Choosing a new hire? Ask a two-year-old.

Many years ago, I was in charge of a childcare center with a staff of 29 that looked after about 60 children five days a week. The children were no younger than six weeks and no older than six years of age.

When I took over the leadership role at the center there were a lot of dysfunctional practices and systems that needed overhauling; one of them was the way we hired new staff.

Traditionally, we had run ads in the local paper to attract candidates. Each person interested in working with us was required to come to the center to pick up a copy of a three-page application that he or she would need to complete and submit with a resumé by a deadline. The Director of the center would then review the applications, pick eight to 10 candidates and line them up for 30-minute interviews. At the end of the day of interviews, one candidate would be chosen by the Director and would receive a job offer by phone while the rest were mailed a postcard informing them they were not chosen.

That system had a lot of room for improvement. One day, I just couldn’t stand it any more and I set out to design a new system.

For starters, why have all candidates fill out three-page applications if, instead, you could screen them for interviews based solely on their resumés? Most of the information on the application was already in the candidates’ resumés, so why would you want to look at the same information twice? It takes twice as long to review all that extra paper. If you have 200 candidates submitting resumés for an opening, why on earth would you want to add 600 more pages of information to review, especially if you only needed that information for, say, maybe four people?

We made a new rule that the three-page application would only be filled out by people we invited for a second interview. If you weren’t invited to interview, you received either a yellow postcard from us thanking you for your submission and stating that your resumé was reviewed but we didn’t feel it matched the set of experience we were currently seeking, or you were mailed a green postcard letting you know your resumé would be kept on file. We sent out very few green postcards, but we actually contacted these folks and ended up finding a couple of good hires in our “green poll.”

We really wanted to screen our candidates better than we had in the past, so we divided up the interview process into three steps: Step One was with me, the Director, Step Two was with the Head Teachers, and Step Three was with some of the children in a supervised classroom setting.

After the Head Teachers and I had reviewed all the resumés, we would sort them in order of preference and I would invite the top six to eight candidates for a one-hour interview. This interview was one-on-one with me. During the hour I would take the applicant on a tour of our center so the candidate could see the full facility. I would explain our organization’s culture, the compensation package we were offering and our employee benefits. I would also ask the person five questions and note his/her responses. I asked every candidate the same five questions:

1. If I asked a young child you taught, to describe what he or she remembers about you 20 years from now, what would the child/adult tell me?
2. What is/was the single most difficult challenge in your life that you have overcome?
3. What are you passionate about?
4. What will you be doing five years from now?
5. What would you die for?

Finally, I would hand the applicant a copy of our three-page application and ask her to go home to think about our interview, the center and everything she learned about us, and to decide if this was a place where she would enjoy working. The candidate could call me anytime after 12:00 noon the next day with an answer. I would not accept an answer any sooner. If she called and said he didn’t want to work with us, I would wish her well, and encourage her to share what she had learned about us with others. If she did want to join our team, she needed to submit the three-page application with references within 48 hours and schedule a second one-hour interview, this time with our Head Teachers.

About half our candidates would bail out at this point. This was great as I didn’t even have to consider them for the job, they hadn’t used up any of my Head Teachers’ valuable time and they made the decision not to work at the center before we had invested much energy in them. Also, those folks were not rejected and most left with a good feeling about us even if they knew this was not the right fit for them.

My interview with the potential candidates was all about finding out if our culture, pay and benefits were a good match with the needs of each candidate. The Head Teachers’ interview was all about the candidates’ educational background, teaching philosophy and current knowledge in the field of early childhood education. That second interview included teaching a short lesson and, just like mine, sent the candidates home to think about things over night. If at this point, after interacting with our Head Teachers (the two people who would be supervising a new hire most often), they didn’t think this was the place they wanted to work, they could opt out, and over half of them did.

If they still thought our center was a place they wanted to work, we would have them back for a third and final interview. Up to this point, the candidates had not been in any of our classrooms and had not interacted with any of our students or classroom teachers.

For our third and final interview, we would rely on the people in our building who were the best judges of character: our two-year-olds. I’ve never fully understood how this works, but two-year-olds in a group setting are brilliant judges of character. They can size someone up in short order and issue a definitive judgment on a person in the time it takes you to read, “Everybody Poops.”

The third interview involved the candidate spending 30 minutes interacting with our two-year-olds under the supervision of both Head Teachers along with the two teachers whose class the candidate was visiting.

If the two-year-olds quickly adopted the candidate into a playgroup and engaged in active play with the candidate, and the candidate appeared comfortable and confident in the playgroup, then there was a good likelihood we would extend an offer to the person. If the children did not engage with the new person on their own, or had to be prompted to play with the candidate, or ignored the candidate, then, regardless of any degrees or credentials, or flawless answers to previous questions, the person would not be offered a job with us.

After 30 minutes in the classroom, the Head Teachers would ask the candidate how he or she thought the experience with the children had gone and would share observations with the candidate. At the end of the interview, the candidate would again be asked to go home to think about the experience and decide if our center would be a good match. About one in four would opt out at this point.

If a candidate didn’t opt out, and the third interview with the children had not proceeded well, one of the Head Teachers would call the person and give the person an honest assessment of what our staff observed and what we would need to see in the future from this person should he or she ever decide to apply for another position.

If more than one person progressed this far in the interview process and we had two or three people who appeared qualified for the position, and none of us had any objections to the candidates, then it was my job to try to disqualify one of them. I would at this point call references, call the universities listed and make sure all their credentials listed could be confirmed. If we had only one suitable candidate, I had to check references and credentials anyway, so this wasn’t a big deal.

If all the qualified candidates survived the references and qualifications checks, then the Head Teachers and I would meet to pick the person we thought would best balance our current team in place. I would offer the chosen candidate the job. I would also call the other candidate to explain why another person was offered the job and why he or she wasn’t receiving the offer, and then I would ask this person to check in with me every two weeks if he or she was still looking for employment.

The final step in the hiring process was to run a criminal background check on our final candidate. If he passed this (and all of the final candidates did) then he had the job.

There was a lot we liked about this hiring process.

Within a year of implementing it, we experienced a 120 percent reduction in staff turnover. Other changes we made at the center also contributed to this sharp reduction in staff turnover, but this new interview process played a huge role in ending the revolving door of teachers the center had experienced for years.

About 80 percent of our top candidates self-selected out: half of them opted out after the first interview with me, and another 30 percent opted out after the interview with the Head Teachers. Very few candidates made it to the classroom interview, typically only one or two, and nearly all of them passed with flying colors. The two who didn’t opted out.

By the time we extended an opportunity to someone, she had already spent an hour with the center’s Director, accepted our pay and benefits structure, our culture, our work place, who her supervisors would be and what their personalities were like, met a couple of our classroom teachers and seen our most challenging children close up and personal. She had been given at least three chances to opt out if she felt this was not the place she wanted to work.

Also, I had spent an hour with the candidate, our Head Teachers had spent two hours with this person, our office manager had interacted with him or her, two of our classroom teachers and over a dozen of our students had had a chance to observe this person and express any concerns before a job offer was made. We had a lot of folks engaged in the process.

We did not involve the parents of the children in the hiring decisions. We thought about it, talked with our Parent Advisory Board and the decision was made that the system we had did such a good job of selecting the best people for the job, the parents did not feel the need to be involved before a new teacher’s first day.

By the time a new teacher was hired and placed in one of our classrooms, he was committed to working with us, and we were confident in him and committed to seeing him succeed at our center. The new teacher felt like he belonged there, and we felt like he belonged there.

While the ultimate responsibility for hiring the right people rested with me, as I was the Director, the functional responsibility was shared among myself, the Head Teachers, a couple of our most experienced classroom teachers, the candidates themselves and even the children. This not only did a great job of ensuring that we had the right people on our team, it also meant that new hires were accepted by and integrated into the rest of our team much, much faster than ever before, and this helped to ensure their success.

Choosing the people who will serve on your team is arguably the most important decision you’ll make in your company. How you go about selecting those people should be given a considerable amount of thought.

The new-hire selection system the staff and I developed for the childcare center is likely not a great match for you if you’re hiring folks for a web firm, unless of course you happen to have a dozen two-year-olds running around. It may however, encourage you to consider your own firm’s hiring process, and how well your process is meeting your needs and the needs of the folks on your team.

What are you doing to make sure you find the right people for your team?