The Employment Interview:
So, Tell Me About Myself!

Interviewing -- talking with and getting to know someone -- is, for some managers, about as natural an act as any in management. For others, it may represent one of the most dreaded, intimidating, and stressful (almost as stressful as firing someone) managerial obligations. Still others see it as a chance for a little diversion from the routine; an opportunity to pull out those killer questions, and maybe dish-out some intimidation - not for the fun of it, of course, but to see how the candidate handles the rough and tumble of the real world. For many others, it's just another task in a long day; grab and skim the résumé or employment app. as the applicant is taking her seat, and start firing the old standby questions.

Regardless of their orientation to interviewing, for most managers this crucial responsibility represents both a large investment of time and a tedious exercise that they approach without considerable forethought or regard for how they do it.

Most people hire people they like, rather than the most competent person. Research shows that most decision-makers make their hiring decisions in the first five minutes of an interview and spend the rest of the interview rationalizing their choice.
                     -- Orv Owens, psychologist, in the New York Times

No matter how you feel about interviewing, chances are good that you have approached it with less than a rigorous structure and reliable methodology. And if you are among those few who do use a consistent approach to your candidate interviews, this chapter may challenge some of your assumptions (e.g., what's wrong with interview questions focused on behavioral anecdotes). The Natural Selection Hiring Method brings structure and methodology to this crucial aspect of candidate assessment and hiring.

For Sale: Applicant, Mint Condition; Ready, Willing, and Able

By the time you sit across the desk from a candidate, you're deep into the process we've outlined in this book so you already know a great deal of what you're looking for, and should know a great deal about the candidate already. But your job is to find out who that person really is, seeing through the job hunter's carefully crafted campaign to communicate buy me. Your inquiries must cut through the candidate's trimmed, polished, and coifed Monday go to interview veneer.

Job applicants have at their disposal literally shelf after shelf of books in any bookstore telling them how to construct the perfect résumé and how to tell you, in a most convincing way, exactly what you want to hear during the employment interview. Many applicants have been coached, videotaped, and rehearsed by professional job counselors. They know all the standard answers, and they've practiced snappy retorts to even the toughest standard questions. In short, many job applicants are much more skilled and much better prepared for their side of the interview than the person sitting across the desk from them (who, frankly, may not be prepared or skilled at all).

Because job applicants are becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is not unusual for a company to inadvertently hire an individual who makes the best impression, rather than the person who is best suited for the position.
                  --Users Guide, Caliper

Many interviews unfold as a battle, not of wits, but sales pitches. The candidate is selling the best employee anyone ever heard of, with the hiring manager pitching feverishly, what an absolutely fantastic opportunity this job is even though you can't tell it from the salary. Rather than dueling advertisements, the hiring manager needs to be a careful buyer and skilled interviewer to cut past the candidate's commercial

This article provides you with a structure and a method to greatly improve the quality of information and insight that you extract from a prospective hire during a carefully planned and executed job interview.

Can You Recall a Time When You Asked a Question?

An interview technique that's been around for decades has become quite fashionable recently. Known by many names, most of which have the term behavior in them, this technique is predicated on a simple premise: A look at the past provides a glimpse of the future; if you did it before, you'll do it again. The basic script calls for the interviewer to prompt, probe or press the candidate to recall and describe in sometimes excruciating detail a real life incident that provides evidence of a skill or experience relevant to the new job. The fundamental precept is that there is a world of difference between talking a good game, being there when it was played, and actually carrying the ball.

Behavior interviews seek evidence that a candidate actually has behaved in the way they represent that they have. Rather than listening to an applicant espouse love for teamwork, the interviewer asks, When was a time when you made a significant contribution to a team and didn't get credit for it?

Instead of letting a candidate assert that she has strong organizational skills, the interviewer asks, How did you organize your week last week? Walk me through the planning and organizing process step by step, in as fine a detail as you can.

When an interviewee asserts that he's a people person, the interviewer tests that claim by asking, Can you give me an example of a time when you had a conflict with a coworker over something that was job-related? If the applicant can't think of a single disagreement, he couldn't possibly be a people person; he's not interacting with anyone.

Entire books have been filled with little more than sample questions for eliciting behavioral descriptions relating to a variety of occupations and situations. But the principle is fundamentally simple and can be illustrated without requiring a book full of examples.

You explore whether the candidate has the quality you want in the new hire by asking for a situation that would show you the candidate living that value. The real situations described by the candidate should show that he or she actually behaved in a way that demonstrates the characteristic you want in your new employee.

Here’s the basic format. Ask for a:

•  Specific example in a real instance of
  
•  The candidate’s own action that
  
•  Illustrates (suggests) competence in a
  
•  Particular quality (such as Service, Reliability, Problem-solving, etc.) .
  

For example, if you want to test for a customer service oriented work ethic, you could ask a series of questions such as:

• Could you recall a time when, on your own initiative, you stopped work in progress because you thought it was unacceptable to your customer?
  
  
• What was the circumstance?
  
  
• How did you know what would be acceptable to a customer?
  
  
• Weren’t you concerned you might get in trouble for having to start over again?

Or if you wanted to assess the candidate’s emotional maturity in the workplace , you might ask: Can you tell me about a recent time when you had to deal with a person who was nasty with you (or, who made you angry).

You get to the quality by asking the candidate to tell you about a situation when it should be obviously present.

The sample question above opens more avenues than flatly asking, Have you ever blown up in anger at a co-worker or customer? If the candidate gives you a flat no, you've learned nothing; and a yes, might be dismissed with, Oh, that was so long ago and we're such good friends now. She must have been having a bad day that day. Sure, you could explore this a little more. You might have detected the blame on the colleague. You could always use the behavior-specific approach in probing for more details if you got a yes rather than a flat no - which leaves you with no information and no applicable insight into the candidate.

Here are some ways to ask a candidate to reveal his or her true self by telling you about relevant real life experiences:

• When was a time when you...
  
  
• Can you give me an example of when you...
  
  
• Could you tell me about a time when you...
  
  
• Tell me more about when you...
  
  
• Have you ever had to... What was the situation, and what did you do..
  
  
• Describe a situation where you...
  
  
• Let's go back to that situation you just mentioned; can you elaborate a little more about how you...
  
  
• When [this] happens, what do you do? ... Can you explain in detail a specific instance of that?
  
  
• Your résumé/application indicates that you.. How exactly did you do that?
  
  
• I hear what you're saying, but I need a few more details to really understand what happened. Can you take me back to the point when you...
  
  
• You said that you always/never __________, but what about a time when...
  
  
• Have you ever had the experience of... (or occasion to...) Can you tell me about that?
  
  
• This is a most impressive accomplishment. To help me understand it better, could you walk me through the process starting with...
  
  
• Interesting. Fascinating. Hmmm. No kidding. Wow. Tell me more.
  
  
• Cutting expenses 94 percent while increasing revenues 212 percent is most impressive. How did you do that?
  
  
• I see. [Silence] Go on.
  
  
• I'm a little confused about what exactly you did in that situation. Can you help me to understand by describing it the way you'd describe a scene in a movie so that I can see the action taking place?
  
  
• What were you doing while all this was happening?
  
  
• What was your role in that?
  
  
• Have you ever had to...
  
  
• Walk me through, in such fine detail that you think it might annoy me, a typical operation/job/phone call/meeting...
  

Similar to past-behavior interview questions are so-called scenario questions. This is where you present a situation and ask, what would you do? This form of question can be a useful gauge of a candidate's knowledge of a subject or understanding of an ideal response. The candidate's answer doesn't necessarily have any predictive validity -- indicating the likelihood that they would actually follow their own script. You might be getting the business equivalent of a well-crafted fairy tale. Follow it up with this question: What's a similar example from your own life?

Bear this simple truth in mind when spinning out scenario questions: Hypothetical questions generate hypothetical answers.

Beyond Behavioral and Scenario Interviews

Now, there's nothing wrong, per se, with asking for and hearing out some of the candidate's actual experiences. You'll hear loud echoes of that concept here. And the fact is that the well-executed past-behavior-based interview is a light-year from where most hiring interviews were in effectiveness just a few short years back. The new dimension here is to recognize the liabilities and limitations of past behavior (event, incident, experience, personal story...) -oriented interviews as they are typically executed, and to add some enriching strategies to give you a deeper insight than a superficial tour, punctuated by excruciating detail, through someone's career and life scrapbook.

So let's address the question we've begged: How can listening to what a candidate has really done -- as opposed to the outcome of the old, informal interview where you listened to what candidates say they believe or what they think you want to hear -- how can that be bad?

In truth it may not be, if you're sure you want to repeat the past, or if you believe an anecdote reveals a pattern. Or if you really do drill-down into the specifics even when it's difficult and uncomfortable to do so, and if you can effectively deduce how representative the candidate's example is, and what motivated it, and the likelihood that this is the candidate's instinctual or habitual way of handling similar situations now and forever. And if you can tie the string of anecdotes into clearly revealing the many non-technical Capacities you're seeking in the candidate. And if you're sure you know why the candidate did what she did in the stories she told you, and what those anecdotes told her...

Or, and this is the clincher, if you're sure the candidate wanted to behave this way, and would again facing similar work challenges but in a different organizational environment. That new environment, yours for example, may offer the candidate different choices because it does not have the same-as-the-example's rules, policies, incentive programs, managerial oversight or support, and so on.

Many managers, practicing a surface-level, give-me-an-example, past behavior interview, fail these if tests. Furthermore, while behavior-based interviews are great for revealing some past behavior, says Herb Greenberg of Caliper, the large international employment testing and consulting firm, it benefits those with applicable experience, people who know the industry or know the lingo.

Gleaning Too Much from Too Little

In other words, managers hear familiar terms and references to scenarios they recognize and their judgment about a candidate begins to suffer from what psychologists call the halo effect. That's where you confer on your candidate positive points they may not deserve because their apparently closely-related-to-yours experience has you identifying with the candidate and convincing yourself that this candidate sounds exactly right for the job.

Hearing buzzwords and instantly recognizable on-the-job situations prompts managers to fill in the gaps in the candidate's story with their own narrative. Because they know (they think they know) where the story is headed, they may actually cut-off the candidate prematurely. They clip the reply before really understanding the candidate's precise role in the situation, why they did what they did, exactly how, what the consequences were, whether this was a one-time event, or to what extent this is indicative of the way this candidate usually operates, or wants to operate, and so on.

Candidates with closely related prior experience can, even unwittingly, tell the hiring manager exactly what they were hoping to hear. So much so, that the manager doesn't even need to hear but a fraction of it before leaping to a set of conclusions that may or may not be correct.

When you do probe for what a candidate has done behaviorally, particularly when assessing technical experience, be sure to get a sense of scope for the behaviors a candidate describes. Just as you profiled the job in terms of criticality, duration and frequency, you need to get a sense of the same for what candidates say they do.

Example: The candidate describes working with people, or as part of a team. Probe: How often? For how long? How important is that to accomplishing the job? Is it your sense that this is too much or too little? Without a sense of scope, you hear about an isolated incident with no context and no predictive validity.

Invest or Regret

The real person sitting beneath that nice interview outfit is the one who is going to show up day after day, week after week once you put him or her on your payroll. Truly understanding that person is worth every moment of time you invest in the process. Think of it this way: You bet your career, and some chunk of your mental health, on every person you hire. Don't you want to be very, very sure who that person really is?

Lead Well® helps organizations to improve measurable results by developing their current and future leaders. For more information, please contact us. By phone, toll-free in the USA: 1-888-LeadWell (532-3935), or 1-609-716-9490. By email, Info@LeadWell.com.

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Don Blohowiak, a management consultant and popular conference speaker, is the author of several business books. The executive director of the Lead Well® Institute in Princeton, NJ, he may be reached at http://www.LeadWell.com/.

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