HOW TO INTERVIEW TO FIND GREAT EMPLOYEES By Robert Moskowitz
Your hands sweat. Your heart palpitates. Your mind is a confusing jumble of fragmented advice, admonitions, and expected behavior. No, it's not your first date. It's your first time interviewing candidates for an important job opening. Although the ability to hire the right people is critical not only for your organization, but for your own success and advancement, very few managers know how to tell the difference between a top banana and a bad apple. In fact, a recent survey showed that more than forty per-cent of hiring decisions are made on the basis of appearance factors alone. The difficulty of finding good hires is compounded today because the availability of good employees is in a tailspin. According to industry sources, relatively low birth rates during the 60's and 70's have led to a shortage of good candidates for today's critical job positions. What's more, most of the key qualifications that make a good employee--good attitude, personal honesty, underlying work ethic, strong motivation, and so forth--don't readily show up on job applications. That's why it's vital that you understand the interviewing process and use it effectively to identify the best qualified person for a position. Interviewing is particularly crucial when hiring for "front line" jobs dealing directly with (and making important impressions on) customers, clients, prospects, and others outside the organization. "The main problem," says Bill Fromm, co-author of "The Real Heroes of Business--and Not A CEO Among Them," and president of Barkley & Green, a Kansas City-based marketing and advertising firm, "is that companies today tend to focus on hiring for skills, rather than training for attitude. But it's far better to hire for attitude, then train for required skills." As an example, consider a retail cashiering job. It's far easier to hire someone who is fundamentally honest, and who likes to meet and deal with people, and teach them how to use the machine than it is to teach an experienced cashier how to smile and get along well with customers, all the while hoping they won't steal. Success in most people-oriented and front-line positions, in fact, depends more on personality and attitude than on technical skills.
Even where skills are vital, it's common for employers to overstate what's actually required for success. A good candidate for an executive secretary position, for example, must know how to type, but can learn the keystrokes to work a certain word processor.
"It may take an extra two weeks to train the right person on the needed job skills," says Fromm, "but when you get done with the training, you're going to be way better off. And the cost of the training is paid back very quickly, because hiring people with the right attitude improves the quality of your employees and reduces turnover--which is hugely expensive." Here are some basic guidelines on how to get the most from the next job interview you conduct: 1)Avoid standard questions. It's pointless to pose such tried-and- true cliches as "Why should I hire you?" "Are you honest?" or "What's your greatest strength (or biggest weakness)?" Most candidates deliver canned answers to these questions, and it's too easy to cast yourself in a good light. Instead, ask questions that elicit more revealing answers. Examples: "Tell me about your first job, back when you were a teenager?" "How did you get it?" "Did you have a boss or a mentor you admired?" "What did you like about him or her?" "What did you like or dislike about that job?" "What did you learn there about working?" These questions are asked far less frequently, so canned answers are less likely. What's more, the candidate can't really know what you might consider a "good" answer, and so can't guess how to slant the answer to improve it. 2)Listen carefully to the candidate's responses. Concentrate on what the answers reveal about the candidate's honesty, values, beliefs, personality, and work ethic. "It's not rocket science," says Fromm. "You don't have to psychoanalyze the candidate or search for hidden meanings. Just take their words at face value." For example, if one candidate says he admired a supervisor who allowed people to come in late and leave early, and another one says he admired a supervisor who stayed late to get all the work done every day, you won't have much trouble deciding which candidate to prefer. In addition, everyone's first job tends to contain powerful signals and warning signs regarding the remainder of their working life. If the interviewee enjoyed organizing the day's tasks or liked dealing with people, chances are those personal preferences remain valid today. If he felt under-appreciated or overworked, or hated working indoors, he probably remains very concerned about avoiding such situations in the future. 3)Always, always, always check references. Like checking the brakes and the
fuel gauge in your car before you start, checking references is the fundamental step you must take before you commit your company's resources to a hiring decision. Thousands of unpleasant and expensive employment problems would be avoided each year if these employers had done the most rudimentary reference checks. Of course, threats of lawsuits mean you can't expect anyone giving a reference--whether over the phone or in writing--to openly criticize the candidate or say "he's a thief." But you can certainly verify job titles and employment dates. "You can also get a feel for the level of enthusiasm in the reference," says Jon Garner, of Garner Consulting, Pasadena, CA, a well-respected employee benefits consultancy that works with large organizations across the country. "There's a big difference between 'Yes, he worked here,' and 'We're so sorry to see him go. Everyone liked him. He was one of our best employees.'" Hiring decisions are among the most difficult to make. But you can eliminate a lot of the most common mistakes by more carefully looking at and listening to the person you are hiring, rather than their outward appearance, or the package of skills and experience they claim to be bringing to the job.
Principles of Effective Interviewing Dr. James N. Farr To be a good interviewer, it is not necessary to be a psychologist. However, you do need psychological skills. Mostly, to be a good interviewer, you have to be high in self-awareness. If you are self-aware, you will be able to read in others what you have learned to read in yourself. In what follows, I offer a series of well-tested principles for conducting and analyzing interviews, based on several decades of experience as a management psychologist working with many Fortune 500 and other companies (including relatively small businesses). Be ready to jump a few hurdles as you read: Some of these principles will probably go against your own stereotypes of how to conduct an interview. Observe contact reaction as the subject walks into your office or the interviewing space. Not a word has been spoken, but, from my perspective as a psychologist, the interview has already begun once the candidate opens the door. Remember that seventy percent of all communciation is nonverbal. A male candidate walks in and says, "I beg your pardon." Cautious, probing, a bit unsure, or just deferential. Another male candidate bursts in with an enthusiastic "Good morning!" Different data; not at all the same type of individual. Write down what you observe. Later, you will have a chance to interpret your notes, and you may find these points very revealing. Do not hasten to put the candidate at ease. This is a mistake that many interviewers-including the most seasoned onesconstantly commit. The mental and emotional state of candidates as they enter into the interviewing process is important data. It can tell you a lot about how they relate to new people, how they handle themselves in introductions, what their own self-concept is, and so forth. Of course, after a minute or so, if nervousness persists on the part of the candidate, then you can use some techniques to put the person at ease (such as offering coffee, or moving from behind your desk and taking a chair next to the candidate). You do want the person to be as much at ease as possible for the bulk of the interview. Develop a set of questions and ask the same questions of each candidate. If you want to distinguish one person from another, you have to get a range of responses. The way to do this is to ask the exact same questions of each candidate, and then compare their answers. If you say to one candidate, "Tell me about your career," and to another, "My, it looks like you've had quite a career so far!," you are compromising the process. You are asking a very neutral question in the first instance, and outwardly providing encouragement in the second instance. When it comes time to interpret the data from these interviews, you will already have things askew, and will be comparing apples and oranges. It doesn't work.
Start with stereotypical interview questions, but be aware that your purpose in doing so is to make the subject to be comfortable. Then take off from there and go deeper. People expect me to ask about their training, how things were in their last job, and so forth. So I do. I may ask, "What do you think is the best approach to supervision?" Now, that is a stereotypical question. The subject will say something like, "To empower people." A stereotypical answer. Then, I'll say, "Well, describe a workplace situation where you are the supervisor and tell me, in specific terms, how you would go about empowering your people." This forces them out of the stereotype. Now they have to put real meat on their answer; they can't dodge or hide. Many mediocre interviewers keep the conversation at the level of sterotypes. If you do that, you're not getting a reading on the real person. Doing a whole interview in stereotypes gets you nowhere. It's all just shallow data. Your objective is to get the subject talking, in as much of a discursive, narrative fashion as possible. This is when people are most themselves, and when they are least able to rattle off their prepared answers and shield themselves from your attempt to probe their weak spots. If you ask, "Can you handle tight supervision?," it's too easy for them to say, "Sure, no problem," even if they're lying through their teeth. The truth about the subject is much more likely to emerge if you ask, "Describe for me the type of supervision you prefer to work under." Sample all relevant areas of the candidate's life. Here are the life categories in which I go fishing for data about each candidate: * Work * Education * Health * Social life * Childhood * Family * Personality I begin with work history because, A) this is exactly what the candidate expects, and B) it helps put the candidate at ease to begin with a discussion of work. In each cateogory, however, start the candidate talking about something he knows like the back of his hand. Go from the impersonal
(What's your feeling about pressure?) to the personal (Why did you apparently have a falling out with your last boss?). Go from the familiar (Tell me about the neighborhood where you grew up) to the unfamiliar (How would you feel in a year's time if we wanted to transfer you to Dallas?). Go from the intellect (What's your feeling about working in teams?) to the emotions (How do you react when somebody tells you one of your prize ideas is full of holes?). Take notes on or tape record the interview. I have a notebook on my lap when the subject walks in. As we begin our conversation, I immediately, but discreetly, begin taking notes. After a few minutes, they stop paying attention to my notetaking. Tape recording is fine, too, so long as you ask them, "Do you mind if we tape record this? I'm afraid otherwise I might miss something important that might be to your advantage." Of course, if some highly personal matter comes up-say a candidate's marriage is falling apart- I'll just stop making notes. That you won't forget, and you can note it down later if you want. Without good notes or transcripts, however, you will come up very short of data, and your analysis of the candidates will reflect this shortage. Maintain a steady presence from one interview to the next. The interviewer must hold himself steady as a barometer against which all the various candidates will be measured. Do not, that is, behave one way toward one candidate, and an entirely different way toward another. If you are warm and effusive, be that way with everybody you interview. If you like to hold yourself somewhat in reserve and simply be professionally polite, hold that posture steady throughout the entire concourse of candidates. To unduly influence one candidate toward a negative, or defensive, reaction, and another candidate toward a positive reaction is, again, to compromise your interview data. Consider the interview a real-life or on-the-job process. Too many interviewers manage their interviews as if what happens between them and a candidate during the session is somehow detached from actual workplace experience. It is not, and should not be considered so. In effect, the ideal way to look upon an interview is as a laboratory to sample projected workplace behavior by the candidates. Within the bounds of necessary time limits, you as the interviewer should set up interactions and experiments that will represent possible scenarios on the job. On the very simplest level, for instance, if you observe that a candidate cannot maintain good eye contact with you, you may assume that he or she will also not do so with a customer. Beyond that, you can bring to the fore actual workplace dilemmas and challenge the candidate to come up with solutions. Note the emotional flavor of the interview.
Keeping yourself steady as a measuring instrument, you will observe that different candidates will nonetheless bring to the interview into a type of emotional atmosphere. Some interviews will feel warm and open to you; others may feel cold and closed. This should be-if you are not compromising your own emotional posture from one candidate to another-an indication of the kind of atmosphere a subject will help to generate in the workplace. Do not err on the side of being afraid of asking penetrating questions. I like to compare an interview to a visit to a doctor's office for a thorough examination. In our culture, it is understood that both men and women will disrobe for such an exam, and expose their naked body to the physician. Doctors need not ask permission to see you naked (and if they did start asking permission, it would make us even more nervous). Similarly, interviewers, by the nature of their job, are expected to ask probing questions. We don't have to apologize for saying to a candidate, "Tell me about the atmosphere in your home life." What I usually do toward the outset of an interview is say something like, "Now, in the course of this interview I am going to ask you questions that may be personal in nature. If you think something is too personal for you to answer, just say so, and I'll move on to something else." Having said that, I find that I can ask candidates almost anything, and they will respond fairly candidly. The truth is, almost every question in the interviewing process is invasive. So the way you ask the question will, in part, determine whether or not your candidates give you open and honest reponses. Be professional, be courteous, and demonstrate a genuine interest in the person you are interviewing. This is the way to build trust, and trust is critical to success in gaining insight into each candidate. Be aware that the toughest challenge in the interview process is interpreting the data. It is trite but true that the best data are of no use at all if they are not properly interpreted. Many interviewers, unfortunately, see the discussion process as the most important aspect of interviewing. In reality, the true meaning of the interview will only emerge with skillful interpretation of the data you have gathered. If, at the outset, the interviewer has an inadequate notion of the data to be gathered, the interview process is not likely to produce the data from which an accurate projection can be made of the candidate's performance on the job. Still another problem may be that the interview has not generated a sufficiently deep sampling of a candidate's personality. It is also possible to produce an overabundance of data that is not relevant to job performance. A major challenge is sifting out from all the notes of an interview those points that really bear on how the candidate will do his or her work.
Proper interpretation of data involves matching a given candidate with a given job in such a way that a company has a high degree of assurance that the tasks assigned to that job will be carried out well, and that the person who occupies that slot will mesh well with others in a given company culture. It is often necessary to re-interview candidates in order to generate data that was not produced during the initial interview before a final decision can be made as to which of the prospects for the job will truly work out best.
GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE INTERVIEWING The Body of the Interview Divide the personal interview into four parts: first, put the candidate at ease, i.e., make friends; second, ask your questions; third, answer the candidate's questions; finally, as appropriate, sell. Too many "yes" or "no" answers may mean that you are not phrasing questions correctly. Starting your questions with words like "Why", "What" or "How" will usually get the candidate to open up. Asking a question which starts with "How" is particularly effective, as it requires an expansive reply. In addition, ask the candidate to respond to a few hypothetical questions relating to your business. Try to evaluate the candidate's self-insight (where he/she has faced adversity), honesty and humility. Ask the interviewee to describe his/her weaknesses and then follow up with a question about steps taken to overcome these. If a candidate has never faced adversity or has no weaknesses, you may have the wrong person. Suggest that you will check references extensively prior to extending an offer. Ask "What will we hear from your detractors?" Also inquire about "skeletons in the closet" (i.e., things that would be better discussed now than uncovered in the referencing process). Do not be surprised if these questions are followed by protracted periods of silence. Let the candidate speak first. Examine turn-ons, i.e., identify peak experiences at work and at play. What does the candidate brag about? What is his/her passion? What would he/she do during a hypothetical 12-month sabbatical? Are these team things or solo adventures? Identify deviance or defiance. When has the candidate flown in the face of convention? Look for curiosity and/or productive "kinkiness." Assess energy levels by asking the candidate to describe a "typical day." As appropriate, combine a face-to-face interview with a tour of your facilities. This gives you and the candidate a chance to talk in different settings and provides an opportunity to get his/her "on-site" reactions.
GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE INTERVIEWING SOCKWELL & ASSOCIATES
Closing the Interview Be sure to save time for the candidate's questions. The quality of the questions will tell you a lot about the strength of his/her candidacy. At the end of the interview, determine the candidate's level of interest. This is best accomplished by asking questions about the position -- i.e., which responsibilities best fit his/her experience? Which will cause the candidate to stretch? Finally, thank the candidate for taking the time to meet with you. Be sure he/she knows that you appreciate his/her interest in the position. Let him/her know when to expect to hear from you... and be sure to respond by that time. Evaluate Review your notes before they age. Trust your instincts. Make a "Ben Franklin" balance sheet (plusses and minuses). List potential concerns, i.e., questions to be addressed during reference calls and/or as part of a second interview.
THE ART OF THE INTERVIEW QUESTION Gathering information is the key to competent interviewing, and nothing is more important than an ability to be flexible in your uestioning techniques; you must do it so smoothly that no one realizes it but you. A questioning style that is appropriate in one nstance may give you false, misleading, or--worse still--no information at all in another instance. The following 12 techniques will help you ring the changes as the situation demands and ensure that you the right note every time. 1. Close-Ended Questions These are the most commonly asked questions in interviewing, and also the most commonly abused. How often have you heard of interviewers asking a closed-ended question such as, "Can you work under pressure?" Only yes and no are the possible answers (and who answers no?). The interviewer has no information, no way of evaluating any one candidate against another. But while a closed-ended question is inappropriate in its most common usage, it is useful as a questioning technique when you are looking for commitment ("Can you start on Monday?") or when you are refreshing your memory or verifying information from earlier in the interviewing sequence ("You were with Xerox for ten years?"). You can also use it to get the ball rolling when you have a series of uestions on the same subject. 2. Open-Ended Questions These questions are logically the opposite of the first questioning echnique. With an open-ended question, the interviewee cannot get by with a monosyllabic answer; instead the question demands an explanation in response. For example, "How do you succeed in working under pressure?" is an open-ended question that asks the interviewee to answer in detail. As a rule of thumb, this style of question is preferable to closed-ended questions, and is guaranteed to keep the candidate talking and you listening. These questions often start with, "I'm interested in hearing about..." "I'm curious to learn..." "Would you share with me..." 3. Past-Performance Questions This technique has been developed into a whole style of interviewing (discussed later). Past-performance, or behavioral, questions are based on the premise that past actions can predict future behavior, that any given individual can be expected to do at least as well or as badly on the new job as he or she did on the last. They are open ended by nature, yet focus on requesting specific examples of past behavior. They are usually prefaced with, "Tell me about a time when..." "Share with me an experience when..." "Give me an example of..." Ask past-performance questions early in the interview, so that an interviewee will realize early on that he or she is
expected to give detailed examples about the past and will be less tempted to try pulling the wool over your eyes as the interview progresses.
4. Negative-Balance Questions When interviewing, you can be tempted all too often to believe that a candidate strong in one area is equally impressive in all areas. This is not always the case. When an eerie light appears around the applicant's head, and hymns from a choir of heavenly angels replace the background noise of your office's typewriters, it is time to get a grip on yourself and look for the applicant's feet of clay. Whenever you find yourself becoming unduly impressed, try, "That's very impressive. Was there ever an occasion when things didn't work out quite so well?" or the simple, "Now can you give me an example of something in this area you are not so proud of?" 5. Negative Confirmation When you have sought and found negative balance, you may feel content that you are maintaining your objectivity and move on, or that the answer you receive may be disturbing enough to warrant negative confirmation. Let's say the interviewee told you about a time she found it necessary to go around or behind her supervisor to achieve a goal. As a manager, you will be given considerable pause: If such behavior is common with this individual, you would be unwise to invite her into your team. Consequently, you will seek negative confirmation with, "You know, that 's very interesting. Let's talk about another time when you had to..." Successive examples will help you confirm negative raits and perhaps save you from a poor hire. On the other hand, you might find that particular negative situation to be an aberration, a one-time thing, and nothing to worry about. 6. Reflexive Questions Reflexive questions are great top-closers and conversation forwarders. They help you calmly maintain control of the conversation no matter how loquacious the interviewee. If, for instance, an applicant starts to ramble about various experiences, it is easy to interrupt with a reflexive question that will allow you to proceed with other topics. This is done by adding to the end of a statement phrases like these: don't you? couldn't you? wouldn't you? didn't you? can't you? aren't you? For example: "With time so short, I think it would be valuable to move onto another area, don't you?" The candidate's reflex is to agree, and the conversation moves on. 7. Mirror Statements This is a subtle form of probing used in conjunction with that most effective tool, silence. The technique is to mirror or paraphrase a key statement and follow it by closing your mouth, nodding, and looking interestedly at the interviewee.
Use mirror statements to capture the essence of a candidate's answer and to get more detail. Repeat the substance of key comments ("So, whenever you are two hours late for work, you take off two hours early to make up for it"), then sit and wait for the interviewee to expand on the mirror statements.
8. Loaded Questions Loaded questions are much abused because they can allow the interviewer to play power games. The question style requires the interviewee to decide between tough options. For instance: "Which do you think is the lesser evil, embezzlement or forgery?" There is, however, a fine line between absurd loaded questions and carefully balanced judgment-call questions. For most interviewers, the technique is useful to probe the interviewee's decision-making approaches. The easiest and most effective way to employ it is to recall a real-life situation where two divergent approaches were both carefully considered; then frame the situation as a question, starting with, "I'm curious to know what you would do if..." or, "What would be your approach to a situation where..." 9. Half-Right Reflexives This question style is used to smoke out yes-men, the incurably incompetent, the oddballs who have a total resistance to giving information, and the competent but incurably tongue-tied. The technique is to make a statement that is only partially correct and ask the interviewee to agree. It is astounding what enlightening insights this technique can create. For instance: "I've always felt that customer service could stand only after the bill has been paid, haven't you?" This example of the half-right reflexive always generates fascinating responses. 10. Leading Questions Here, you lead the listener toward a specific type of answer. These questions often arise accidentally as a result of the interviewer explaining what type of company the interviewee will be joining. The interviewer might proudly explain, "We're a fast-growing outfit here, and there is constant pressure to meet deadlines and satisfy your ever-increasing list of customers," then ask, "How do you handle stress?" The interviewee knows that to retain any chance of landing an offer he or she must answer a certain way and consequently does so. This is not to say that leading questions are inadvisable, but like closed-ended questions, they must be used appropriately. Their best use is as information verifiers, to get the candidate to expand on a particular topic. For example: "We are a company that believes the customer is always right. How do you feel about that?" But you should use the technique only once the candidate's belief or performance in a particular area has been established. In ether case, leading questions should not be used early in the interview or confused with the somewhat sophisticated half-right reflexive.
11. Question Layering A good question poorly phrased will lose its bite and give you incomplete or misleading information, but question layering can probe an answer thoroughly and on many levels. Let's start with the earlier example of wanting to know whether a potential employee can work under pressure. Many interviewers would simply ask, "Can you work under pressure?" and while the intent is good, the question style is wrong for several reasons (as mentioned before): The question requires only a yes or no answer, which tells you nothing; and it leads the interviewee toward the type of answer he or she knows you want to hear.
Instead, you should take a leaf out of a good reporter's notebook. The reporter uses all the styles we have discussed, but in a way that peels back different layers of truth until a topic has been examined from every angle: The reporter asks who, what, why, when, where, and how. In this instance, you do the same thing by joining the closed-ended question with some of the other questioning. See how much more relevant information you can glean: * "Can you work under pressure?" (Close-Ended) * "Tell me about a time when you had to work under pressure." (OpenEnded) * "So, it was tough to meet the deadline?" (Mirror Statement) * "How did this pressure situation arise?" * "Who was responsible?" * "Why was this allowed to occur?" * "Where did the problem originate?" Now you have eight different angles to the same question, each revealing a different aspect of the personality, performance, and behavior of your candidate. Nearly every question in this book can be given the layering treatment. In fact, this technique makes the possibilities for questions theoretically endless; it just depends on how thorough you want to be. Remember: You should not accept a candidate's first answer to any ofyour questions. You have a right to look closer and check for cracks. If you feel something is lacking in an answer, pursue it by layering your questions. You'll never know unless you ask.
12. Hamburger-Helper Questions Just as people will sometimes use a little hamburger helper to make the ground beef go a little further, so you can use these three techniques to stretch a question. 1. If you are either dissatisfied with the first answer and want more data, or are so fascinated with the answer that you want to hear more, say, "Give me some more detail on that. It's very interesting," or, "Can you give me another example?" 2. You may hear an answer and add after it, "What did you learn from that experience?" This is an excellent layering technique that can give you a handle on judgment and emotional maturity, as well as give you more thinking and planning time. 3. Perhaps the best technique for gathering more information is simply to sit quietly, looking at the interviewee and saying nothing. All mankind is embarrassed by a conversational lull. Remember the last cocktail party you attended, when the silence lasted just a couple of seconds and was terminated by two or three people talking at once? This human frailty can be used to your advantage during the interview: The intervieweethinks, "Well, he's not saying anything, so he must be expecting me to say something else. I must not have finished my aswer to his satisfaction." Even as the interviewer, you will fnd a little silence in the interview difficult to manage at fst, but it can pay substantial dividends in the long run.