We want you!
Hiring…absolutely crucial for growth, actually….hiring well is crucial for growth. If done poorly, it can stall the short term gains of hiring new talent, but we've covered that before.
This is more on the how of hiring….the interview. Every manager knows how important it is to hire great talent but how do you do that? Often the interview process is quite daunting for managers, especially as they often don’t get any training on how to do it. More likely than not, they are just assigned an interview and told to report back on how it went. What follows is some hasty research on how to interview, what questions to ask etc. This makes it quite easy to understand why the majority of people will rely on their gut feeling to make hiring decisions.
However, there is a BIG difference between a gut feeling and a gut instinct. A gut feeling is something that your subconscious just pulls to the forefront of your mind, but gut instinct is something honed over many years of experience. Unfortunately, that is not something that can be taught, it comes from repeating the action and reviewing the results multiple times.
Fear not! This article will go through a tried and tested interview process that will allow you to accurately sift through your candidate pool and hire the best.
First Step
Really understand the job that you are hiring to fill. Like with all aspects, engage in multi-order thinking. Dive deeper than just the job skills or requirements. What would a typical day be? What teams will they interact with? What are some example projects that have happened in the past or likely to happen in the future? What tasks/projects went well? What was the reason for it? And just as important if not more, what tasks/projects went badly? What happened? What is the future of the role? What would be the next steps in 6 months to a year? What would success look like in 3 months, 6 months etc.
Next
Personality…Don't hire yourself. It’s not a joke. One of the biggest pitfalls managers can fall into is confirmation bias around their personality traits with incoming candidates. Now, to be honest, it might be that your personality would fit well into the role your hiring for, but that’s not the point. If you have done the previous preparation well enough, then you will have a clear understanding of what type of personality would do well in the role. Do they need to be highly structured? Take criticism often? Work in environments with imperfect information and have to make quick decisions? You may find someone with all the technical matches and then find out they can’t handle the environment the job puts them in.
Questions
Ironically, the next step is to look up some interview questions. The internet is an incredible source of information for high-quality content once you know what you are looking for. This makes all the difference. If you just look up interview questions, you will come back with all the generic questions that everyone has prepared answers for.
What are your greatest weaknesses? <- terrible question.
Instead research questions specific to the areas that are important to the role. For example, if they have to engage in a lot of cross-department communication, ask questions around stakeholder management. What projects have they completed before in a team environment? What project went terribly?
As you might have noticed, there have been a few times I have brought up questions that involve things going badly, i.e. what went wrong, what failed etc. This is actually what I consider to be one of the most important types of questions that you can ask in an interview for multiple reasons.
People will prepare in advance good stories and projects, they will rarely prepare stories of things that have gone badly. This is extremely important because if someone has not prepared a story, it will be very difficult for them to embellish it and thus you will more likely get an accurate accounting.
This leads to one of my absolute favourite questions to ask, Tell me about the last time you failed. I honestly don’t care anything about what they failed at, what I care about is how self-aware they are and what they did to improve themselves after. This will also tell you a lot about their character. Do they know what they failed at? Or do they shift the blame to someone else? Have they put changes in place to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again? The answer to this question will reveal a lot about the candidate so make sure you listen very carefully and probe deeper on their replies.
Finally, as you undoubtedly know, things go wrong. Doesn’t matter what you do, something will always go wrong. Finding out how aware the person was and how they reacted will give you a good insight into how they will react when problems arise in the future.
Bonus!
Depending on how confident you are with interview, I highly recommend questions that might be considered strange or weird. Here are a few questions that I use depending on the role.
“If I gave you a lion, but you couldn’t sell it or give it away to anyone, what would you do?”
“After this interview, you find a winning lottery ticket for 5 million euros, what would you do?”
“How would you design a spice rack for the blind?”
“If you could fly or be invisible - what would you choose?”
Whilst they may seem like a joke or a time-waster, they are carefully chosen depending on the job role.
Lion – how do they prioritize and handle problems with no obvious solution?
Spice rack – do they answer immediately and make fast judgement calls or do they favour doing research?
Fly or be invisible – do they like being in the spotlight or operating in the background?
Lottery – One of my favourites – watch their face, it will give you a very quick judge on their motivation for the role. My answer, for example, I would laugh, give half to my parents, buy a property or two, invest the rest and hopefully see you next week for round 2. I love marketing and want to continue learning as much as I can to help reach my career goals. Ultimately you want to hire someone that is invested in the role and/or company, not just the paycheck.
Questions like this will give you a deeper insight into the culture and personality traits that you know the candidate will need to have to be a high performer in the role. These questions are ideal for getting authentic and honest answers that are not rehearsed.
Preparation
Yes, still more to do before the interview itself but not too much.
Write down all the questions you want to ask, keep them segmented into areas to allow for the conversation to flow and bring their CV with the areas marked that you want to ask more questions on.
Alright….now we’ve gotten all the questions and preparation done – it’s time for the interview.
Once we have gotten through all the platitudes, spend the next few minutes on questions that you would ask someone you had just met at a friend’s house party. Yes, you read that correctly. Interviews are incredibly stressful. There is nothing worse in an interview than seeing a candidate fall apart due to nerves. Whilst there is only so much you can do, asking questions unrelated to the job and engaging in more of a casual conversation can help quite a bit in calming those nerves.
Once it's reached a comfortable level, open with the question that everyone prepares for – Tell me about yourself, experience etc.
Listen to their answer, it seems obvious, but there is a big difference between listening to respond and listening to understand. I highly encourage you to actively practice the latter as this will allow for the conversation to become exactly that….a conversation and not just someone firing question after question.
Finally, don’t fall in love too fast. Even if your gut feeling/instinct is shouting this is the right person, it doesn’t hurt to make sure. The following is the structure that I like to follow in regards to the whole process. It’s not too long and it covers all the necessary aspects.
Phone interview
Face to face
On-site test
Final interview
This is just a template and it can change from role to role depending on seniority but it is the basis that I’ve found to be the most effective and efficient.
This leads to a question that I get asked very often.
What do you look for in candidates?
There are three things and you'll be surprised about them but regardless of the job I'm hiring for they are always the same.
Enthusiasm – are they excited for the role? Are they leaning forward? Smiling? You can always feel this from a candidate.
Mission – do they really believe in the mission of the company, huge points if they believe in the why of the company
Willingness to learn – Do they want to continue developing? What areas are they missing and where can I help.
At the end of the day, I want to work with someone that is fired about coming into work, excited about the mission we are trying to do and wants to continue to improve themselves. I have found these traits to be the most common factor in all the high-performance teams I have run.