The Power of the Redirect

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 examples involve only minimal impact to the company, but are stories where the candidate personally grew and learned a lot.

2. You are asking a candidate about their mistakes and the first two stories are about a "mistake" where the candidate failed to achieve some ambitious goal that was outside of their strict mandate.

In both cases, I would argue that you want to lightly intervene as an interviewer. If you don't, you risk continuing to get signal down a "path" that you may not want to dominate for the rest of the questioning. Start playing with "redirects" in the formulation of your next question.

For example, after hearing two accomplishments with a lot of learning but questionable impact, here is my next question. "That's great. What big win did you have at [Google] that drove the needle the most for your team?" Or some variant of that. Note that you are inviting them to share another "win" but you are framing it with an emphasis on impact.

Now for the case involving mistakes. My next question would sound something like: "Got it. And in your core mandate as a product designer—what was your biggest do-over there?" We are still keeping the question open-ended, but we are directing the candidate's energy and focus to the core of what we want to ask about (a core professional mistake they made in their role.)

Redirects are the sweet spot between passivity and being too aggressive or rude in "calling out" candidates (i.e. "Oh come on, that's not a mistake and you know it!). You get the data density that comes with not letting candidates ramble and dodge but you still maintain the warmth and rapport that is needed for candidates to trust you and really open up with their most substantive stories.

Give it a try the next time you feel a candidate taking you down a path you don't want to be on.