How to Never Be Bored

Have you ever conducted an interview where you were waiting for the candidate to wrap up a story that you didn’t really care about?

We’ve all been there. There are a lot of causes but the one I want to talk about today is when a candidate is wasting both of your time by talking about something that is irrelevant for the role in question.

It’s your job as an interviewer to keep this time waste to the absolute minimum, while still making sure you keep high rapport and ensure the candidate has a great experience.

A helpful framework is realizing that relevance occurs at two levels: among stories (macro) and within stories (micro). Let’s talk about how you can maximize relevance within each one.

Macro Relevance

This means the story or anecdote is relevant for the role and you want to hear more about it. This should be the default case.

But sometimes a candidate will throw you a curveball, and tell you that their proudest accomplishment was winning a company-wide pottery contest that clearly has little to do with their role as an Engineering Manager. What do you do?

The answer is your maintain high rapport, and seek to move them on to the next accomplishment as quickly as possible, all without being rude or awkward. The specifics of how you do that will vary based on the circumstances, but in this case I might jump in at the first opportunity and say: “That’s great. What about this was most meaningful to you?” followed by—at my next opening—”Fantastic. What’s another accomplishment that was a bit more core to your role at [XYZ corp]?”

Note that we are gently—and with enthusiasm—moving the candidate onto their next accomplishment with a helpful nudge towards staying on topic. There’s no need to explicitly tell the candidate you thought their response was off-topic or irrelevant. There’s equally no need to waste 5-10 precious interview minutes politely listening to a story that you do not care about.

Micro Relevance

Ah, here is where it gets tricky. Mirco relevance refers to every part of a given story being relevant and something you want to hear about. In other words, it’s possible that the accomplishment being discussed is clearly relevant and yet a significant portion of the discussion could be irrelevant or sub-optimal.

Let’s take a look at how this happens in practice. It’s usually one of two scenarios:

Candidate’s fault

The candidate just starts going off on a tangent or otherwise providing way too much detail on something you don’t really care about. At this point the conversation has strayed from the core pillars (What they did, How they did it, Magnitude/Calibration) and you are wasting time. Just as before, it’s your job to jump in and either re-direct the candidate to a more relevant follow-up question or simply help the candidate wrap up the story by asking your next question.

Your fault

This is when you take the candidate down a rabbit hole that you shouldn’t have. There are a couple of common causes here. The first one is personal curiosity. The solution is to ensure that you only indulge your curiosity on the parts of the story that are likely to yield relevant information (as defined by the Target for the role).

The other possibility—extremely common—is when the candidate mentions something that you do care about, but the context of the story indicates that now is not the right time to dig in.

Suppose you’re asking about someone’s proudest analytical accomplishment. And in doing so, they mention that they also presented their findings to the Board. As it so happens, communication is one of the things you care about for this role. You must resist the temptation to go down this rabbit hole in an attempt to judge their communication skills! They did not select this story as one that was particularly noteworthy in terms of communication. You are highly likely to go into a micro irrelevancy territory—a rabbit hole that you hope will yield actionable data—and there is a better way.

Instead of attempting to squeeze too much juice out of a single story, get the essence of what that story was about (analytical accomplishment) and then learn to more quickly move on to other questions/stories. You can simply ask them for their proudest accomplishment involving communication and then you’re much more likely to hear a story that is rich in relevance and worth your time.

Try these techniques the next time you interview and I predict you’ll get better data and have a better time as well.