RFT drafting: balancing consistency and innovation

Vinnie Mirchandani, in his terrific deal architect blog, points to a video interviewing system called HireVue that allows employers to view videos of candidates responding to set interview questions. Mark Newman, VP of Operations, has told Vinnie that "they expect to be running 4,000 interviews a month at the end of the year".

I'm going to gloss over many of the subtleties of the system and use it, probably unfairly, as a mechanism to discuss the dangers of prescriptive RFT drafting. My apologies to HireVue in advance.

All sourcing activities, whether procuring a vendor or hiring an employee, are undertaken to solve a business problem. Effective sourcing requires you to gather the maximum amount of relevant and accurate information from as many respondents as possible.

My concern with the HireVue approach to employee sourcing is that it is too prescriptive and reduces the scope and accuracy of respondent information. Now don't misunderstand me … I am a huge fan of standardised methods of collecting respondent information but sourcing staff must ensure that they balance the need for consistency with the opportunity for innovation.

Regarding the scope of information, as far as I can tell, HireVue values comparability of candidates over the candidate's ability to provide innovative responses. Whilst being able to easily compare respondents is critical to a successful evaluation, it should not come at the expense of drawing out unique perspectives on the issues confronting your business.

Regarding the accuracy of the information, I wonder whether the majority of candidates will be able to guess the standard questions an employer will ask and provide ideal, nearly identical, responses during the video interview, regardless of whether the ideal response accurately describes them.

I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's description of the death of the video phone in his near-future novel, Infinite Jest. In the novel, the video phone is killed by constrained requirements. Once people started using the video phone, a market developed for software agents that made you appear as if you were dressed in a business suit when you were actually wearing your bathrobe. Next, you upgraded your agent to display yourself without bags under your eyes or unsightly blemishes that had arisen in the night. Soon after, you bought the upgrades that made you appear younger, more beautiful and appearing to adopt an interested, active listening pose when in reality you were sitting in your living room, unshaven, wearing nothing but an undershirt, watching an Oprah re-run. Eventually, everyone on the planet adopted the same ideal video agent and, soon after, stopped using video phones because the video signal carried no truth.

RFT drafters must ensure that they are not so prescriptive that they force the vendors to appear identical even though in reality they are very different.

Drafting a good RFT, like conducting a good interview, is part science and part art. The responses need to be comparable, but you will only achieve the best result if you let the vendor, or the candidate, spread their wings a bit.