Ramping up for Increased Employment Market Competition in the Era of Prohibited Non-Compete Clauses in Ontario

1. Dave Litwiller
Feb. 2, 2022
IMPROVING INTERVIEWING
Ramping up for Increased Employment Market Competition in the
Era of Prohibited Non-Compete Clauses in Ontario
FEB. 2, 2022
DAVE LITWILLER

2. BACKGROUND
• On December 2, Bill 27, Working for Workers Act, 2021
received Royal Assent and became law, prohibiting non-
competes in the Province of Ontario with limited
exceptions
• Empirically, the good that will likely come for the tech
sector:
• Increases in the metabolic rate of the economy in the
province
• More rapid dissemination of strong management practices
and technologies in the innovation realm
• Accelerating productivity growth

3. BACKGROUND
• Employers need to adapt to this change in the competitive
landscape for talent, to maximize benefits and reduce
risks
• One of the biggest levers for improving culture,
productivity and natural affinity between employees and
employer is through the talent each business acquires in
the first place

4. INTRODUCTION
• Interviewing is a particularly high leverage stage in
employee recruiting to affect positive outcomes
• The challenge is that the interviewing stage of the
recruiting process is particularly fraught with variability
and frequently missed opportunities to improve the
probability of good outcomes for both sides
• Now is a good time to review recruiting practices, and
especially the interviewing process, to give rapidly
growing scale-up stage tech firms the best opportunity to
thrive in this new era of provincial employment law

5. OVERVIEW
There are three areas of outsized impact to lift the predictive
value of the interview process to downstream on-the-job
performance and cultural fit:
1. Structured Interviews
2. Topgrading Interviews
3. Interview Process Improvements

6. STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS

7. STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS
• The Hard Reality: Traditional interviews (unstructured) have
some correlation, but low, with future on-the-job performance
• Even when faced with strong statistical evidence about the
hazards of unstructured interviews, the faith of many
interviewers that they can buck the odds is remarkably
durable
• Fundamental attribution error in traditional interviewing is rife
• Situational factors vary greatly from interview to interview
with unstructured interviews, creating hidden confounding
variables
• Structuring interviews is the single most impactful technique
that most organizations can adopt to improve the predictive
value of interviewing

8. THE BASICS
• Zero in on the qualities the individual must have to most
strongly boost job performance
• Requires detailed job descriptions linked to compelling,
accurate and reflective corporate values
• This drives a listing of skills and abilities to succeed at the job
• Then, hard-to-fake ways of assessing those qualities need to
be developed in interview questions
• Quantitative scoring is required by the interviewer for each
question
• Moreover, calibration of scoring needs to be provided by
providing typical answers which merit each possible score for
each question

9. TABLE STAKES FOR
SUCCESS
• Requires buy-in from both sides to the method, since
structured interviewing is more repetitive than
unstructured

10. TOPGRADING INTERVIEWS

11. TOPGRADING INTERVIEWS
• Topgrading Goal: To go beyond the competency level
interview
• Topgrading delves deeply into the entire employment and
academic history of each candidate
• The method asks a standardized list of questions about every
past role
• By going consistently deep into all relevant work history, a
fuller picture of the goals, motivations, thinking style and
work methods of the individual emerges
• Significant time commitment is required to conduct
topgrading interviews, but done right, it becomes very
difficult for individual candidates to hide significant, relevant
characteristics
• Alternatively known as Chronological In-Depth Structured
interviews (CIDS)

12. TOPGRADING INTERVIEWS
• Topgrading interviews generally ask about sixteen questions
exploring every past role, including topics such as
• Each major project completed
• Successes, and how they were achieved
• Mistakes/failures, why they occurred, and how they were
mitigated or overcome
• Key decisions, decision processes and context
• Main relationships and dynamics
• Talent inherited, any changes made and why
• Rating the boss’s strengths and weaknesses
• Predicting how the boss would/will rate the candidate in
reference checks
• Reasons for leaving
• Self appraisal
• Plans for the future at the time, and why

13. CAVEATS
• Topgrading interviews filter out candidates who would
rather just reflect on their best work, as well as those who
simply want a more expedient or less intrusive
interviewing process
• The technique relies upon at least the credible possibility
of reference checks with past bosses or colleagues to
increase the likelihood of receiving complete and accurate
answers from many candidates

14. INTERVIEW PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS

15. INTERVIEW PROCESS
IMPROVEMENTS
• The following builds upon structured interviews
• Levers for further process enhancement:
1. Separate responsibility for assessing candidate
attributes among different members of the hiring team
2. During interviews, each interviewer scores each
candidate on only the criteria (s)he was assigned to
assess, and records written assessment comments
3. Interviewers are not allowed to discuss their assessments
until all have completed their evaluations, and come
together to pool assessments

16. INTERVIEW PROCESS
IMPROVEMENTS
• These methods allow a group of interviewers to contribute
to a standardized assessment, while resisting
confirmation bias and groupthink
• More formally stated, the levers for improvement:
• Independence of individual assessments
• Aggregation of views
• Delayed holistic judgement
-> These three components combine in powerful ways to
benefit from the breath of experience and perspectives of
multiple interviewers, while sidestepping the negatives of less
structured group decision dynamics

17. INTERVIEW PROCESS
IMPROVEMENTS
• Further ways to lift the process:
• Designating a process owner from outside the hiring
team who is responsible for the quality of the interviewing
and hiring decision process and its continuous
improvement
• This process owner should be someone who is a
participant, a coach and a mentor to interviewers, but has
a different incentive than the rest of the hiring team
• To make the role meaningful, the person needs to have
veto power over any hire if the quality of the selected
candidate or the conduct of the process is deficient
• To read more about this process owner construct,
Amazon’s Bar Raiser Process is a good reference, about
which much has been written

18. INTERVIEW PROCESS
IMPROVEMENTS
• The Bar Raiser mechanism (or similar protocols) helps
prevent urgency to hire from overwhelming an acceptable
minimum standard for talent, as well as building in
continuous improvement
• Typical further good practice: Rotation of Bar Raisers
among hiring teams helps cut down on the risk of
unhealthy forms of reciprocity building up which can
otherwise diminish the value of the practice

19. CONCLUSION
• These steps to enhance interviewing and the predictive
value of interviews to future on-the-job performance can
seem daunting and even constricting to those acclimated
to less formal interviewing methods
• The reward though that makes the prize worth the effort is
to activate one of the strongest ways to boost the level of
energy, skill, teamwork and collaboration capacity to
fortify high performing firms to the new employment law
realities of operating largely without non-competes
• Scale-up stage tech companies which do this well stand to
gain much more than they may lose from the prohibition
of most non-competition provisions in employment
agreements

20. FURTHER READING
STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS BAR RAISER
PROCESS

21. FURTHER
DISCUSSION
For additional discussion about improving interviewing, and
evolving related practices for the new era of prohibited non-
competition clauses in the Province of Ontario:
dave.litwiller@communitech.ca