Not even for employees. Mike’s recent analogy between interviewing for a prospective business partner or employee and “interviewing” for a prospective life partner is apt. Unfortunately, it overlooks one very important point: interviewing doesn’t work. You know that I don’t believe interview-style dating works, but now I’m going one step further. Traditional interviewing doesn’t work even as a means of forming successful business relationships.
The great irony is that as more and more people are deciding that traditional routes of meeting people are too difficult or too slow and adopting the interview-style shortcut of personal ads, dating services and the like, employers are waking up to the fact that the old-fashioned interviewing process doesn’t work even in the workplace. High profile employment experts and recruitment specialists like Chicago’s Ed Ryan are showing businesses how to avoid the high costs of traditional interviewing and hiring processes. And the costs are high: studies show that on average, a “bad hire” costs the company about three times his salary. That, too, is right in line with making a bad relationship choices.
The reasons the interview process fails are similar, too: the “interviewer” gets focused on the wrong traits, the “interviewer” works to see what he or she wants to see, and the “interviewer” unwittingly feeds the right answers to the prospect. The first point is the best possible argument for throwing out the wish list. Most of us, it turns out, populate our wish lists with things that aren’t really important. In the employment context, this is typically specific experience. In the dating world, it may vary from person to person. The bottom line is the same, though: it isn’t the cold, hard data that makes a person compatible, in the workplace or in our lives. Stop and think about your best relationship, about what made it really great. You didn’t just say “she really loved dogs” or “he was an outdoor person!”, did you?
Our second downfall is giving too much benefit of the doubt. Of course, writing off everyone who is imperfect in some way would mean writing off everyone, but there’s a difference between accepting imperfections and turning a blind eye to them. Whether we’re interviewing to fill a job or dating as part of a quest for a romantic partner, we want to fill the position. We want the person sitting across the desk (or table) to be “right”. Maybe he had a great resume. Maybe she makes us laugh. Maybe he’s just really good looking. For whatever reason, we’re not screening so much as we are (consciously or not) working toward making it work. Often, that means glossing over the red flags and putting the most positive possible spin on what we do hear. And that’s a decision that can cost a bundle. It costs us in dollars, productivity, time and employee morale in the office; it costs in most of those same areas in our personal lives. Bad relationships take a toll, especially when we’re unwilling to see them for what they are early on.
Finally, we give away the answers. In the employment context, a good interviewer can avoid this once he’s conscious of it. On a date, the interview is mutual, so it’s much more difficult. It’s hard to be yourself and share information about yourself without simultaneously telegraphing what you want to hear from the person sitting across from you. In a job interview, elaboration by the interviewer is like handing out a cheat sheet at the door, but on a date you can’t make the other person do all the substantive talking–and you shouldn’t. The best you can do is try to overcome the “glossing over” and really hear it when that lovely lady sitting across from you is simply parroting back a concept you just fed her.
At least, that’s the best you can do if you’re scanning resumes (in the form of dating profiles) and interviewing for a life partner. You might be able to do better with a better system, just like employers are finding that they can.
