The 2nd In-Person Interview, 7 Ways to Reduce Stroke Risk, Sleeping at Work
Business
The Second In-Person Interview
The first in-person interview focused on determining if the candidate has the skills, experience and track record to be an A player on your team. The second interview of the day will focus on cultural fit and allow more of your team to get involved in the interview process.
Peer interviewing is a big part of making great hires that will add to your culture. If you did not include a peer in the first interview, now is your chance. A lot of people struggle with adding peer interviewing to their process. Don’t be one of those people. Great companies like Southwest Airlines, Doubletree Hotels and Jetblue Airlines swear by the practice. Peer reviewing shows how much you value the contributions of your employees in strengthening your culture and gives them ownership of the new hires. It also ensures a great start for your new hires – they already know several people and know that they “fit” the organization.
First, make sure you have given the candidate a chance to relax after the first interview. It was long and fairly intense. Give them a tour, have a group take them to lunch. Just get them out and in a more social environment for a while. They’ll relax and meet new people. Everyone who interacts with the candidate should be familiar with the job scorecard and fill it out after they spend time with the candidate. You can get amazing insights from how a candidate treats the people working the front desk and the wait staff at lunch.
The top half of your scorecard focused on skills and experience, the second half focuses on cultural fit. This second half of your scorecard should have your core values listed with a brief description of each. Some people rank their values, others count them equally. You decide what is best for your organization. You’ll need to have questions you are asking and attributes you are looking for related to each core value. These are all on the interview template and relate back to the job scorecard.
Doubletree Hotels asks this question – “Tell me about a time you broke the rules for a customer or fellow employee” to find out if a candidate has the value of “flexibility” that they are looking for. It is a great question because nobody wants to admit to breaking rules, but for someone who craves flexibility it is almost a victory for them to show how breaking a rule resulted in a better outcomes.
Who should do the interviewing? This is where you must include peers who are A players in the interview process. You can break up sections of the interview template among multiple people to get different perspectives. The more A players you have accessing the candidate, the better your results will be.
Caution – do not make the candidate answer the same question multiple times. Have each interviewer responsible for a particular section of the interview template. It comes off as rude to make them repeat themselves multiple times throughout the day.
That is it for the in-person interview day. Next step is to tally the results from the interviewing team and reach consensus. We’ll cover that next week.
Health
7 Ways to Reduce Your Chance of Having a Stroke
In previous posts we’ve talked about how high cholesterol and high blood pressure work together to increase your risk of a heart attack. Heart diseases is the number one cause of death in the US. Strokes are the 5th leading cause of death, but the number one cause of serious, long-term disability. Approximately 795,000 people suffer strokes each year and about 140,000 die from strokes each year.
I want to build a long and healthy life – as I’m sure you do. So, we need to live our lives in a way that minimizes our risks of bad stuff like strokes. Here are the 7 ways provided by the Harvard Medical School.
- Lower Blood Pressure – aim for less than 120/80.
- Lose Weight – BMI of 25 or less.
- Exercise More – Exercise contributes to losing weight and lowering blood pressure, but is also an independent stroke reducer. The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise.
- Drink! – Not exactly, but some studies show that having one drink per day may lower your risk. Probably not worth picking up the habit, but a good reason to slow down if you are a drinker.
- Treat Atrial Fibrillation – If you have it, get treated.
- Treat Diabetes – It damages blood vessels, making clots more likely to form inside them.
- Quit Smoking
So far in our Health posts we’ve covered how to lower our cholesterol, blood pressure and stroke. You’ll notice that many of the same actions reduces the risk of all 3!
Life, Fun, Whatever
Sometimes we just need a little extra rest…
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