In-Person Interviews, Blood Pressure and Cholesterol, Brotherly Love in Tri!
Business
Preparing for the In Person Interview
Now that your Phone Interviews are complete, you’ve narrowed your search to the top 2-3 candidates. It is time to invite them in for the on-site interview. The on-site interview is extremely time intensive which is why we are only inviting candidates that we believe are great fits. If you don’t have at least 2 great candidates at this stage you should repeat the earlier stages of the attract and filter process until you have at least two candidates to interview.
Why do even more work to have at least two great candidates come to the on-site interview? You are tired and you want this position filled. Your readiness to fill the position combined with only having one candidate left will heavily influence you to look past the candidate’s flaws just to get the position filled. Not to be crude, but I’ve been told that the last girl at the bar starts to look pretty cute at closing time (I heard that in a country song). Don’t put yourself in a position that will encourage you take an OK candidate when you know you need an A player.
We already created a Job Scorecard and an Interview Template/Score Card based on that template. Go here to review those steps. Using the interview template you’ll break the interview day into two separate interviews.
The first interview will be all about looking for the skills and capabilities needed to excel at this position. With your score card in hand you will walk the candidate through their work history looking for the skills and capabilities required. Again, the book “Who” by Smart and Street offers a great set of questions to drive the conversation. Tweak these questions for your organization and the position, but make sure you cover the major areas that their questions cover. Ask these questions about each listed job on the candidates resume. If they have a lot of jobs on their resume, you can batch their experience into “segments” and ask the questions about each “era” of experience. Here are the questions they suggest:
- What were you hired to do?
- What accomplishments are you most proud of?
- What were some low points during that job?
- Who were the people you worked with? Specifically:
a. What was your boss’s name? How do you spell that (lets them know you will check references and really acts as truth serum!)? What was it like working with him/her? What will he/she tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?
b. How would you rate the team you inherited on an A, B, C scale? What changes did you make? How would you rate the team when you left? - Why did you leave that job?
Who should do this interview? The person who will be this person’s boss must take responsibility for the hire and their success, so they must drive the interview process. But, I recommend including another person in this interview. The hiring manager’s boss or someone from HR will work. It is always difficult for a manager to hire someone that is so good they could take their job, but for your organization to succeed they must do just that. That is why you must have the second person in the room.
Follow Google’s lead and require your leaders to hire someone smarter than them, that will challenge them and that they will will learn from.
Don’t let a B manager bring in a bunch of C’s. Next week, we’ll cover the 2nd interview of the in-person interview day.
Health
How Blood Pressure and Cholesterol Work Together
You know I’m all about “leading indicators” when it comes to business. I’ve been working hard to figure out the leading indicators for a long and healthy life. After my total cholesterol edged over 200, I learned more about cholesterol ratios. Good news – my ratios are good.
All of these heart risk calculators want to know your blood pressure as well as your cholesterol levels. How do cholesterol and blood pressure work together? Turns out that high blood pressure is a significant risk indicator for all the things we want to avoid (stroke, heart attack, kidney disease and even sexual dysfunction – yikes!). Surely, we need to avoid this high blood pressure stuff!
But I still didn’t understand how high BP increases heart risk. Thanks to a great article from the American Heart Association I figured it out! Turns out that over time, the force and friction of high blood pressure damages the delicate tissues inside our arteries. Then, bad cholesterol (LDL) sticks to these tiny tears and begins to clog up our pipes! So, we’ve got stay focused on keeping our cholesterol and our blood pressure low.
The great news is that the methods to reduce your blood pressure are similar to those for reducing cholesterol. Just do these and you’ll get a health two-fer!
- Eat more veggies
- Reduce your salt intake
- Manage your stress
- Avoid tobacco and alcohol
- Maintain a healthy weight
Life, Fun, Whatever
Awesome video of some brotherly love a the Triathlon World Series in Mexico. Jonny Brownlee was suffering badly at the end of the race. His brother, Alistair, practically carries him and pushes him over the finish line so he can finish 2nd and preserve his ranking. Amazing 2 min video!
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