Want to avoid that? Avoid these three deadly interviewing sins. Fortunately, it's not that hard.

Deadly Sin #1—Failure to Prepare

Before you start recruiting you need to do two things: Clarify what you are looking for, and decide how you will determine whether a candidate has it.

"I want to start interviewing yesterday!"

Managers are always in a hurry to fill their empty spots, so there's always pressure to instantly start posting, advertising, and interviewing.

Not so fast. That's a recipe for disaster. As the old saw goes, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."

Similarly, if you jump into the hiring process without defining what you are looking for:

• Good people won't be attracted to apply—they'll sense that if the announcement is only vaguely defined then the job’s responsibilities might also be.
• Unqualified people won't self-select out, so you'll have to deal with hordes of them.
• Most important, you'll have no meaningful basis on which to judge the candidates.

Before launching a hiring campaign, take some time to determine exactly what you need. What abilities, skills, credentials, and knowledge are required? Talk to incumbents, talk to the people who work with the position, review the job description.

When you're clear on that, craft a concise statement of qualifications for posting and advertising, and to give it to agencies and other sources of candidates.

How Will You Know a Candidate Is Qualified?

Next, you need to figure out how you'll know if candidates have what you are looking for. What interview questions will help you find out?

If you start to interview before taking this step, you will:

• Spend your interview time thinking up questions instead of listening to what the candidate is saying
• Leave out critical questions (like salary expectations, willingness to relocate, possession of a required degree or certificate)
• Fall into the conversation trap of discussing sports and the weather, or worse—family issues and other topics that could spell legal trouble
• Lose consistency. When you go to compare candidates, you'll have nothing to go on because they'll have answered different questions. If you focused on technical issues with one, and management issues with the other, how will you compare the two?

Deadly Sin #2—Falling Prey to Stealth Discrimination

The second thing that happens without a plan is that you can easily end up discriminating, even when you didn't intend to. For example:

Playing favorites ("I hire people I like."). With no good selection strategy, you tend to end up with someone you "feel good about"— probably someone who is just like you. This has the obvious effect of keeping out people who aren't like you—in other words, discriminating.

Stereotyping ("X’s can’t X."). When you don't have a good system for measuring candidates, it's easy to fall back on stereotypes. For example:

"Women aren’t strong enough."
"Men aren’t compassionate enough." 
"X’s aren’t good at X."

Patronizing/paternalizing/maternalizing ("X’s shouldn’t X."). This is a special form of stereotyping that seems well-intentioned, but is, in general, discriminatory.  For example:

"Terry is a city person, and won’t want to relocate."
"Parents with young children shouldn’t travel."
"Women shouldn’t travel alone."
"Pregnant women can’t be subjected to pressure."

De facto ("Gee, I just never seem to hire X’s"). One of the more subtle forms of discrimination is called “de facto.”  In these situations, there is never an intention to not hire or promote certain types of people—it just never seems to happen. 

For example, a hiring manager says he's eager to hire women in a certain job, but, although many qualified women have applied, of the last 50 hires, all 50 were men.

In the next issue of the Advisor, we'll cover the third deadly interviewing sin, talk about how to become a drillmaster interviewer, and deliver a tip about a powerful new tool for the small HR department.