You will run your interview and role play on a colleague or friend and refine both.
You now have a hiring profile, six behavioural questions with a scoring guide, and a role play with a hidden concern, and on paper the kit looks sound. The first time you find out whether it works should not be with a real candidate whose career depends on it.
This exercise is a rehearsal. You run the whole process on a practice candidate, have a second person score alongside you, and fix whatever the rehearsal shows up. Wei Ming ran his on a Thursday afternoon with Daniel as the second scorer and Priya, a friend who sells corporate travel packages, as the practice candidate.
The practice candidate should be someone who has sold something, so the questions have real material to work with. A friend in sales at another company is ideal. Tell them it is practice, that you will not share their answers, and that you would welcome their honest view of the questions afterwards.
The second scorer should be someone who will interview real candidates with you later, such as a senior rep or another manager. Daniel had told Wei Ming in their first one-to-one that he was interested in management one day, so this was also a chance to give him some of that experience, as lesson 9.3 will discuss.
Give the second scorer your hiring profile, questions and scoring guide a day ahead. Do not explain what you are hoping to hear. If the guide needs your explanation to be usable, that is one of the things the rehearsal should reveal.
Send the practice candidate the role play brief a few days ahead, exactly as you would for a real one.
Run it as you would on the day: welcome the candidate, explain the format, ask the six questions in order with your probes, and then run the role play with its halfway pause. Wei Ming kept strictly to time, allowing 35 minutes for the questions and 20 for the role play, with a short break between.
Both scorers take notes during the session but do not score until it ends. Then each of you scores alone on the three-point scale, with one line of evidence beside every score, and nobody discusses anything until both sheets are complete.
Put the two sheets side by side. Where you agree, the question and its guide are probably clear. Where you differ by one point, talk briefly about the evidence. Where you differ by two points, one of you gave a 1 and the other a 3, the question or its guide is unclear, and needs rewriting.
Here is what Wei Ming and Daniel found. On five of the six questions and four of the five role play lines they were within one point of each other, which left two items that were two points apart.
The first was the coachability question: "Tell me about a piece of feedback from a manager that changed how you sell." Priya described feedback about talking too fast on calls. Wei Ming scored it 3 because she gave a clear example. Daniel scored it 1 because she never said how she knew the change had worked. Reading the guide again, both readings were possible. The strong answer described "a specific change" but did not say whether evidence of the result was required.
The second was the role play line for handling the concern. Priya found the hidden concern about the niece late in the role play and said she would "make sure the niece is involved". Wei Ming gave 2, Daniel gave 3. The guide did not say whether naming a way to address the concern was enough, or whether the candidate needed to get Mr Lim to agree to it.
Rewrite any question or guide line where scores were two points apart. Make the difference between weak, fair and strong something two people would hear the same way.
Wei Ming's new guide for the coachability question said a strong answer names the feedback, the specific change, and how the candidate knew it worked, such as a number that moved or a buyer's response. A fair answer names the feedback and the change but gives no evidence of result. For the role play, a strong score now required the candidate to propose a way to address the concern and get the buyer's agreement to it.
If you can, rerun just the changed items with a second practice candidate to check the new wording works. If not, run the rewritten version past your second scorer and ask whether they would now score Priya's answers the same way you would.
Before you use the kit on real candidates, check it against two sets of rules. The first is your company's own hiring policy: who must approve the hire, what HR needs to see, how long records are kept.
The second is fair employment guidance in Singapore. Read the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices on the TAFEP website, and check the Ministry of Manpower website for employers' obligations. Singapore has also passed a Workplace Fairness Act; ask HR or check MOM's site for what it covers and whether it applies to your company yet. Go through each question and the role play brief and remove anything that touches on age, race, religion, gender, marital status, family responsibilities, disability or nationality, unless it is a genuine job requirement that HR has confirmed. Store interview notes as your company's PDPA policy requires.
Wei Ming found one problem. A probe he had written for the prospecting question, "How do you manage your evenings when you have a lot of calls?", could easily lead into family responsibilities. He replaced it with "How did you plan your prospecting when your pipeline was full?"
You should finish with a revised kit: the hiring profile, six questions with an updated scoring guide, a role play brief and buyer character, and a scoring sheet for the role play, plus a short note listing what you changed after the mock round and why. That kit is your capstone for module 2.
The activity below asks you to run your own mock round. Book the practice candidate and the second scorer this week, while your questions are fresh enough that you still remember what you meant by them.
Run a mock hiring round with two scorers, compare scores and produce a revised question set and role play.
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