An article in the Harvard Business Review pointed out that 43% of hiring decisions are made within the first 4.8 minutes of the interview. Talk about the importance of a candidate creating a good first impression!
If this is the case, why bother interviewing people for more than 5 minutes? The answer is because hasty hiring decisions can be incredibly costly when they don’t work out.
What’s the cost to hire and train a salesperson these days? $100 grand? More? Probably.
Can you imagine the consequences of a plant manager purchasing a $100,000 piece of capital equipment based on a 4.8 minute interview with the salesperson? It would be more like a 4.8 month serious deliberation with a committee before such a purchase would be made.
Hiring haste doesn’t only make waste; it can be a disaster for your bottom line. I’m certainly not advocating that you take 4.8 months to make a hiring decision, but 4.8 hours of serious consideration might be something to shoot for.
If you want to keep the hiring process short, consider using mandatory hiring criteria and a sales assessment to help filter out the obvious misfits.
