Crushing a Job Interview!

“A job interview is an arbitrary and a totally discriminatory selection process of rejecting a whole lot of perfectly good candidates” –Unknown

A job interview is a precious occasion for both sides. Here, a candidate gets to evaluate if they are landing the right job with the right environment for them to flourish, and the hiring manager gets to assess if they are making the right selection that will enhance their team. Despite rigorous screening, discriminatory (legal of course!) process, and countless checks, about 30% of the hiring decisions are made incorrectly at all levels (on both sides). The price for a false positive choice is incalculable in lost opportunity, team morale, and a person’s reputation. At high levels a bad-hiring decision can kill a business.

Much of the hiring decision is based on tough technical questions to explore a candidate’s expertise for jobs that require heavy-duty technical skills (medicine, law, technology, engineering, to name a few). For highly technical positions clearing such interviews should be mere table stakes and yet they often seem to preponderate the selection process.  This is why, in most cases, the incumbent failure does not stem from their inability to deliver technical chops (IQ), but, rather, from their social and interpersonal skills (EQ, PQ).

If they are also being hired as managers they can often fall short on their management or leadership skills—including their Political Intelligence, PQ—not on their technical savvy, none of which can be properly evaluated in a run-of-the-mill interview. Vetting non-technical skills and assessing showstoppers is one of the toughest interview challenges with so much of it left to chance that one can readily see why the 30% false-positive rate can look like an underestimate!

Yet another factor, too, that exacerbates the false-positive rate, even for highly talented technocrats (high IQs) stems from the selected candidates’ high smarts—with vary low standard deviations on their IQ spread. And, yet, because typical interview processes do not pay much attention to assessing their EQ, there is a yawning abyss for how their EQs are spread. The lack of correlation between someone’s IQ and EQ (they are orthogonal) make the normal interview selection process deeply flawed, yielding this high false positive rate.

So, what it boils down to is the types of right questions that are asked during an interview and to assessing the quality of the authentic responses they elicit (to screen for high IQ and EQ, both can be assessed by a right interviewer asking the right questions.). The ability to assess the quality of the responses to these questions can make the difference between victory and defeat (for both sides). It is that binary!

In my proposed design, once a candidate is fully qualified for their technical expertise the hiring process must shift in a different direction with those who are seasoned enough to explore both technical and social skills by asking some key questions. I have many managers and executives as clients, who struggle with asking insightful questions that will greatly reduce the false positives. I also have clients going into interviews who want to know what questions to ask of their hiring managers, so that they have a good sense of whom they are going to be working for. So, this blog offers some suggestions for questions for both sides to make their interview encounter meaningful.

The list of suggested questions for both sides is not in any particular order:

Questions Hiring Manager Should Consider:

Instead of asking pat questions such as your strengths and weaknesses, the following questions can reveal a candidate’s true grit.

1. What assumption do people around you make that would be wrong? (This question delves into self-awareness and how they deal with it to be effective. It is also a window for the candidate to make a case for their physically obvious shortcomings to not be showstoppers with interview misperceptions they create.)
2. Describe your dream job (One candidate for a program manager position responded: A security guard at the Playboy mansion!)
3. What is the toughest problem you have solved? Then ask: Can you describe in detail how you solved it? (If they have really solved such a problem they will excitedly tell you until you are fully satisfied. Those who were merely witnesses in its resolution will betray their ignorance. The answer to this key question also sheds light on the level at which this candidate is operating and their leadership.)
4. What has been your biggest failure? (This is yet another question that reveals a person’s ability to take risk and to extend themselves beyond their comfort zone and how they come through—or not—in a clutch.)
5. What do you find annoying in your everyday work that you would like to avoid? (Response to this question will give you insights about what must you do to keep this person happy. If that is outside your realm, reconsider)
6. What major initiatives you have undertaken on your own and completed them successfully? (Here, too, the scope of such initiatives gives great insight about their leadership abilities and how they championed that across the organization.)
7. For manager-level candidates it is good to ask questions about their management style to understand if they are micromanagers. Most people confuse being hands-on (good) with being a micromanager (bad). Delve into it with some depth and flesh out the kind of candidate you are hiring by deftly asking behavioral—not merely attitudinal—questions.

Questions Candidates Should Consider Asking their Hiring Managers:

1. If you were to select me to join your team what would be the top three priorities for me to work on? (The answer will tell you how they plan to engage you from the get-go.)
2. How will I be measured? (In many cases I found that the hiring managers had no clue how to answer this question.)
3. If you hired a prefect candidate what will their performance look like at the end of the first year (once you get an answer to this question you can respond by narrating how you have done this in your prior jobs by telling stories and by giving examples.)? Your subsequent dialog after the answer can set you up as that perfect candidate.
4. If, during your research about the company or the team, you uncovered some juicy detail about them ask a clever question to elicit something that could otherwise stay unexplored and could come back to haunt you, once you take the job. Phrasing this question can also be tricky, so go prepared. Do not ask invidious questions or questions that can make the hiring manager uncomfortable (“what is happening with that SEC probe?”).
5. What do you see as a career path in this role and what resources are available to pursue that path? (In the case of one laid-off client he was being offered a job at a grade lower than his last job and there was no headroom for him to get to the next position)

If you understand the import of these questions and how to steer the interview based on the responses to these questions you are more likely to come to the right decision no matter what side of the selection process you are on!

Good luck!