Time Management Mistakes

Your goal is to hire great people. That decision requires reliable data of which the interview process is a crucial component. You obviously want to gather as much relevant data per unit of time as you possibly can, subject to also ensuring that the candidate has a fantastic experience.

Given this, why do so many interview processes end up with a group of colleagues debating a potential hire with insufficient data?

There are several reasons, but poor interview time management is a huge root cause. An elite interviewer can often excavate 2-3x the number of relevant data points compared to a merely good interviewer in the same period of time.

But how? Simple: they don’t make time management mistakes. Here are the 5 most common.

Mistake 1: Not Strongly Setting the Agenda

Yes, you need a little bit of small talk. But you should fairly quickly set the agenda—including a tight intro about yourself, if that’s your style—and then get into question-asking mode. Too many interviewers hesitate to set structure here and as a result the conversation meanders for too long. It can make the candidate feel awkward and savvy candidates can use this ambiguity to start asking you questions which creates lots of problems (bias, for one) but means that you are not gathering data about them.

Mistake 2: “Walk me through your resume”

You may as well just tell the candidate that you are completely unprepared for the interview and have no game plan. Unless you are explicitly testing for someone’s presentation / summary skills, this is a very poor use of time. It just invites a candidate monologue that will almost certainly have little depth because they have no idea where you want to dig deep and where they should just stay on the surface. As a result, you learn almost nothing that will be useful in making an accurate hiring decision.

Mistake 3: Not Vocalizing (Interrupting)

95% of the interviewers that we coach do not verbalize enough while listening to the candidate’s response and almost no one interrupts quickly enough. Every sentence a candidate says that’s slightly off-topic or that’s giving you gratuitous amounts of information is a sentence that’s not about a new accomplishment or mistake. In other words, it’s a waste of time.

The root cause of this is that people are default polite. As a result they are pretty good at the “smile and nod” part of our rapport training but they are generally terrible at the vocalizing (and interruption portion).

If you do not know how to move a candidate along and help them keep their responses crisp and high-signal (which requires interrupting them occasionally) you are extremely unlikely to be a great interviewer. You will not get enough data from your time with the candidate and you will be unprepared to make a quality hiring decision.

Mistake 4: Moving on too quickly

This is a less common mistake than staying on a story too long (see below) but we still see it frequently. When someone moves on too quickly from an accomplishment, there are two especially common scenarios:

1. We know what the team did, but we still don’t know what the candidate actually did. It’s the “we” problem. Some interviewers are reluctant—or simply don’t notice—to find out what the candidate’s unique contribution was. We’re hiring this person, not their “team”!
2. We have no calibration on how impressive the accomplishment was (or we’re relying on our own subjective judgement when we should have gathered objective data). Whenever possible, you should be calibrating the accomplishment against boss/client expectations, competitors, peers, etc. as the situation requires. Most interviewers are treating the interview as a performance (with themselves as the judge) and so they are judging in real time how impressed they are by the story. No! Just get as much relevant objective data as possible so that you—or anyone else reading the interview transcript—can make an unbiased evaluation of how impressive the accomplishment was.

When it comes to weaknesses, interviewers sometimes move on too quickly because—I suspect—they are afraid of actually discussing the weakness in any real depth or detail. Sometimes the very first follow-up question I hear is “so how have you improved on that since then?” which is problematic as a follow-up question (leading) but even more to our time-management concerns here: it short-circuits the story before we can dig in and learn the key details of what the actual mistake was! The next time you feel slight discomfort here, push through and consider asking the following 2-question combo:

1. What should you have done instead?
2. What kept you from doing that at the time?

The first question illuminates what ideal performance would have looked like (and by contrast, throws the mistake into sharp relief). The second question often uncovers the root cause.

Mistake 5: Staying on a story too long

As a reminder, you generally want to know three things: What, How, and Magnitude. What did the candidate do? How did they do it? How big of a deal was it? Once you know these three things it’s generally time to move on. But average-to-good interviewers can often stay on a story way past the point where they should have moved on. There are generally 3 causes for this:

1. Psychological/emotional reluctance to move the candidate to the next story.
2. Chasing a rabbit holes
3. Personal interest

We’ve already talked about moving the candidate along, but what is a rabbit hole and why does it matter?

A rabbit hole is when a candidate is telling you about their proudest analytical accomplishment, mentions that they gave a presentation to the Board and you start asking follow-up questions about how the presentation went. Why? Your rationale is that presentations skills are important for this role and so naturally you should try to learn about them. There is one problem: this story was not about presentation skills—it was about analysis. So now you are burning time asking them about a potentially unremarkable communication tangent. This is a waste of time.

Another version is when an interviewer asks a candidate for the biggest “challenge” or “mistake” they overcame as a follow-up question to the candidate’s biggest accomplishment. Why are we asking for a sub-mistake within an accomplishment story? This is almost guaranteed to be a low magnitude, unremarkable mistake (if it were massive, the overall story would likely not be a success….) and as a result this is a waste of time. I think interviewers may do this because they are emotionally resisting asking for straight-up mistakes and as a result feel more comfortable asking for these faux-mistakes within the protective guise of a success story. Again—waste of time!

Now for the ultra-curious types like me: this is likely to be your interviewing Achilles heel. You can’t go deep on a story just because you find it personally interesting. You get to go deep on stories that are relevant to the Target. Sometimes—often, hopefully—these will also be intrinsically interesting to you but that isn’t the main point. Avoid these interesting tangents. They waste time and can also bias your decision-making.

Overcome these 5 time management hurdles and you’ll start significantly increase the amount of relevant data you can contribute to an accurate hiring decision.