions, and your entire hiring strategy for bringing on the A-players you need to succeed.
2. List Your Candidates Required Problem Solving Skills
With a good understanding of the problems you are faced with on a daily basis, think about the kinds of problem-solving skills your candidate will need to have to assist in resolving those challenges.
Be careful with this one… you’re not listing raw skills like “knows how to use Microsoft Office” or “can program in Java,” you’re listing problem-solving skills such as persistence, out-of-the-box thinking, drive, ability to find new information quickly, flexibility, etc.
Remember, if you ask for candidates with specific skill sets like Microsoft Office, you’ll get them.
What you won’t get are the candidates that know how to solve your problems using faster/better/cheaper tools. What you won’t get are candidates who know that your problem may already be solved. What you won’t get are candidates who can think independently, take appropriate risks, and drive forward to get the job done.
3. Map These Problem Solving Skills to Questions
Here is where we begin development of your interview and the aptitude test.
For our “Hacker Aptitude Test,” we went searching for Mensa type puzzles that represented the kind of thinking we needed in computer hackers, namely persistence, creative thinking, and the ability to unstick themselves from a path of thinking that’s not working.
For your aptitude test, you will use your listed problems above to think about abstract questions you can ask candidates that will give you a good feeling for whether they will be able to solve your problems, and any future problems your company can throw at them.
Let’s take software engineer as an example. In the past, you may have specifically asked for a “Java programmer with a math background and 5 years of experience.” Now you are looking for someone who can build math software that runs on any computer. Your test may have some of the following types of questions to find just those candidates:
- Math problems of varying difficulty levels
- An open-ended question asking the candidate to list programming languages they know will create programs for any computer, or where to find such programming languages.
- Show them a program one of your current employees has created that is similar. Ask your candidate to explain what’s happening. More importantly, ask your candidate to make changes to the program to make it more efficient or explain why it can’t be made so.
4. Create Your Test
Now comes the easy part. Creating your test.
I recommend having multiple sections to your test that embody the different characteristics you’d like to see in your candidates.
Put all your questions together in a single test that you will give to each new job applicant that comes through the door. Weight each test question based on how important each problem is to your business.
Our test looked like this, yours can be structured similarly:
Section 1 – Skills
Here we asked specific questions about the candidates hacking skills, computer programming skills, computer architecture skills, etc. We wanted to know what they already knew about computer hacking.
You will ask questions unique to the skills for which you are hiring. Find out what they already know about the types of problems your company has to solve.
Weight answers in this sections low… no more than 15% of the total test. The thing about skills is that you can always train your candidate for the specific skills you need them to have. You are more interested in the next two sections.
Section 2 – Cognitive Ability
Questions in this section need to get to the root of how candidates think. This is a bit of an IQ test, with IQ-test-like-questions.
If you can, create cognitive questions that align to the types of problem-solving skills you defined above. For example, if out-of-the-box thinking is required for your work, find some questions that exercise this thinking.
Weight this section high. Over 25%. You want candidates that have quality thinking when faced with unknown problems. For specific work-related problems, we should look to the next section.
Section 3 – Problem-Solving
You are asking your candidates to do one thing in this section: prove that they have the ability to solve the types of problems related to your work.
Take some time to design questions that force your candidate to “perform” the kind of work they would have to perform on the job. For our software engineering example, it’s easy… ask them to create a computer program (either on paper or live).
For other types of jobs, ask them to describe how they would solve a particular kind of problem you are faced with. Better yet, have them do it live.
Score this section high. Over 25%. You want candidates that show an aptitude for doing the type of work you’ll expect them to do on the job.
Section 4 – Experience Questions
The final section gets to the bottom of their experience. You’re not going to weight this section high. Less than 15% I’d recommend. Their previous experience is less important than their future performance. However, this section will help you gauge whether the experience they listed on their resume was accurate and relevant to your job requirements.
Section 5 – Structured Interview Questions
Drill your candidate here with questions you’ve designed up front to get to the bottom of their character. You want to find out what they’re all about, how they work, when they get frustrated, what they do about it, etc.
If you’ve had problems with past employees, ask them specific questions that will indicate whether similar problems will surface with this employee.
If you’ve had great experiences with past and current employees, put those questions on here too.
At the end of this section, you want to have a solid understanding of how the candidate will interact with your team, how they will work under pressure, how they will deal with unknown situations, etc.
Weight this section high, over 25%. Teamwork and character are far more important than years of experience or skills that can be taught.
Final Thoughts
Having gone through the above steps, you should have a solid framework for a new interview process that lands you A-players.
Yes, it will take some up-front work and planning. It will take thought and development. But the time you will save when your new employee hits the ground running will be orders of magnitude more than the time you will lose developing this interview process to begin with.
Hiring great employees cannot be an afterthought. It takes foresight and dedication. I hope this guide has given you the tools you need to stop bringing good people onboard and instead start bringing on the best.