Michael Blakely
Michael Blakley is Co-Founder of Equitas, inclusive interview intelligence software designed for fair hiring and helping companies build diverse teams. You can ask him all about in...
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Who are you?
Hi, I'm Michael Blakely, the co-founder of equitas Interview Intelligence Software, designed specifically for fair hiring. And ask me a question about inclusive interviewing.
Why should we keep using interviews?
So for me, there's a couple of reasons. Interviews are the most efficient way to learn as much as you can about someone, and they're the most accurate way as well. There was a recent meta-analysis of Hunter Smith. It was redone interviews and structured interviews came out on top. Now the accuracy level is going to frighten you because they're only 42% accurate whenever it comes to hiring someone who's going to be successful within that role. But there's no other way to learn about someone, their background, their skillset, their behaviours other than interviews. It is quite quick. It is sort of time-wise. You can make sure that you're not taking up too much of your employee's time by running huge assessment centres and long processes as well. So for interviews, it's all about accuracy and speed.
If I can take away one thing about interviewing what should it be?
The one key takeaway is that an interview is a snapshot in time. So you've got a very short amount of time to try and get to know someone as quickly as you can and work out if they're going to be a good fit for the role and the organisation. So it's a two-way street. It's not just you assessing the candidate skills. They're going to assess whether they want to work there or not on top of that. So the two things to keep in the back of your mind whenever you're interviewing is one, capture as much data as you physically can. Make sure that you're grabbing all interview notes or using technology to do that as well. And the other side, it's candidate experience. You need to sell the role, you need to sell the organisation. You need to make sure that they actually want to work there and try and be really transparent with them. Don't oversell the role. Make sure that they know the day-to-Day reality of what they're getting themselves in for. And there's more chance of them actually accepting the role if you do that.