The Talgo Blog

Let me be clear: there are a lot of ways that someone can be a bad interviewer. But once we remove the most obvious (and egregious) ones—berating the candidate, being a complete jerk, being late, and being distracted on your phone, etc.—there is one interviewing fail mode that has a huge negative im...

There is one common mistake I see in my coaching clients who otherwise have solid rapport: they go too “flat” when they are listening to the candidate’s story. They are typically fairly engaged with great rapport when delivering their questions but that rapport energy drops off a cliff when they sta...

We spoke a couple of weeks ago about examining your pet questions and putting them through a Talgo filter to see if they are really giving you the data you think they are.

There is one class of question that I want to draw special attention to: the “hard” interview question. This is a question that...

Many of my coaching clients are too stiff and formal in how they present themselves when interviewing a candidate. The most common form of this overexpressed politeness is that they often ask “would you be willing to share…" or “could you please tell me…” before virtually every question. There are a...

Your favorite interview questions might feel like a set of secret weapons, but they may not be as good as you think. It’s easy to fall into a groove just because you’ve been doing something a certain way for a long time. Or perhaps because you are optimizing for something other than actionable hirin...

As a manager in the business world, becoming an excellent interviewer could easily become your secret weapon.

Consider your role—as you move from an individual contributor to a manager, your success starts to hinge almost entirely on the collective output of the people on your team. Mastering the a...

One of the biggest issues when growing your company is ensuring that you keep your bar for quality high. It’s easy to do for your first dozen hires because they generally come pre-vetted and from your existing networks. Once you start scaling beyond that, you need a reliable process in place for ens...

Whether you’re about to implement the Talgo approach for the first time, or you’ve been doing it consistently for awhile, it’s important to have a process in place to review and improve upon your starting point.

The Japanese philosophy for this is known as Kaizen (“continuous improvement”) and it’s...

If you’re making a commitment to being a better interviewer this year, rapport is a great place to start. It will get you better data and it creates a better experience for the candidate too.

Here are 3 pieces of advice you can apply to your next interview:

1. Curious > Polite
2. “I’m hearing a fasci
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