The candidate selection and interview process for hiring great people has always confounded me, as it does many others.

I've heard the concept of "structured interviewing" (these guys should add their guide to Wikipedia - the article is only a stub) bantered around in previous lives, but never really dug into it much. However, it appears that Will Price and Mark Tsimelzon, founder and President of Coral8, have really put some thought into this structured interviewing thing with their post "A Practical Guide to Structured Interviewing."

Like any complex process, the interviewing process is best structured and analyzed as a sequence of phases. At Coral8, we have four phases: email interview, phone interview, the first in-person interview (with 1-2 person), the second in-person interview (3-4 others). Whether you have the same stages or not is not important. What's important is having a clear understanding of a) why you are having each phase b) what you are trying to accomplish, and c) how you are going to evaluate the results. It helps if all the interviewers share this understanding, and keep the process as consistent across candidates as possible.

I'm sold on the concept.! Ok, who do we hire next?

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That's quite an orderly process. It would be an improvement over the unstructured interviews given by unskilled interviewers that most companies rely on for their hiring decisions.

I wonder what kind of puzzles they use for non-technical positions? Presumably not the reasons for round manhole covers.

Nathan,

I was thinking the same thing! I guess, as a marketer myself, I'd ask them to do something like a targeting exercise (how would you locate members of the company's target market) or whip up a presentation on making a sandwich or something (to judge their creativity & thought flow) or to even write a simple marketing/biz plan for how they would run things if they were hired.

A good marketer CAN think on their feet and come up with something, and an interviewer should be able to really expect something.