Easy and Hard

Good interviewing is paradoxically easier and harder than the typical way that most people interview.

The main reason it’s easier is because it turns out that you actually don’t have to ask convoluted, multi-part questions about ultra-specific topics in order to get great data from the candidate. (Was that last sentence hard to read? Imaging being a nervous candidate.)

You also don’t have to judge the candidate in real time in an attempt to make a holistic read on the candidate. These things are very hard to do well, and besides, they come with a lot of unintended (negative) side effects.

The main reason it’s harder, however, is that good interviewing involves much less pre-filtering and real-time judgement than what you might be used to. This means you’ll be asking more open-ended questions and using time management techniques to get the candidate talking more about stories that are relevant to the Target, and less about others. You’ll also be asking about past events instead of simply asking them to sell you on how they “would” handle a situation that you care about. Finally, you won’t be gut-judging them in real time—you’ll be using the data you’ve gleamed from the interview in order rate the candidate on the Facets that you’ve been assigned. This will happen after the interview, not during it.

Think about it for a moment: imagine how easy it would be to just ask a candidate “How would you handle a conflict with a co-worker?” and listen to their impressive sounding 3-5 minute monologue. You might hear a lot of things that sound good, the candidate may be personable and a good communicator, and so you judge them positively (and holistically). This is what the average (untrained) interviewer is doing—asking a specific question that is often leading or hypothetical in nature and then judging the candidate’s response in real time. And then ultimately landing on a holistic judgement of whether or not to hire the candidate.

It’s fast, intuitive, and optimizes for (in-the-moment) ease of interviewing but it gets terrible results. This type of interviewing is why studies consistently show the average interview has little-to-no predictive power for job performance.

Instead, you want a majority of your questions to be open-ended questions about someone’s past, ideally not showing your hand as to what a “good” or “correct” answer will sound like. Because you are not telegraphing what you are looking for, it means you must practice active time management. It is your responsibility to not let the candidate take you on rambling monologues or side-stories. You need to constantly run a relevancy engine within your brain and jump in (with great rapport) when the conversation is veering into irrelevant territory.

It also means that you must sit with your notes and process them in order to arrive at well-calibrated ratings. It also requires some genuine thought to map someone’s prior experiences onto the current Target that you are hiring for. It’s not just “oh I liked that person, I want to hire them.” It’s also not “they performed really well on that interview—I’m impressed!” Instead, it needs to be: “I have several pieces of objective data—that I can corroborate with references—that lead me to think there is a high probability that this person will thrive on these 2-3 Facets. I’m curious to see what data my teammates uncovered on the other crucial aspects of the role.”

Once you commit to this way of interviewing, the quality of data and your hiring decisions will be so much better you’ll laugh at the old way of doing it. And you’ll find that your interviews become more natural conversations in many ways, since you’re asking simple, open-ended questions about someone’s past.

People generally love talking about themselves, and they also generally prefer simple, open-ended questions over ones that are multi-pronged (confusing/overwhelming) or inherently judgmental in nature. This—along with great rapport—will help candidates move from a performance-based mindset where they are trying to spin and impress you, towards a more relaxed, authentic accounting of their past experiences. Which benefits both of you long-term.

Better data, better candidate experience, significantly better hiring outcomes. Some of it will be hard. But some of it will be easy too.