By: Russell Giles

With over 60,000 open job requisitions in Silicon Valley alone and a national unemployment rate at rock bottom, the days of picking and choosing from a candidate pool are long gone. So should be the days of the traditional interview process. But like a favorite threadbare, outgrown tux it still gets dragged out of the closet. Result? You look like a rube. Overweight and outdated.

Unfortunately, many execs and managers have not grasped that hiring can no longer be a hodgepodge of disjointed transactions. Even if a company is not expanding and needing to fill new positions, the average turnover in many industries has dropped to less than two years requiring constant restaffing. And the hard cash cost of a hiring mistake (or promotion error) has pushed past the six-figure range. Now staff selection must be considered a critical technical skill not just an interruption in a manager's routine.

There are three major weaknesses in most companies recruiting and staffing process. First, no true process; second, no interviewing and selection skills; and third, no sales process. While many enterprises say they have these necessities in place, their execution is more wish and fantasy than measurable reality. Here are the details.

The first staffing pitfall is that most companies do not have a solid process in place. The realities of hiring today, demand that executives view each hire as a project. A project that requires the same specificity of action steps, assigned roles, scheduling and critical milestones as designing a piece of software or a product launch.

The most often ignored step in the staffing process is the first. No company would think of designing software or launching a product without some preliminary meeting of the key players involved in the project to align on what they are doing and what exactly are the results they are looking for. But in staffing, time and time again recruiters cannot even get a clear, cogent skill set and behavioral profile from the hiring manager. And a strategy meeting of the people who will be conducting the interviews is as rare as a low burn rate in a dot com.

The second weakness is that most people in business (including recruiters and HR professionals) do not realize that interviewing a candidate is a technical skill. Interviewing is not simply "asking good questions" or "testing a candidate" or (God forbid) believing in the fantasy that common sense is a good judge of character during an interview.

Inherent in any technical skill is the idea of specific procedural actions, logical rules for efficiency (i.e. socks before shoes), and standards for success. Also, inherent in technical skills is the fact that most of the technicians speak a common working language that allows for the possibility of logical team decisions.

And most important, technical skills require specific training, study and practice. The simple fact that I have been working with the Internet since its inception does not qualify me as a JAVA programmer. Yet, every business day thousands of people conduct job interviews without ever having attended a training session or even perused an article (let alone studied a manual) about interview technique.

In the vast majority of today's interviews, it is the candidate who has prepared, rehearsed, practiced and been coached. And in our current talent scarcity, it is the candidate who is the buyer not the interviewer.

The above fact leads to the third and most debilitating weakness in common hiring practices. Most companies do not regard their recruiting and interviewing process as a whole to be a selling process. While every recruiter and manager knows they have to "sell" the company and the position during the interview, few realize that the entire recruitment-interview-offer system is their key selling tool.

In the egotistical startup fervor of "we have the killer app and we will build the new paradigm for a creative, people valued company" most hiring personnel from CEO's to project members fall all over themselves in the details. Lack of preparation, scheduling and common courtesy that would not be tolerated in any other selling or marketing process are rampant in job interviews.

Imagine you invite a potential investor to your company to meet with some of your people. You schedule the time and ask you prospect for two hours. However, once at your work site, you wander this key prospect from manager to manager stumbling around to find unoccupied meeting rooms.

Many of the managers say the same things over and over again to this prospect. And they ask the prospect the same questions. A few of your people come in and don't know who this prospect is, so at the beginning of the face-to-face they stop for a few minutes to read their information on the prospect while he or she stares into space. This whole process eats up not two, but five hours of the prospect's time. The prospect leaves with a kind "we'll get back to you". Everyone is friendly. Ten days pass.

You finally make contact and invite them back again only to reenact the same process with the same bungling and time dragging but now it's with your "key management players". Would you really expect to make a sale with this prospective investor? A better question for executives is: How long would you tolerate this behavior in your sales and marketing staff if it were your company's prospective customers? You're right. You wouldn't. Not for a second past you realizing that it was happening.

Guess what? To some degree it's likely happening in your company. And worse, it's being justified with phrases like, "Well, this is the way we're operating right now and job candidates should know it". Or worst of all "we're just growing and building so fast, we'll get it right later".

What amazes me is that I've interacted with scores of companies and thousands of interviewers over the past four years on their hiring procedures. And when we began, they all never had enough time or energy to do staffing right, but they always managed to scrounge the time to do it over again!

It's probably true that selling the company throughout the hiring process has always been weak. The difference now is the game has changed. Even if you aren't faced with fighting tooth and nail to get talent, no company in today's speed of business can afford a hiring mistake.

But if you WERE able to design a streamlined, project-based recruiting and hiring process.... If the people in your company who conducted interviews and made staff selections WERE trained and practiced in those technical skills.... If you executed your staffing as mission critical... you would have an enormous edge!

And the good news is, expert help is available at reasonable costs. My advice is simple: this area of management is not a do-it-yourself project. So, here are a couple of web pages to start you off. For training your staff try www.interviewedge.com. For senior executive and key manager search and selection, contact www.kornferry.com. In this case experience does count, and these people have been doing the work very well for a very long time.