The Talgo Blog

I recently coached an interviewer who was almost exclusively focused on testing the candidate's strategic problem-solving ability. Here's an example from that session:

Interviewer: “What was your biggest accomplishment at Google?”
Candidate: “Well, I led the creation of this...

Decisiveness is an important trait for effective hiring. Without it, teams default to half-measures—vague job ads, wishy-washy interview questions, and “safe” middle-ground scores when discussing and evaluating candidates. By taking a firm stance at every step, you’ll not...

Let's play a game. You're a Hiring Manager (HM) and you're trying to hire for a Head of Marketing. You and 3 of your teammates will conduct 4 interviews, each specializing in a different theme. You'll then bring your notes together and make a decision. 

Notice first that 75% of the data...

Sometimes when you're interviewing a candidate you may notice that the stories tend to drift in a particular direction and you may want to do something about it. Here are a couple of examples:

1. You are asking a candidate for their proudest accomplishments in their past roles and the first two...

Hiring the right person starts with defining the right role, yet most job descriptions (JDs) fail in their dual purpose: guiding the hiring team and attracting the right candidates. At Talgo, we've seen firsthand what causes JDs to fail, and we have some clear proposals on what to do about it.

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Hiring someone is expensive. You will pay in three resources:

1. Time (doing it right takes time, and doing it wrong takes even more time...)
2. Money (obvious)
3. Organizational complexity. Each person you add to the org increases communication cost, etc.

With these costs in mind, you want to know what...

I recently spent two days doing non-stop interviewing coaching and I was blown away by two realizations:

1. New interviewers are nervous and almost always ramble in their question-asking, inadvertently including words in their question they did not intend. This skews how the candidate hears the...

One of the main things we do in our Talgo workshops is systematically show teams how to gather and use predictive data to make more accurate hiring decisions. Data being the operative word—in contrast to more subjective "gut" decisions which are the primary driver of most hiring...

Why not just create an interviewing scorecard based entirely on competencies—why bother listing the results expected at all?

We got (a variant of) this question recently in a consulting call, and I think it’s a good one.

To be clear, a purely competency based framework alongside the...