The Best Way to Hire for Good Conversation Skills

Have you ever experienced being part of the management team in a customer contact or any customer-facing environment?

If so, you very well know that one of the most important metrics is Customer Experience.

Now how many times have you been in a situation where the biggest pain point in your team was poor conversation skills?

How many times have you tried to create skill builders to improve the ability of your employees to provide great Customer Satisfaction? Have you ever been frustrated to find that a lot of these didn’t work out as planned?

How many times has the blame been put on the recruitment team for not having an effective hiring process?

If you can relate to the above questions, and one of the main problem areas that you’re looking to solve for is how to create a better hiring process, then I’d like to share with you what is probably one of the best ways to hire for good conversation skills.

I call it “Speed Dating Audition Hiring.”

I just called it that but I didn’t invent it, really. It’s the innovative hiring process being used at Menlo Innovations – a software company based in Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

How it works is no secret as there’s actually an article at INC that describes this in detail.

But the gist of it is that instead of the traditional hiring process where you invite interviewees for scheduled interviews with canned questions that they can anticipate and provide canned responses for, and then interviewers and hiring managers spend hours and hours to finish interviewing 50 or so candidates, how it works is as follows:

1. 20 to 50 candidates come in all at the same time for a 2-hour interview schedule in a large venue with tables and chairs
2. The interview process will be like a speed dating event where the candidates must get to talk to at least 3 other candidates during the 2-hour period, as if they’re auditioning for a role
3. All the interviewers and/or hiring managers have to do is to set the ground rules and discussion points, and then they go around the venue to observe and take notes
4. Once the 2-hour event is over, the candidates can leave, and then the interviewers and/or hiring managers can sit down for the next 3 hours or so to deliberate on each candidate

The deliberation process is simple too. They just go through the list of candidates one by one, and based on their notes:

1. If they unanimously say yes, then the candidate can move on to the next phase of the hiring process, which can be an exam or a traditional panel interview
2. If the unanimously say no, then the candidate will not be hired
3. If they have a discrepancy, where some say yes and some say no, then that’s the only time when they need to discuss, deliberate, and decide.

Ultimately this will save a lot of time for both the interviewers and interviewees, and shorten the entire hiring process as well.