An interview involves more than just asking a few questions and chatting with potential candidates. Financial advisors must do their homework first if they want to conduct successful interviews and find the best support staff for their businesses.

“The preparation you do for hiring is what’s going to guarantee you a successful hire,” says Cissy Pau, principal consultant, Clear HR Consulting in Vancouver.

An effective interview starts with a strong candidates screening process. Examine the job description and decide which skills are must-haves, such as a basic level of education, and which are nice-to-haves. Next, eliminate applications from the batch of potential candidates that do not meet either of those benchmarks. As well, discard resumés that have spelling mistakes.

Another way to narrow down the list of candidates is to do a short pre-interview. If talking to clients by phone is a big part of the role you’re seeking to fill, then it’s important to find out whether or not a candidate has proper phone manners.

“I find that eliminates a lot of people right off the bat,” says April-Lynn Levitt, a coach with the Personal Coach in Oakville, Ont., “because some people just can’t talk on the phone.”

Ideally, once screening is complete, there should be roughly a handful of suitable interview candidates. Says Pau: “Four to six is probably a good range to give you enough variance to allow you to actually compare candidates.”

Before meeting with any of those applicants, however, make sure you know exactly what you intend to ask.

“Some advisors don’t do that, they just wing it,” says Levitt. “They don’t have questions written down, they ask different questions to everybody [and] sometimes the candidate is almost leading the interview.” Asking each candidate a standard set of questions will make it easier to compare them as a potential hire.

These questions should cover basic information about the candidate’s experience, and also leave you with a good understanding of how the individual would handle different situations. The most important queries are what are known as behavioural questions. These open-ended questions prompt candidates to describe in detail how they handled problems in the past.

“Don’t waste your time with silly questions about strengths and weaknesses or personality,” says David Zweig, associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resources management, department of management, University of Toronto Scarborough. “Ask questions like: tell me about a time you’ve dealt with a difficult client; how did you handle that situation? What was the outcome? And ask a lot of [probing questions] to really get at what the situation was and how the person identified it.”

For each question, think about what would make for a poor, satisfactory or great answer. Then, during the interview, rate each response on a scale of one to five. This system will help you make an objective decision about the candidate.

HR representatives are familiar with these and other interview tactics, says Zweig, and advisors would do well to work with these individuals to refine their hiring processes.

“What people in the financial services industry need to realize,” he says, “is they need to lean on their HR function in order to help them create those kinds of interview protocols.”

Besides an interview, assigning candidates a little homework can help narrow down the list of potential hires. For example, a potential administrative assistant may have to complete a grammar and spelling test, says Levitt, whereas someone applying to be a junior trader might have to design an investment portfolio within a set timeframe.

This is the second article in a three-part series on hiring support staff.

Up next: Integrating a new hire.