The Talgo Blog

Hiring the right person starts with defining the right role, yet most job descriptions (JDs) fail in their dual purpose: guiding the hiring team and attracting the right candidates. At Talgo, we've seen firsthand what causes JDs to fail, and we have some clear proposals on what to do about it.

Here...

Hiring someone is expensive. You will pay in three resources:

1. Time (doing it right takes time, and doing it wrong takes even more time...)
2. Money (obvious)
3. Organizational complexity. Each person you add to the org increases communication cost, etc.

With these costs in mind, you want to know w...

I recently spent two days doing non-stop interviewing coaching and I was blown away by two realizations:

1. New interviewers are nervous and almost always ramble in their question-asking, inadvertently including words in their question they did not intend. This skews how the candidate hears the ques
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One of the main things we do in our Talgo workshops is systematically show teams how to gather and use predictive data to make more accurate hiring decisions. Data being the operative word—in contrast to more subjective "gut" decisions which are the primary driver of most hiring decisions across the...

Why not just create an interviewing scorecard based entirely on competencies—why bother listing the results expected at all?

We got (a variant of) this question recently in a consulting call, and I think it’s a good one.

To be clear, a purely competency based framework alongside the remaining Talg...

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result," is among my favorite Charlie Munger quotes.

How does this apply to interviewing? Unlike other parts of the talent pipeline, you often have people performing interviewing in a more-or-less "volunteer" capacity. They aren't an HR professional who ...

Most of us know the Segway. A supposedly "cool" innovation that was received by the general public as decidedly... uncool.

Keep that image in mind the next time you are tempted to "segue" your interview from one topic to the next. Most interviewers attempt to do this to make the conversation more "na...

In interviews, the questions we ask should serve two goals. First, they must have a high probability of gathering relevant, predictive information about the candidate. Second, they should avoid telegraphing exactly what we’re looking for or what the “right” answer might be.

When the intent of the q...

Most interviewers are either afraid of asking for negative information from candidates (weaknesses, mistakes). Or they are simply unskilled in doing so. Often both.

Why do we insist that asking for negative information is such an important part of a well conducted interview process? Three reasons: