Frequently I find that companies are falling into the trap of comparing candidates against each other when interviewing to fill an open role. I tend to find that this hints at a core problem with one of the most important functions for any company: the ability to find the correct talent for the team.
Why is comparing candidates a problem? You may be thinking “I want the best candidate that I can get”, but it is exactly this thinking that is hiding the underlying problem. What you really want, is the correct person for the role and the team. The “best” candidate you would hire based on comparisons might be worse than no candidate, you could lose a great candidate while spending time interviewing other candidates, or you could just hire a candidate that made you feel better with their soft skills.
To avoid these traps, before posting the job or interviewing a single candidate, you need to have a clear understanding of what would make someone successful in the organization and what would make someone successful in the role. It might seem like a good idea to make a wishlist of every piece of technology they might have to work with, certificate requirements, and years of experience and each item a candidate has is 1 point or a weighted amount of points. But, is this really a clear understanding of success?
Take a look at the list of technology, maybe they are all related to 3d character design. A better requirement at this point might not be the exact technology, but to look for someone that has the ability to learn a new set of tools and has an understanding of the processes for discovering the idea for a new character, sketching the character, creating the character in a computer, and iterating based on feedback at different stages; the exact process they follow might change, but the end goal is the same.
At this point we know they can do the job, but do we know if they can do the job on the team yet? This is a little bit harder as it requires an understanding of the culture they would be working in. It also requires understanding of the current team composition and what the team needs in the composition to improve the overall effectiveness. Maybe the current team generally follows the leader and the perfect candidate would be someone that would raise their hand and challenge the leader to offer a different suggestion to help improve the team’s ability to handle conflict and think about alternatives or maybe the current team tends to like to push technology to the max and needs someone that generally likes to slow down and is comfortable expressing that.
After understanding both the technology capabilities and the culture fit, we no longer have to compare candidates against each other, but against our vision for what that candidate will do.