I agree also with you – I pray for a good candidate in advance of every interview I conduct. There’s nothing more dispiriting than spending days on end meeting people who don’t quite measure up on the skills needed or who have the skills but won’t ‘fit.’

My thought process arises out of the belief that the phrase “screening and selection” is a misnomer. If I have 1 job and 100 applicants, my task as a hirer is to separate the wheat from the chaff. I do this with the CVs and I do it again with the various stages of the interview process.

Is it selection or elimination? Is the glass half-full or half-empty? If 2 or 3 people emerge from the first interview as clear front-runners, am I selecting them or am I eliminating th others? Whatever language one uses to describe the process, the end result is the same. I simply look for the best tools to make the process as effective, inexpensive and humane as I can.

I don’t put a line through a candidate’s name with any malice – it’s just Darwin’s survival of the fittest. Nature is very cruel a lot of the time and unfortunately, a professional selection process mirrors that …

When I’m hiring ‘hard skill’ people, I’ll generally agree a handful of must-score-highly questions and a handful of eliminators with the other interviewers.

These must be based on deep knowledge of the key success factors and measurables for the role within the specific organisation.

I don’t like being a slave to any system, but I have found that the quality of our hiring decisions has significantly increased since we started using these simple measures.

For ‘soft skill’ jobs, I will typically fill out a summary sheet on the candidate as (s)he is being escorted from the room. I’ll assign marks out of 10 under 10-12 different headings and then put the sheet aside. When all the interviews are over, I can then use a weighting scale for the summary sheets and have a fairly hard ‘score’ for each candidate.

Again – a bit clinical, but we have found this very effective in finding square pegs for square holes and our success rate (and reputation!) as external interviewers has risen dramatically as a result.

My general feeling about the candidate usually fulfills the role of “eliminators.” Although it stars on reasonably high level, quite often after a quarter it’s already fallen flat on its face and I go quickly to the end of the interview.

The thing which is interesting in what you’ve written is your scoring system. While you take notes you just write down scores next to every pre-prepared question? Or you supplement them with loose notes with your opinions?

I quite agree with you – a neutral, open mindset when meeting candidates is essential. In common with most hirers, I spend a great deal of time trying to whittle my shortlist down to candidates who are going to not waste my time in the interview room.

Like most interviewers, I hope against hope that every candidate who walks in the door is going to be the answer to my needs. The problem is, most of them aren’t – hence the ‘eliminators.’

I tend to use this approach when I am dealing with large numbers of similarly qualified, similarly experienced candidates. Anyone scoring less than 6 out of 10 on three of my eliminator questions is usually a goner. I find it particularly useful as a “red light, orange light” tactic for use with graduates.