How to 3x Your Interview Data

A few years ago, I was helping the Chief Revenue Officer of a well-known tech giant interview candidates for a key People Ops leadership role. We each interviewed candidates for 45 minutes. When it came time to discuss the top candidate, he was shocked by how many data points I had gathered during my interview. I had 12+ hard-hitting stories from this candidate’s past, compared to his 4 or 5.

“Wow, Jordan, your interview must have run really long.”

“Actually, no. I just knew when to move on.”

The difference between our interviews? Side stories. He had captured mountains of them. Each anecdote from the candidate included irrelevant tangents and back stories that failed to provide any real insight. He was forming and chasing hypotheses, turning over every stone to see if there might be a gold nugget underneath. He forgot what each story was really about.

Case in point: the candidate had a great story about aligning a group of highly opinionated executives around a change to the company’s recruiting process. The story was insightful because of the aligning part—the process change itself was rather mundane. Yet he had detailed notes on the origin of the new process, the team she worked with, the (fairly straightforward) company-wide rollout, etc. None of that information was particularly noteworthy. Frankly, it was a waste of time. The real story was about her getting buy-in.

Bottom line: when you are digging into any story that a candidate offers—whether an accomplishment or a mistake—ask yourself: “What is this story really about?” Put another way: “How did we arrive at this story?” There are always 15 side stories, and most will be time-wasters. Here are a couple of examples to clarify the point

• If a candidate is telling you about their most creative product innovation, learn about the innovation itself, how they came up with it, and the impact it had on the business. Don’t burn 5 minutes talking about their presentation at the launch event. Move on!
• If a candidate is telling you about getting promoted early to VP, learn about the promotion itself, what they did to earn it, and how common that was. Don’t waste time on the side story of how they renegotiated their equity package. Move on!

Most hiring managers we train (especially very analytical types) report a feeling of temporary discomfort as they learn to move faster. Their inner sense is, "Maybe there is some other aspect to this story I don't want to miss?" But when they see a doubling or tripling of stories—and hard-hitting ones to boot—their comfort with "moving on" improves.

To be clear: digging deep is a good thing. Just make sure you are digging into what really matters about the story. And when you are done, MOVE ON!