A Great Interview Doesn’t Always Mean A Great Hire

A Great Interview Doesn’t Always Mean A Great Hire

Some people are really good at interviews.

They’re confident. They have polished answers. The conversation flows easily. You leave thinking, “This is the one.”

But being good at an interview and being good at the job they’re interviewing for are not always the same thing.

The opposite can happen too. A strong candidate may be nervous, take longer to answer, or simply be less comfortable talking about themselves.

The challenge is separating what felt good in the interview from what actually tells you the person can do the job.

DECIDE WHAT COUNTS AS EVIDENCE

Before the first interview, identify three to five things someone truly needs to succeed in the role you’re interviewing for, but challenge yourself to go one step further than just that.

Ask yourself:

What would convince me that a candidate can actually do each one?

If the job requires someone to handle competing priorities, maybe you want to hear a specific example of how they managed several deadlines.

If problem-solving matters, you might ask them to walk you through a problem they had to figure out without much direction.

If customer service matters, you might want an example of how they handled an unhappy customer.

Now you’re not just interviewing for a list of qualities. You’ve decided what evidence you’re looking for before a candidate even walks through the door.

ASK QUESTIONS THAT ARE HARDER TO REHEARSE

Consider these two questions:

• “Are you good at dealing with difficult customers?”
• “Tell me about a difficult customer situation you handled. What did you do?”

The first question is easy to answer correctly. The second gives you something to evaluate.

But even common interview questions can produce rehearsed answers. That is where follow-up questions become useful.  Some strong follow-up questions could be:

• What did you personally do?
• Why did you choose that approach?
• What happened next?
• Would you handle anything differently now?

You’re not trying to catch the candidate off guard. You’re trying to understand what’s behind their answers.

DO NOT GIVE EVERY INTERVIEW DETAIL THE SAME WEIGHT

A candidate can be:

• Easy to talk to
• Confident
• Experienced
• Enthusiastic
• Well prepared

But none of those are automatic proof that the person can succeed in a specific role.

After an interview, separate your notes into two simple groups:

• What I observed – “I really liked talking to her” is an observation.
• What the candidate demonstrated –  “She gave two examples of calming upset customers and explained exactly what she did” is evidence related to the job.

Both may influence your impression. Only one tells you something specific about the skill you were trying to evaluate.

GIVE CANDIDATES THE SAME CHANCE TO SHOW YOU

Interviews will naturally take different directions. While you don’t need to follow a script word for word, every candidate should have the chance to answer the same core questions about the skills that matter most for the job.

Otherwise, one candidate may spend 20 minutes talking about relevant experience while another interview drifts into an easy conversation about shared interests, and when it’s time to make a decision, you’re left comparing candidates based on completely different information.

A short list of consistent questions gives you a better comparison while still leaving room for follow-up questions and natural conversation.

WRITE DOWN YOUR OPINION BEFORE THE GROUP TALKS

If several people interview a candidate, ask each interviewer to record their thoughts before discussing them as a group.

Why?

Imagine the first person says:

“I thought she was fantastic.”

The next person may start looking at their own interview through that lens.

The same thing can happen when the first reaction is negative.

Writing down individual observations first gives you a record of what each interviewer actually thought before hearing everyone else’s opinion.

Then compare notes.

You may find that several interviewers noticed the same strength. You may also find that one person heard an important example that others missed.

CHANGE THE FINAL QUESTION

When it is time to make a hiring decision, there is one question worth changing.

Instead of:

“Who did we like best?”

Ask:

“Which candidate gave us the strongest evidence that they can succeed in this job?”

That doesn’t mean personality, communication style, or experience stop mattering. It does mean you’re asking for actual evidence instead of letting a good conversation make the decision for you.

Hiring will never be a perfect science. Interviews can’t tell you everything about how someone will perform once they start working, but a strong interview process can help make sure your decision is based on more than who happened to interview best.

A great interview can leave a strong impression. A great hiring process gives you something stronger to base your decision on.

Do Your Employees Actually Understand Their Benefits During Open Enrollment?

Do Your Employees Actually Understand Their Benefits During Open Enrollment?

Open enrollment usually comes with a lot of information.

Plan options. Premiums. Deductibles. Deadlines. Emails. Forms.

Employers may spend weeks getting everything ready and making sure employees receive the information they need, but sending employees the information is only half the job.

Did you communicate the information that they need to make a decision?

That is a different question.

START WITH THE DECISIONS, NOT THE DOCUMENTS

Benefits information is often organized around the documents an employer needs to provide.

Try looking at it from the employee’s side instead.

What decisions does the employee actually need to make?

They may need to decide:

• Which medical plan fits their needs
• Whether to add a spouse or dependent
• Which optional benefits they want
• Whether they need to change current elections
• What they need to complete before the deadline

Establish a list of decision points like the ones above.  Once you know them, you can look at your open enrollment communication and ask whether employees have the information they need for each one.

1. SEPARATE “WHAT’S CHANGING” FROM “WHAT’S STAYING THE SAME”

Employees who already have benefits may not need another introduction to every plan.

They probably want to know one thing: What’s different this year?

Did premiums change? Did the deductible change? Is there a new carrier or network? Did you add or remove a benefit?

Put those changes somewhere employees can find quickly. Then provide the full plan information for anyone who wants or needs to dig deeper.

2. EXPLAIN COSTS BEYOND THE PAYCHECK

The premium coming out of each paycheck is easy to compare.

It is also only one part of what a health plan may cost an employee.

Employees may also need to compare deductibles, copays, coinsurance, out-of-pocket limits, and provider networks.

If your comparison only shows the payroll deduction, you may be downplaying the scale of the financial decision that they are actually making for their families.

3. TELL EMPLOYEES WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DO NOTHING

This deserves more than a sentence buried in an enrollment email.

What happens if an employee misses the deadline? Do current elections continue automatically? Does the employee lose certain benefits? Are there benefits that must be elected again?

Make the answer easy to find.

“No action required” and “you must make an election” are two very different messages.

Employees should not have to search through several pages of benefits information to figure out which one applies.

1. GIVE EVERY MESSAGE ONE JOB

More communication does not always mean better communication. Sending several long emails with the same information can make employees more likely to tune them out. Instead, give each message a job.

One email might explain enrollment dates and what is changing. Another might show employees where to compare their options. A reminder email might focus only on the deadline and what happens if they do nothing.

Employees do not need every detail in every message. They need the right information at the right time.

5. DECIDE WHO SHOULD ANSWER WHICH QUESTIONS

Employees are going to have questions during open enrollment.

Decide ahead of time where different types of questions should go.

Your HR team may handle enrollment questions. Your broker or carrier may be better equipped for detailed plan questions. Another resource may handle technical problems with the enrollment system.

Additionally, make sure managers know where to send employees.  A well-meaning manager can easily become an unofficial benefits expert and give an employee incomplete or incorrect information.

Managers do not need to know every answer or try to answer every question. They just need to know where to send employees for the right answers.

6. DO A 60-SECOND EMPLOYEE TEST

Before sending an open enrollment message or enrollment materials, give it one final test. Pretend you are an employee seeing the information for the first time.

Can you find these answers in about a minute?

• What changed this year?
• What decisions do I need to make?
• What will this cost me?
• What do I need to do?
• When is the deadline?
• What happens if I do nothing?
• Where do I go with questions?

Keep in mind that if an answer is difficult to find, adding more information may not solve the problem. You may need to make the important information easier to see.

COMMUNICATION IS PART OF THE PROCESS

Open enrollment problems are not always caused by missing information.

Sometimes all the information was technically provided. The problem was that an important detail was buried or unclear

For open enrollment, the goal is not simply to say everything. It is to make sure employees can find what they need, understand what matters, and know what to do next.

Before The Holiday Rush: 7 Payroll Details Worth Checking This Fall

Before The Holiday Rush: 7 Payroll Details Worth Checking This Fall

The end of the year can get busy fast.

Employees take time off. Holiday schedules change. Bonuses may be paid. Businesses bring on seasonal help. Then year-end reporting is right around the corner.

Before all of that hits, fall is a good time to check a few payroll details.

But don’t fall into the trap of only looking for obvious errors. Some of the most useful payroll reviews uncover things that look right on the surface but may not be working correctly behind the scenes.

Here are seven places worth a closer look.

1. LOOK BEYOND EMPLOYEE ADDRESSES

It makes sense to ask employees to confirm their name and address before year-end tax forms are prepared but take the review one step further.

Have any employees moved to a different state? Are employees working somewhere different from where they were hired? Did an employee change their name but never update the required records?

An address change can be more than a mailing issue. Depending on the situation, where an employee lives and works can affect payroll taxes and other employer requirements.

Don’t just ask employees, “Is your address correct?” without also asking yourself how this change whatever it is effects the bigger picture.

2. CHECK PTO RULES, NOT JUST PTO BALANCES

A balance can look correct while the rule creating that balance is wrong.

Before holiday PTO requests pick up, check how your system is actually handling PTO.

Are employees earning time at the correct rate? Does PTO stop or change at certain limits? Are different employee groups following different rules? What happens to unused time at year-end?

If your payroll or timekeeping system calculates PTO automatically, compare the system setup to your actual policy.  Automation only helps when the rule behind it is correct.

3. TEST HOLIDAY PAY BEFORE THE HOLIDAY

Do not make the holiday payroll your test run.

Before the first holiday arrives, confirm who receives holiday pay, how many hours they receive, and whether working on the holiday changes their pay.

Then test how those rules will actually be entered or calculated.

This matters even more if hourly, salaried, full-time, part-time, or other employee groups are treated differently.

A policy can be clear on paper and still be set up incorrectly in payroll.

4. WORK BACKWARD FROM PAYROLL DEADLINES

Bank holidays and office closures can shorten the normal payroll window.

Instead of only marking paydays on the calendar, work backward.

When does payroll need to be submitted? When must time cards be approved? When are payroll changes due? Who is responsible if the normal approver is out?

That last question is easy to miss during the holidays.

An earlier deadline does not help much if the one person who approves payroll is already on vacation.

5. DECIDE HOW EXTRA PAY WILL BE HANDLED

Year-end bonuses, commissions, incentives, and other extra pay can create last-minute payroll questions.

Before sending a list of payments to payroll, confirm what is being paid, when it should be paid, who approved it, and how it should be treated.

Do not assume every extra payment works the same way.

Giving your payroll team the information early creates time to identify questions before the payroll is already being processed.

6. REVIEW MANUAL PAYROLL CHANGES

If you only have time to review one group of payroll changes, start with the ones someone entered manually.

Look at manual adjustments, overrides, new deductions, pay-rate changes, PTO corrections, and other items that required someone to change the normal setup.

Manual changes are sometimes necessary. But they are also worth reviewing because they may not follow the same automatic rules as the rest of your payroll.

Be sure to ask at least two questions:

• Was the change entered correctly?
• Was it supposed to be temporary or permanent?

That second question can uncover settings that were meant for one payroll but never got changed back.

7. FIND YOUR REPEAT CORRECTIONS

Finally, look at the payroll problems you’ve already fixed this year.

Do managers repeatedly miss time card approvals? Does the same type of PTO correction keep showing up? Are hours regularly adjusted after they are submitted?

Look at the pattern because a recurring payroll correction is information. It may be telling you that a deadline is unclear, a system setting is wrong, someone needs training, or the process itself needs to change.

USE FALL AS A PAYROLL TEST RUN

You do not need to audit an entire year of payroll records before the holidays.

Instead, use the quieter weeks before the year-end rush to test the parts of payroll that are about to get more complicated.

Check the rules behind PTO and holiday pay. Review manual changes. Work backward from holiday deadlines. Look for repeat corrections.

You aren’t just looking for something that’s wrong today. You’re thinking ahead and looking for something that could become a much bigger problem during the busiest payroll weeks of the year..

The Most Expensive Business Problems Usually Don’t Start That Way

The Most Expensive Business Problems Usually Don’t Start That Way

Most business problems don’t start with alarms going off.

They start with something small.

A new employee starts before everything is ready. A manager has an important conversation but never writes it down. Someone notices something odd on payroll and assumes it’s fine.

Nothing terrible happened that day, so everyone moves on.

That is often how a small process problem gets the chance to become a much bigger one.

THE MISTAKE MAY NOT BE THE BIGGEST PROBLEM

Every business makes mistakes. A missed step, wrong entry, or forgotten task does not automatically turn into a major problem.

What matters is how quickly someone catches it.

Imagine a payroll error causes an employee to receive an extra $100. Catch it on the first payroll, and you have a $100 problem to solve.

But what if nobody catches it?

The same error happens again. Six months later, you may need to figure out how many employees were affected, how much money is involved, when the problem started, and how to correct it.

However, the original mistake is still the same.

What changed is the amount of time it went undetected.

We spend a lot of time trying to prevent mistakes but catching them quickly can be just as important.

DOES YOUR PROCESS KNOW WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG?

Most business processes are built around how work is supposed to get done.

Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Done.

But there’s at least one other question worth asking:

What tells us when the process did not work?

Completing an I-9 may be part of onboarding. But what tells you when one is missing?

A manager may be responsible for employee documentation. But who notices when it never gets completed?

Payroll may be reviewed before it’s processed. But would that review catch the same error twice?

This creates a detection gap. A detection gap is the time between when a problem starts and when someone notices it. The longer that gap lasts, the more opportunity a small mistake has to grow.

5 SIGNS YOU MAY HAVE A DETECTION GAP

1. The same problem keeps coming back.

Fixing the result is not the same as fixing the cause. If the same mistake keeps happening, something in the process may be allowing it.

2. You usually find problems by accident.

An employee asks a question. Someone happens to notice a strange number. A manager stumbles across a missing document. Those are good catches, but accidental discovery is not a reliable safety net.

3. Nobody knows who checks the final results.

Completing a task and checking that it was completed correctly are different things. If everyone assumes someone else is checking, errors can sit unnoticed.

4. One employee is the control system.

If your answer is, “Susan would notice that,” you may have more risk than you think.

Experienced employees often know what looks wrong. But what happens when Susan is on vacation, changes roles, or leaves the company? If one person is your only safeguard, some of that knowledge needs to become part of a permanent and repeatable process.

5. You can fix the problem, but you can’t tell when it started.

Imagine finding an incorrect payroll setting today. You know how to fix it going forward, but can you tell when it changed?

Yesterday? Three months ago? Last year?

If you can’t determine how long a problem has been happening, figuring out its true impact can be much harder.

LOOK FOR THE DETECTION GAP

Choose one process you rely on regularly and ask:

• What could go wrong?
• What would alert us that it happened?
• Who would notice?
• How quickly would we know?
• Could we tell when the problem started?

Those questions go deeper than asking whether your business has a process. They tell you whether the process has a way to catch itself when something goes wrong because the fact is that mistakes are going to happen at some point, and the faster you can catch the mistake the less costly it will be.