About GravityPeople GravityPeople is a leading recruitment outsourcer providing direct-hire and hourly recruiting services. Established in 1998, GravityPeople has been serving the San Francisco Bay Area Technology community for over decade. Now with a national focus, GravityPeople provides strategic technical recruiting services to clients across North America.

1. Be a Hiring Machine.
A Strategic Interviewing Guide for Technology Companies
by GravityPeople
GravityPeople
147 Natoma St
San Francisco 94105
415.982.5500 v
415.358.5995 f
gravitypeople.com
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010

2. Be a Hiring Machine
Hiring is composed of four processes: Find, Filter, Face and Finish.
Find: Job Posting, Marketing, Direct Search, Job Bank Data-Mining and Research
Filter: Resume Filtering, Phone Screening and Candidate Marketing
Face: Interviewing and Candidate Marketing
Finish: Offer Generation, Candidate Marketing and Candidate Closing
Of course, the individual performance of each of Four F’s is tightly linked with the other processes. Since Gravity’s
HLM solution is designed to off-load the Find and Filter stages from our clients, it is the Face (Interviewing) process
where we concern ourselves with client improvement.
Why do companies interview?
A company interviews because it desires to reduce the risk of a bad hire.
It can be said that a well-run interview program is the most critical of the Four F’s (in Modern Hiring). A poorly-run
interview process wastes the performance of the other stages and leads to bad hires or no hires at all.
Gravity develops interview programs for organizations that need to attract, retain and develop high quantities of
complex ability—knowledge workers. Knowledge workers can be accountants, protein chemists, software engineers,
product managers, salespeople or marketing communications managers, for example. Even though the skill
requirements of these jobs are highly variable they all share something in common: the qualities that compose a
successful hire are difficult to measure and bad hires are very costly. Gauging the risk associated with a hire of such
complexity requires a systematic and repeatable interview process that is targeted at discerning the qualities that
will make a candidate successful.
HLM’s goal is to bring control to hiring by building repeatable, robust and scalable talent-acquisition functions
that will enable companies to accomplish their corporate objectives. Thus, when Gravity refers to a bad hire, we
are not saying that the hire is a bad person. We are saying that that hire is out of line with the corporate objectives
for that role. A bad hire at one company can be a great hire at another.
In order to mitigate the risk, and reduce the frequency, of bad hires (and increase the good hires) we need to look at
how to improve interviewing and we need to understand what we are actually trying to measure by interviewing. In
this paper Gravity will take look at the interview process in order to understand how hiring can increase retention,
engender employee development and reduce hiring risk.
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010

3. Making the Determination--
Interviewing For Ability, Talent and Character
When we interview we are trying to create a hypothetical
environment to mimic a real-world situation. This simulation will
hopefully enable us to reduce the risk of making a bad hire by
giving us a fair estimation of the candidate’s performance in our
real-world environment. What measurements will give us the best
prediction of performance? The three critical measurements are:
• Ability
• Talent
• Character
What is Ability?
Ability is the measure of a person’s skill and experience and correlates to a job description’s “must haves”. When a
company interviews for ability, they are trying to determine if the person can accomplish the minimum requirements of
the position. The simplest question to ask is, “Can the person do the job?” Another, perhaps more concise question is,
“Can the person be effective in this role immediately?”
Ability determines the execution ability of a company. To slightly oversimplify, the more ability a company’s
workforce maintains the more it can get done. Of course, ability is affected by things like work ethic and decision
making. But in theory, a company with three software developers can write three times more code than a company
that has one software developer.
For some jobs ability level might be the only concern: “Can they cut down a tree?” For others positions, and this
depends on the job as well as the company, there are two other measurements—talent and character. Knowledge
workers require high degrees of skill, but also high quantities of talent and character. For example, hiring someone
to flip burgers may only require the ability to flip burgers; it does not require a great deal of talent nor character.
Hiring a Vice President of Marketing requires ability, but talent and character are probably just as important.
Since skill and experience is a largely objective measurement, ability is then the easiest and least expensive to
identify. “Is the person ethical” is a much more subjective and nuanced question than, “Can the person write HTML?”
Since the latter measurement is largely objective, we can use lower-cost resources (lower-level employees, outsource)
to measure ability. Once we have inexpensively confirmed that the person has the skill to accomplish the job
responsibilities we can move to more subjective questions.
Ability First
Only after the interview process has determined the ability level of a candidate is adequate should we concern
ourselves with the more costly measurements of talent and character. If the person can not do the job there is no
reason to confirm whether they can grow with the job or if they fit the corporate culture. Perhaps this sounds
strong, but for both candidate and company alike, spending time in interviews that test for cultural fit and for growth
potential before we know if they can do what is required of them day-one is a waste of everyone’s time. Thus, the
first step in the interview process should be to gauge ability level; it is the easiest and cheapest to identify and a
“must-have” requirement.
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010

4. What is Talent?
“How well does this person fit our long-term objectives?” This is an appropriate way to correlate talent’s importance
to interviewing and hiring. Every company has immediate needs, and those immediate needs, like tax preparation or
Java coding, are what we look for in ability. Talent optimizes these abilities and it should also map to long term
corporate objectives, like managing teams or launching an office.
In older economies, talent had some importance, but perhaps not as much as skill (if you need someone to chop down
a tree, do you need them to design a saw as well?). In knowledge-worker organizations problem solving and
decision making are often as important as skill.
If you map talent acquisition to corporate development objectives you can actually build the higher-value employees
in your company instead of hiring them from outside. Look why some companies hire college recruits—the ability
requirement is low, but they hope to build ability through talent development. For companies like consulting firms and
investment banks it is more effective to build the talent for five years then to recruit someone with five years of
experience. In many industries, we simply do not have the luxury of a five-year training window, so we can not solely
screen for talent.
Talent can be measured with behavioral and problem-solving questions. Behavioral questions measure a person’s
past performance in certain situations, which give us a measure of their decision-making abilities. It takes a skilled
interviewer and appropriate content to drive this stage of the interview cycle. If you ask someone to name a time
they were given a project with little supervision or resources and how they dealt with it, you get a very subjective
response.
Talent Second
Talent is more difficult to identify than ability. Whereas ability measurements like skill-testing produce results that
are easy to measure (it is easy to see that 2+2=5 is the wrong answer), talent measurements require more interactive
open-ended questions. Not only do we need to spend more time with the applicant to gauge talent, we need a more
skilled resource to measure it. Thus the measurement of talent becomes more expensive. However, talent is more
easily identified than character, so we should take care in identifying talent in the middle stages of the interview
cycle. If the person does not fit our development strategy, does not solve problems well or makes bad decisions it is
likely a waste of resources to see if they augment corporate culture.
Interviewing For Talent
Talent interviewing is a blend of the subjective and
objective. Many times we are not concerned with the
correctness of the answer but with the steps at which the
candidate arrives at their solution.
Examples of problem-solving and decision-making talent
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010

5. What is Character?
“Do I want to work with this person?”
“Will this person have a positive affect on our culture?”
Both of these questions are appropriate measures of character’s value to the interview process and hiring. Like
talent, character optimizes the output of ability. Someone can be very skilled, but if they are difficult to manage—
then the value of their skill is reduced. Character also maps to broader human capital objectives in that it closely
aligns with employee retention. If you hire disagreeable people, your turnover is likely to be higher than average.
Character can be measured by behavioral interviewing questions. It is often not the response that is important, but
the way the response is given that is important. An answer that says “yes” but has associated body language that is
contrary to the answer is a character “red flag”.
Character Last
Of the three, ability, talent and character, the nebulous nature of character makes it by far the most difficult
to quantify. Due to this problem, the last stage of interviewing requires the highest value employees to competently
measure character. In a well-run interview process we desire to reduce the risk of a bad hires as well as maximize
the time and effort of employees. No one will say in an interview that they are not a hard worker or that they have
a bad temper. In light of this, character should be measured near the end of the interview process by very adept
interviewers whose opinion will be trusted.
In saying that character should be measured near the end of the interview process, we do not intend to say it should
not be looked for earlier. Care should be taken at all stages to identify risk associated with character. Although we
can tolerate some deficiencies in talent and skill, deficiencies in character are almost always a reason for a no-hire.
Character Assessment
Character assessment is very subjective. Many times we are
not concerned with the correctness of the answer but the way
in which the candidate answers the question.
What is the hardest job you have ever had? Why?
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010

6. Ability, Talent, Character--Summary
Ability
The “must haves” of a job
Enables business functions and execution
Mostly objective
Relatively easy to measure
Screened early in interview process
Talent
Optimizes ability (e.g. problem solving)
Maps to corporate employee development objectives
Objective and subjective
Difficult to measure
Screened at middle stages of interview process
Character
Optimizes ability (e.g. work ethic)
Maps to corporate retention objectives
Mostly subjective
Very difficult to measure
Screened at late stages of interview process
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010

7. Marketing
Interviewing is certainly the process by which we make the determination to hire someone. However, there is also a
critical component to this process—creating interest in potential employees. If we think back to the Four F’s (Find,
Filter, Face and Finish) we will remember that Face is the process of interviewing. Just as bad filtration will lead to
poor interview success, a lack of effective marketing will lead to poor acceptance ratios in the Finish cycle.
Every interviewer must understand that although the corporate goal is to reduce the risk of a bad hire, a
candidate is trying to reduce the risk of a bad job. Therefore, companies must take care to provide information to
the candidate that will reduce the perception of risk.
Marketing must be a component of all stages of the hiring lifecycle. At the “Face” stage, we can map
marketing’s objectives to the interview triangle.
Ability: What will the candidate be doing? Why is this interesting?
Talent: What growth opportunities will the candidate have?
Character: Why should the candidate want to work for the company?
The later the stage in the hiring process when marketing actually begins the less effective it becomes. Save your
marketing punch for the closing stage of a candidate’s offer, and its reception will be lukewarm. Inserting a
corporate spokesperson (ideally a future co-worker) into the interview process is highly effective in increasing offer
acceptance ratios.
The company that provides the most information to a candidate in the hiring process will almost always beat a
competitive offer.
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010

8. About GravityPeople
GravityPeople is a leading recruitment outsourcer providing direct-hire
and hourly recruiting services. Established in 1998, GravityPeople has
been serving the San Francisco Bay Area Technology community for
over decade. Now with a national focus, GravityPeople provides
strategic technical recruiting services to clients across North America.
© Gravity Technologies, Inc. 2010