Problem
Case Study: Needles in the haystack
It's April and business is growing. Since you started managing the dessert bar and coffee shop in Pinehaven Port, you've extended the weekend hours twice and several times had to ask your three servers to work overtime. What will the summer be like? Even more to the point, what will the summer weekends be like, with tourists and summer residents swelling the population at regular intervals until October?
You need more staff. The owner trusts your judgement (he should; he's your brother) and told you to hire as many servers as you think you need for the upcoming busy season.
You made the mistake of posting an ad on national and local online job boards and got far too many résumés, even after the posting services did a first cut for keywords. After what seemed like hours of scanning quickly through the "maybe" pile, you narrowed it down to 10 people to interview in your search for one more full time and two new weekend servers.
You want to make sure the applicants really want a job until October, though. You don't want someone who really wants a permanent job and will quit as soon as one appears, sending you back to the haystack of résumés. By the same token, you don't want to hire someone for the weekend slot who will leave at the first sign of full-time hours elsewhere. You need interview questions that will allow you to make an apples-to-apples comparison of the candidates, show you whether they'd be a good fit with your customer group, and indicate whether they'd stay in the job they were hired to fill.
Prepare a set of interview questions for a series of 45-minute interviews.