A Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Person for Every Job Free

Rosenberg’s A Managers Guide … restricts discussion of selection to one method – the face‐to‐face interview, and the purpose of the book is to give managers the tools and understanding they need to improve the way they select on this method. The three steps to this process are outlined on page 2, “Analyzing the core responsibilities of the position; Determining what skills, knowledge, experience, attributes, and competencies are needed to meet those responsibilities; Generating appropriate questions that, when answered, will provide solid evidence of the candidate’s possession of the required qualities”. In other words, job analysis and job specification, followed by person specification, followed by preparation for the interview. Rosenberg argues that the “ … book will demonstrate that all you need is ten good questions and 40 minutes to do the job”. The first chapter shows a (20‐page) transcript of a “typical interview” and the dialogue reproduced between the interviewer and candidate is interspersed with useful comments on common mistakes made by interviewers (failing to allow the candidate to tell their story, talking too much – i.e. more than 20 per cent of the time, mistaking the interview for a social event, etc.). Throughout the book Rosenberg uses such dialogues to bring out learning points.

The next chapter shows common pitfalls or errors made by interviewers, e.g. being put off or impressed by potentially irrelevant details such as age or education. It also defines the ideal candidate (36‐7), who we are told has six characteristics:

• 1.

  (1) continuing interest in learning;

• 2.

  (2) flexibility;

• 3.

  (3) the importance of being a team player;

• 4.

  (4) self‐starter;

• 5.

  (5) seeking feedback;

• 6.

  (6) a systems point of view.

It was not obvious to me why every candidate for every job should have these characteristics and the last criterion “need for a systems point of view” came across as paying lip service. This was not detailed anywhere else in the text, or the appendix on sample questions to test different competencies. Nor was it mentioned in the index, though the author’s, “skills and experience in systems analysis” were plugged in the foreword. Chapter two also shows a useful distinction between behavioural questions (e.g. “describe how you typically go about learning a new skill”) and puzzle questions (e.g. “if you were told you had to learn a new skill, how and where would you start”) (p. 53) and claims that, “[m]ost hiring mistakes are made because the interviewer has relied on too many puzzle‐type questions and not enough behavioural questions” (pp. 50‐1). Though it is unclear what the empirical basis for this assertion is, it seems intuitively sensible to place higher value on what people have actually done than on what they would claim to do.

Chapter three introduces the Master Match Matrix^TM, which is a competency‐based framework for rating candidates. It consists of a list of prioritised competencies, generated from the job specification and person specification. Candidates should be scored immediately after the interview according to the interviewer’s assessment of how well those competencies were demonstrated in the interview. If one had eight competencies, a candidate has a maximum possible score of eight for the first ranked competency, seven for the second, and so on. For the lowest ranked competency, candidates could only score one or nought. There are multiple benefits to using such a system, principally, that it forces you to focus on the requirements of the job, rather than the CV, or other peripheral details. I would suggest it is more important to learn and understand this underlying principle than to learn how to reproduce the matrix, although it is easy to put the matrix into practice, and I personally think it makes for a useful tool. Of course using the matrix (or any method of selection) cannot always tell you with accuracy what the relative merits of different candidates are, because no selection method is perfect. This would go without saying, except that Rosenberg claims that the matrix has “solved these problems” (p. xv).

Chapter four has advice on structuring the interview. One concept I thought useful here was the role of an initial structuring statement (p. 91). Chapter five outlines the role and character of particular types of question and questioning, and this theme is developed in chapter seven, where examples show how interviewers can adopt particular strategies to elicit more information. The second appendix has a useful list of questions to assess particular competencies (communication, sales, strategic awareness, ability to develop others, etc.).

Chapter six, “listening visually”, is devoted to the subject of body language, and contains some particularly sweeping statements (p. 140), “Candidates’ words may lie, but their body language always tells the truth”. The framework developed in chapter eight, “interviewing for personality fit”, is similarly crude, splitting people into three types “power‐oriented”, “achievement‐oriented” and “affiliation‐oriented” in a vulgarisation of McClelland’s (1961) need theory. Rosenberg tells us (in one of a number of unsubstantiated statistics):

The last two chapters will be largely irrelevant for those practitioners outside the USA as they cover issues related to employment law, as indicated by the disarmingly titled chapter nine: “What’s legal and what’s not.”

The cover offers four selling points: using the Master Match MatrixTM; how to structure the interview; effective questioning techniques; and understanding the candidate’s personality type. If I were to say where I think the book’s strengths lie, it would be in more general terms. It offers a good outline of the role of different types of questions, correctly emphasising the overwhelming importance of the requirements of the job. A Manager’s Guide also offers a practical account of the role of the person specification and job specification. The book makes good use of transcribed dialogues between candidates and interviewers to illustrate learning points. One particularly sound and well expressed idea for me was that the common practice of relying on a candidate’s resumé rather than a job/person specification as the basis for an interview, means you have a “moving target” when it comes to making comparisons between candidates.

Rosenberg says in the preface (p. xvi) that the book is “ … a practical – not a theoretical – approach to interviewing … ”, but to me that is not enough of a disclaimer to allow such sweeping statements and crude generalizations as in chapter six (p. 137), “ … when you see negative body language but the response is positive. Then you know the candidate is lying”. Chapter eight (180) introduces the tripartite typology (“power people”, “affiliation people”, “achievement people”), thus:

Of course there are many strategies for dividing people into groups that do not require careful thought and analysis, but a lot of these are illegal when it comes to selecting people. My immediate inclination is to comment that any mechanism that requires “very little time to learn and almost no effort to apply” is going to be of very little reliability and almost no validity. Incidentally, one omission from A Manager’s Guide was that the (hugely practical) terms validity and reliability were not mentioned. Rosenberg’s tendency to oversimplify may partly be a reflection of style. The tone of the book is chatty, and at times it feels as though you are listening to someone with a wealth of experience sharing (or, more accurately perhaps, selling) insights, anecdotes, hunches and particular prejudices about the way they think interviews should be conducted. Seen in this light it should be possible to set aside irritation at the way some of the ideas are expressed, and make a mental note to qualify some of Rosenberg’s bolder claims or oversimplifications. There is plenty in the book to provide food for thought, and judicious, thoughtful use of it would be likely to improve someone’s interviewing technique.