Ten Expert Tips for Smarter Hiring

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Time invested in the hiring process can win your organization a top performer who ultimately helps it grow — or, just as easily, a poor fit who doesn’t stay long, leading to additional strains on resources. Employers today are, as ever, under pressure to fill open roles quickly, but the consequences of a poor choice can ripple through an organization for years.

Each hiring decision shapes not only who joins your team but also how your company defines itself — and as AI’s capabilities evolve at a rapid-fire pace, it can be tough to envision exactly what the job description of today’s new hire, let alone yours, might entail in the months and years ahead. No wonder hiring can seem like a gamble, even in an employer’s market. How do you spot real potential in a sea of polished resumes? How do you distinguish between someone who shines on paper and someone who will actually strengthen your team? And how do you make the right call when the stakes — time, money, culture, performance — are so high?

From attracting top talent by building a stronger employer brand to asking probing interview questions to weed out AI-generated responses, the ideas and insights gathered here from MIT SMR experts can make each step of the hiring process more focused, intentional, and effective.

1. Deliberate phrasing can elicit thoughtful responses to standard interview questions.

“I’ve amassed a large data set of questions that leaders use as a work-around to avoid the pat and predictable answers that job candidates recycle in response to standard hiring questions. Some leaders have come up with ‘bank shot’ questions to get around the polished facades that people present in interviews so that they can better understand who candidates really are.

“To categorize all of the interview questions I’ve heard over the years, I sorted them into what I call essential questions — the core questions that the interviewer is trying to answer about the candidate as part of their key checklist. For example: Are they self-aware? Are they a team player? Do they have a strong sense of personal accountability and responsibility? In an ideal world, it would be more efficient to simply pose those questions and get an honest yes-or-no answer. But many people are quite savvy about offering up answers that they think the interviewer wants to hear.

“The bank-shot questions below require meaningful and authentic answers that candidates can’t take from a cookie-cutter script, even if they’ve been asked them before.”

Read the full article, “Eight Essential Interview Questions CEOs Swear By,” by Adam Bryant.

2. Determine candidates’ true capabilities with probing follow-ups.

“Strategically, interviewing in the age of AI also requires effective follow-up questions to uncover deeper indicators of genuine expertise. Can they explain how to do something, not just what to do? Do they know why something works? Do they know when, where, and for whom something is more effective? Have they considered other approaches? And are they aware of the drawbacks of their approach? Those types of questions can push potential hires to go beyond their rehearsed or surface-level answers. …

“By strategically probing candidates’ initial answers, interviewers can go beyond simply what candidates say they have done in the past to uncover the underlying thought processes behind their decisions and actions, which is crucial for two reasons.

“First, only those who have internalized their KSAOs [knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics] can provide insightful answers that genuinely reflect their abilities and potential job performance. Therefore, assessing these deeper indicators is important regardless of whether candidates have used generative AI for interview preparation, though such queries can certainly help interviewers spot candidates who are reciting AI-generated responses without comprehending them.

“Second, these deeper indicators reflect skills that are among the most important for workers globally, according to the World Economic Forum’s ‘Future of Jobs Report 2023.’ Whether termed critical thinking, reasoning, or judgment and decision-making, these are uniquely human capabilities that AI cannot replicate. Ensuring that candidates possess abilities that add value beyond what technology can currently achieve is fundamental to any hiring process.”

Read the full article, “When Candidates Use Generative AI for the Interview,” by Navio Kwok.

3. Character can outweigh a candidate’s competencies.

“Research has found that unlike competencies, which vary between organizations and often between levels of the organization, character attributes are universal. And while competencies may be evaluated independently of each other, character attributes are interconnected and need to be considered holistically. To do this well, hiring managers and HR leaders need to understand what character is, how it manifests, and how it can be developed.

“When hiring based on competence, the classic approach is to use structured interviews and associated assessment rubrics to evaluate what someone can do or how they would do it. Every person being interviewed during a particular process is assessed in the same way to minimize interviewer bias and foster objectivity. In contrast, character is about who someone is and how they became that person and thus is unique to the individual. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, with a standard list of questions, for evaluating someone’s character. Instead, character assessments are more free-flowing and personalized conversations. They are objective and rigorous yet also honor individual differences. …

“The individual differences arise because every person’s life story is different when it comes to the development of their character — and we can honor that uniqueness. Because character is not static but is a habit being developed over a person’s lifetime, assessment of character can be ongoing and repeated, whether it be in hiring or promotion decisions.”

Read the full article, “Make Character Count in Hiring and Promoting,” by Mary Crossan.

4. Show that you have what the best candidates are looking for in their next opportunity.

“Prospective employees gauge whether a new job will be meaningful to them based on cues in the recruiting process. Those cues don’t just influence a candidate’s decision to take a job; we found that those cues also affect a person’s sense of meaning throughout their entire career with the company. By highlighting the potential for meaningful work during the recruiting process, leaders can win over top talent and prime them to be more engaged and productive, and to stay longer. …

“Meaningful work isn’t just the absence of red flags but the presence of green ones. … These green flags don’t come from descriptions of the job or details of the compensation package. They are found in the stories and examples that current employees share about their own work at the organization. Here’s how you can emphasize those green flags during the recruiting process.”

Read the full article, “The Three Green Flags of Meaningful Work,” by Wes Adams and Tamara Myles.

5. Burnish your brand to attract top candidates.

“Many companies view the hiring process as the need to search for and find the right person — it is about ‘acquiring talent,’ after all. But talent acquisition involves more than matching the right person to the right role. It also involves positioning your company as the best choice among the employers you are competing against — which highlights the importance of developing an employer brand that candidates believe will fulfill their needs and aspirations better than any other option in the marketplace. …

“Like great consumer marketing, effective employer branding requires deeper insight on candidate and employer needs alike, combining market segmentation, target identification, talent research, and proposition development, as well as a well-crafted brand narrative and consistent experience. Below, we share our step-by-step process on how to develop a superior employer brand, based on the winning practices of many of the world’s leading employers.”

Read the full article, “A Five-Step Guide to Improving Your Employer Brand, by Kimberly A. Whitler and Richard Mosley.

6. A culture of worker autonomy will attract some candidates and discourage others.

“When companies reduce the depth of their hierarchies, the remaining managers’ spans of control widen, and as a result they can no longer micromanage their direct subordinates but must delegate more decision-making to workers. Those employees should then be able to — and indeed must — organize their own work to a greater degree. Individuals who particularly enjoy this novel autonomy and thrive in flatter environments typically rank high on conscientiousness, show a high need for achievement, and push new initiatives and projects.

“At the same time, agreeable individuals help ensure that self-organizing does not result in teams that cherry-pick the tasks that inspire them and avoid work that does not specifically benefit or appeal to them. In other words, a team must include people who are willing to perform supportive tasks on behalf of everyone — say, organizing the holiday party. …

“There is not necessarily one best structure that encourages an organization’s most-skilled workers to stay; among talented staff members, different structures appeal to different individuals. …

“Given the move to a less-hierarchical structure, what types of individuals will be drawn to the company and which will be prone to leaving?”

Read the full article, “People Follow Structure: How Less Hierarchy Changes the Workforce,” by Markus Reitzig and Kathrin Heiss.

7. Lateral moves can benefit both employees and their companies.

“While often overlooked as a lever for talent, offering employees lateral moves can be an untapped gold mine for companies. By adopting leading practices for internal mobility, companies can better deploy existing worker capacity and benefit from more successful hires who hit the ground running in new roles with greater institutional knowledge, higher levels of engagement and retention, and even improved gender equity. At the same time, employees benefit from meaningful skill and career development opportunities that better align with their goals, making this a win-win for employers and employees alike. …

“Tapping internal talent in the workforce is a meaningful opportunity for companies facing growing skills gaps, hiring pressures, and retention risks — especially in an economic downturn. As more organizations follow the lead of outperformers to invest in internal lateral mobility, companies that overlook this strategy risk becoming less competitive for talent in a market in which career opportunity matters more than ever.”

Read the full article, “What Outperformers Do Differently to Tap Internal Talent,” by Nithya Vaduganathan, Ben Zweig, Colleen McDonald, and Lisa Simon.

8. Out-of-the-box talent management software can limit the customization of talent strategies.

“If talent is to confer competitive advantage, it’s essential for key decision makers to come together and discuss how talent should be defined so that it’s relevant to the organization, and what criteria, evaluation, and decision processes are most appropriate in context. While it may seem convenient to delegate to vendors the foundations and parameters of talent discussions, doing so can risk missing the subtleties and nuances that make up a holistic understanding of talent for a specific organization or the organizationwide talent puzzle.”

Read the full article, “Who’s Making Your Talent Decisions?, by Sharna Wiblen.

9. A shift to skills-based hiring begins with culture change.

“Skills-based practices — which start with skills-based hiring and include practices related to promotion and retention — won’t yield positive impacts overnight. Rather than representing the workforce version of a health fad, skills-based practices are more akin to making long-term healthy lifestyle changes: interventions requiring consistent, concerted effort, with outcomes that are hard to observe in the very short term. …

“Making good on the promise of a skills-based approach to hiring hinges on longer-term shifts in the mindsets, culture, practices, and procedures that underpin the day-to-day activities of employers. Developing healthy hiring habits will be neither fast nor easy. …

 

Skills-based practices won’t yield positive impacts overnight.

 

“From reconsidering how skills or competencies are measured, documented, and shared to rebuilding talent pipelines to make them more accessible to individuals from a wide range of educational and economic backgrounds, there are many changes that need to be made. But none, perhaps, is as tricky as changing culture. After all, buying a new tool or platform to support skills-sharing is simple compared with changing hearts and minds.”

Read the full article, “Why You Can’t Hire for Skills Without a Skills-Based Culture,” by Maria Flynn.

10. Identify and deploy your most skilled interviewers to boost hiring success.

“Very few organizations have considered who their best interviewers are, and as a result, they may be leaving money on the table by failing to optimally allocate or manage their interviewers. Such inefficiencies can mean higher turnover, a lower quality of hire, and a more expensive hiring process.

“By tracking which candidates received job offers, accepted those offers, and turned out to be good hires — defined as those who remained with the company for at least 90 days — we linked those candidate outcomes to the interviewer who had made the hiring recommendation.

“We set out to determine whether we could identify any interviewers who were doing a better job at identifying and attracting good hires than others. The data revealed the answer to be a resounding ‘yes’: There was significant variation in interviewer performance along each dimension we measured and, even more important, an interviewer’s performance in previous interviews was a strong predictor of his or her performance in future interviews.”

Read the full article, “Do You Know Who Your Best Interviewers Are?,” by Lalith Munasinghe and Kate Gautier.