Interviewing candidates
I recently counted the number of training courses that I had attended that were both memorable and useful. There were just six courses over 24 years that stood out to me. One of those courses was on interviewing technique. Over the years I have refined my approach and in this post I am offering up my process for interviewing and hiring the best candidates.
The reason I think this is pressing is because I still witness hiring managers asking poorly framed questions or following a checklist of questions that don’t help them assess whether a candidate is good or not for a role. My biggest bugbear is the question “please give me your three biggest strengths and three biggest weaknesses?”. In the best case you are asking the person to lie to you three times and the worst case they may be lying to you six times. This question typically doesn’t elicit any introspection or self-knowledge on behalf of the candidate. You couldn’t for instance flip the weaknesses into an initial set of performance objectives on day one. That is because they are all fake. Typical responses are “I work too hard”, “I am a perfectionist”, “I like to jump in early when I see others making mistakes”. In fact, that there aren’t many more answers to that question, because the trick has always been to offer weaknesses that are also potentially strengths or that can be corrected with minimal effort.
There are number of data points that a hiring manager has access to that can help them form a decision on the best candidate for a role. These include a resume, covering letter or application form, any guidance from a recruitment consultant, the interview, skills assessments, interviews by other stakeholders and references. There is also a probation period where the initial decision can be assessed. Of all these, the interview should be the most informative because you get to ask relevant questions and can supplement the information received verbally with their body language and your intuition. I once interviewed a candidate who insisted on clicking his fingers to emphasize his answers. They did not get the job.
The interview is only effective if you ask good questions. You can only ask good questions if you have a well-designed job description. If you are new to this blog, my 4th post on “the one type of job you shouldn’t accept” is relevant here. A well-designed job description should have a clear purpose and expected accountabilities. In other words, what problem is this role trying to solve. For the purposes of hiring, the job description should also have required experience and qualifications. Skillsets should only be marked as required if it is impossible to do the job without them, everything else should be marked as recommended or suggested. If a “perfect candidate” existed, they would typically be doing the job already to a high-level of competence at another organization. For most roles you probably do not want the perfect candidate as there is little room for growth within the role you are hiring. I like to view the job description as a shopping list and the interview process as a chance to compare prospective candidates against that list to determine how well they match-up. We are balancing previous experience with salary budgets and calculating how much management time will be required to train the new member of the team in their new role.
Given that we are unlikely to want or find the perfect candidate, the focus of the interview should be confirming that the relevant skills they claim on paper are in fact true. If you don’t establish this then you are relying too heavily on references and the probation period which are both limited due to employment law. Because candidates have legal recourse if given a negative reference, most company references usually only confirm the working dates of the candidate at previous jobs. Probation periods are usually time-limited, and candidates need to fail spectacularly and quickly for you to realize that it is worth restarting the entire hiring process from scratch.
These days you need to be careful about the questions you ask a candidate. Small talk about how easy it was the for the candidate to get to the interview or anything that is not directly related to the role is off limits as it could be potentially discriminatory. This can make the initial interaction awkward. Focus instead on welcoming them into the office space (or wherever the interview takes place) and then on the interview process itself. As a Brit, I can wholeheartedly recommend the weather as a topic of discussion. This works less well in places with low seasonality, but even then, people will either like or dislike the weather and that should eat up the uncomfortable five-minute walk from reception to interview venue. I start the formal interview by introducing myself and my position, I then describe the open role in sufficient detail to lift it off the page and to give the candidate a better idea of what I am looking for. It’s important that each candidate gets the same description. The introduction finishes with a request for the candidate to give a quick summary of their career to date, specifically their key highlights. This is all designed to put the candidate as ease so they can give the best account of themselves. It also gives the candidate a chance to determine if the role or working with me is something that still interests them. The career summary allows them to frame themselves in the most advantageous way. I don’t mind how long they take or how much detail they give, they just need to make it interesting and relevant.
For the main part of the interview, the focus is on confirming skillsets. There is a style of question and questioning technique that I think works best. I approach this part of the interview from two angles. The first angle is asking the candidate to identify projects or tasks in their careers where they demonstrated the recommended skills for the role they have applied for. Listening to their answer I will question them further to clarify precisely their role and their actions. What I am looking for is that they can give sufficient detail to ensure the example is real. Given most projects are teamwork, I am looking for their specific role in the team and to prevent them from claiming other’s work and initiative as their own. For more senior roles, asking how people came to a decision, or what was their inspiration, or how did they convince others of the course of action are helpful devices for keeping the focus and spotlight on the candidate. Most of the time these questions will focus on periods of adversity. When things weren’t running smoothly, what action or initiative did they take. Depending on the seniority of the role, were they competently executing a decision made by others or was it a decision they made that was executed by their team. The questioning continues until I can clearly reflect back to them the exact process and thought process they went through and how much of that was their responsibility. If they are claiming a responsibility that would normally be a few levels above their current position, I will point that out to them and ask them to describe their manager’s role in more detail. I repeat this process with a couple more examples.
The second angle is pushing for details of specific roles on their resume that best align with the skills I am looking for, particularly if they were not mentioned in the first line of questioning. I often find that the roles that go unmentioned were probably less successful parts of their career. Even though they will be less proud of these roles, how they handled a working environment that wasn’t their favorite gives you a useful viewpoint on them as candidates. If they didn’t mention these roles because they had more relevant or recent examples but can give a passionate appraisal of the work they performed, then this is also valuable information. I always ask why they want to leave their current position (if they are employed). Any answer to this question is usually good, although one candidate once mentioned he was leaving his existing employer because his current colleagues were all lazy (his application went no further).
For both angles the idea is to push below high-level summaries and drive into details. If the questioning doesn’t get you to the right level of detail, switch to asking them to appraise themselves and how they would do things differently and why. If after this approach they won’t offer up the necessary detail, there are a couple of conclusions you can make. The candidate may just be unwilling to offer sufficient details when asked. This isn’t a great look in an interview and could carry over into their work with you. Alternatively, the candidate may be stretching an example and their role within it. In which case the questioning has worked. In both cases I would wrap up the interview early and pass on them as candidates.
I would recommend that you do not take any notes or even a pen into the interview itself. This is for two reasons. Firstly, in some jurisdictions a candidate can request your notes after the interview, and this is an administrative burden that is best avoided. Only unsuccessful candidates request notes, and I would much prefer to give them clear answers on request than force them to decipher my awful handwriting to glean information that simply isn’t there. Secondly, I prefer to give the candidate my full attention and make the interview as conversational as possible, and I can’t do that if I am taking notes at the same time.
Post-interview I distill my thoughts into written notes and usually send them to the HR team (and the hiring manager if I am doing second-round or supplementary interviews for someone else). The written notes take the following form. Can the applicant do the job? If they can do the job, how would that role be performed? Where would the candidate excel and where would there be a development needs? How long could we expect the applicant to do the role for or how long until they master it? If this is a short time frame, what would be the next career move for the candidate. Finally, I add any other thoughts concerning organization fit. To clarify this last point, this is not about personality and background but about aligning with organizational values. Any signals that the candidate would not work collaboratively or respectfully are worth noting.
When answering how a role will be performed by a candidate, I am summarizing the match between requirements and skillset and how much authority they will carry based on their prior experiences. At the most junior level, they should be able to execute against a set of objectives or goals. With a little more authority, they may help interpret the objectives or goals. With more authority again, they may help define and set the objectives and goals and push back on requirements that could be improved. Can they represent their team both within the department and in the wider business or do they need more management air cover and support whilst they adjust into their new role? I am projecting in my notes how I think the candidate will perform the role if it was offered to them.
Finally, once all the candidates have been interviewed, I like to prepare a comparison of the candidates with a recommendation. I usually prefer not to know the salary demands of the candidates before I get to this stage. It’s human nature that we normally equate cost with quality, so without knowing the cost I can assess the relative quality of the candidates from the interview alone.
That is my interview technique. I rarely ask any questions about the future of the industry or pose too many “what-ifs” based on actual examples. In real-life we usually have more time to consider situations that arise and have the benefit of conferring with colleagues. I may want to assess their instincts, but in an interview, these are unlikely to be their genuine instincts. If you do want to learn about how they would respond to a specific situation, then it is usually better to frame a question around something in their work experience and ask them how they responded (and how they would do things differently now).
Let me in the comments if you have interview techniques that I haven’t mentioned and that work for you. Next week I want to write about problem-solving and the first step that often gets missed.