by Walker Royce
Yikes! I’m sure trying to fulfill a tall order! The information I captured in Table 6-4 certainly persuaded me to reconsider and refine many of the topics as well as the presentation of this book. I hope it provides you with more use and more entertainment value than the price you paid for it and the time you invested in reading it.
CHAPTER 7
Interviews
Interviews are an acute example of one-on-one communications. Because they are the epitome of a critical conversation where the stakes are high for both parties, they provide a great case study for effective communications. This chapter contains observations on communicating in interviews and suggests some provocative techniques for improving your effectiveness as an interviewer or an interviewee.
Few decisions in business are as crucial as hiring the right people. Most businesses run on the backs of employees, and interviews are one of the key filters in the hiring process. For an interviewee, the stakes are even higher. Few endeavors matter more to our livelihood than the employment we seek. Your job, the company, and the people you work with have a significant impact on your overall pursuit of happiness.
So how serious and prepared are most interviewers and interviewees? In my experience, both parties are complacent and unprepared. Most interviewers get the same value in the first 5 minutes as they do in 60 to 90 minutes. The initial impression gained during the first 5 minutes, mostly framed by appearance, is the predominant differentiator. How did I learn this? As I started managing people and gaining experience in hiring, I began each interview with these three questions:
How would you grade the interviews you have already experienced?
Have your previous interviews for this job helped you learn more about this opportunity?
Do you think the interviewer learned much about your ability to perform in this role?
I repeatedly heard that most interviews spent two-thirds of the time on the applicant’s resume, long-term goals, and outside interests. Most interviewees gave their interviewers a B. They were hesitant to give lower grades because they didn’t want to insult anyone, but they did not get much out of the interviews and thought that the interviewers didn’t either. There was little deep insight into whether the applicants could perform well on the available job, the interviewer’s main goal, or whether this opportunity was in the best interest of the applicant, the interviewee’s main goal.
As I gained more responsibility for hiring, I made it clear to all the people who did preliminary interviews for me that I would be the last interviewer and I would ask the three questions listed above. As my interview teams realized that their interview techniques were being graded by the applicant and were visible to their boss, it was amazing how much more effective they all became at discerning good hires from poor hires.
RESUMES
First impressions in the hiring process start with a resume (or CV, curriculum vitae). When screening any candidate, be wary of the multiple-page, here-is-everything-I-have-done-since-birth resume. In my experience, there is an inverse correlation between the length of a person’s resume and their accomplishments. People with one-page resumes tend to have accomplished more than people with three-page resumes. Big accomplishments are easy to state concisely and require little explanation.
Here’s how Sandy Koufax’s resume might read:
Three-time winner of the Cy Young award
Youngest player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame
Pitched four no-hitters, including one perfect game
World Series record of 4-3, with a .95 ERA in 57 innings
Averaged more than one strikeout per inning over his entire career
Wow! Why say more? Why add nuggets that can’t hold a candle to those boulders? I have seen many accomplished people’s resumes. Almost all the ones that communicate well are concise and focus on the significant stuff.
However, there are not many Sandy Koufaxes out there, nor people with huge accomplishments in their respective fields. Most of us have a typical range of good solid qualifications, educational degrees, awards of various value, and past experience. How someone puts together their resume provides a clue to their ability to communicate. Capturing a life-time of qualifications and accomplishments in a brief description is a high-stakes communications exercise.
Here is a definition from Dictionary.com:
resume:
a summing up; summary
a brief written account of personal, educational, and professional qualifications and experience, as that prepared by an applicant for a job.
Notice the emphasis on summary and brief. Most resume-writing guides recommend that you confine yourself to one page. Amen to that advice. One page is plenty of space to get hiring managers excited about talking to you. If they want more information, they will ask for it or schedule an interview. Sending someone a multiple-page resume is a clear signal that you cannot communicate concisely or have little concern for doing so.
Here are some ideas for creating a crisp resume that will make a positive impact.
Fit on one page, without resorting to the size type used on postage stamps.
Put lists in priority order, with the most important entries first.
Define your current role and responsibilities succinctly.
Briefly describe your pertinent jobs and responsibilities for the past 5 to 10 years.
List titles and employers for experience from 10 or more years ago only if the experience is especially relevant to the role for which you are applying.
Be honest; don’t inflate titles, responsibilities, education, or awards.
One of my former employees recently applied for a job in another part of the company. The hiring manager, one of my peers, wanted a reference from me because he knew the guy had worked for me in the past. He forwarded the guy’s resume to me, a four-page monstrosity that is a case study of everything to do wrong. This applicant is no dummy; he is an accomplished professional. The gist of his resume is summarized below.
Current Role: Chief Engineer
Followed by 20 bullets, with two sentences for each bullet describing activities performed
Previous Roles
13 different roles dating back 25 years, with an average of 10 sentences describing activities performed in each role
Publications
10 different presentations at public conferences
5 white papers, available internally but unpublished
Awards
9 certifications/awards
I knew this guy and his history pretty well. I knew that Chief Engineer was an inflated title. Although he listed all the activities he performed, he did not describe his responsibilities. At least that was honest, because he was a lone staff person who was not responsible for a budget, a team, a design, or a project. His long-winded list of activities made it impossible to determine whether he had accomplished anything. (A truism that I think applies to progress reports, performance assessments, and resumes: The longer it takes to describe what you have done, the less likely it is that you have done anything significant.) Then he went into almost as much detail about his previous jobs, going back 25 years. Who cares? Anything he did more than 5 years ago was probably stale experience in today’s high-tech world anyway. He described the job he performed when he worked for me with enough exaggeration and flair that I came close to torpedoing his candidacy. It is a bad idea to candy-coat or puff up your resume, especially if you are applying to an organization where you previously worked.
His list of publications and presentations included every public talk he had ever given, in chronological order rather than order of importance. “Numerous technical presentations at industry conferences,” which conveys public speaking ability, would have been preferable. Only significant publications should be included, such as books or articles in respected industry journals.
He listed a patent under awards, which was good, but it was only in process, which carries less weight, and it was buried near the end of
the list. Other awards, for which I knew the context, were mostly trivial. The few that were meaningful lost significance by being listed with the minutia.
We rehired the guy, but only because he was the best candidate among a weak group. The moral of this story is the same as for many other stories in this book: Be honest, be concise, choose your words carefully, and communicate clearly when the stakes are high.
SOME IDEAS FOR INTERVIEWERS
Interviews are critical conversations. You have limited time and a specific purpose: to discern the relative qualifications of an applicant versus other applicants. Don’t waste time looking for the perfect candidate; look for the best candidate from the pool of applicants. The later you are in the interview process, the more effective and discerning you can be because you have context from the other candidates and need only to discover whether this person is better or worse for the job than your frontrunners.
With limited time for face-to-face interaction with an applicant, usually an hour, the interviewer needs to be direct and prepared. Most interviewers do little preparation for an interview other than reading a candidate’s resume. Here are some good ways to prepare.
Go in with an agenda of no more than five topics, each with a purpose. Discuss these before meandering into side topics that might arise.
Pre-arrange with the hiring manager a purpose for your interview. Does the boss want you to examine technical skills? Past experience? Personal values? If the hiring manager doesn’t have an integrated plan for an applicant’s sequence of interviews, your question may result in one being created, which is a good practice.
Control the agenda and feel fee to cut off a candidate who becomes verbose. Get to the discriminators and look for reasons to end the interview (showstoppers that can’t be overcome) or to keep going (discriminating assets, experience, or skills that match the role well).
Personal priorities must be assessed by someone in the interview process, even though they are best confirmed by trusted references who have worked with the candidate for some time.
Integrity: Without this, nothing else matters.
Motivation: Passion for your company’s mission is the best indicator of long-term retention.
Culture fit: Topics such as teamwork, customer empathy, sales savvy, context-dependent thinking, adaptability, attention to quality, creativity, and others that vary among organizations but are critical for both parties to discuss.
Skills: Problem solving, communications, time management.
Experience: In today’s world of rapidly evolving technology, only the past 5 years of experience are probably relevant for the day-to-day skills in many roles. However, the longer term experience may be important to assess maturity, domain knowledge, career path continuity, and other important factors.
Reaching some of these topics and having a meaningful discussion about them is a challenge. One key is to use open-ended questions, such as, “What sort of culture are you looking for?” This is far better than stating, “Teamwork is important at our company. What is your view of a good team?” This leading question will get exactly the response you ask for, whether the candidate believes it or not. When you get a response to an open-ended question, it is easy to dive into the candidate’s understanding and determine whether the candidate aligns with your needs.
You also need to be an attentive observer, like a world-class poker player in a high-stakes game, examining the candidate’s every word and action. Does the candidate use plural pronouns (we and our) or personal pronouns (I and me)? Does the candidate emphasize team achievements or personal contributions? Is their body language timid, confident, or phony? Feel free to point out what you notice and get the candidate’s reaction. You may gain tangible insight into how this person reacts to stress or how they deal with a sensitive topic, such as someone confronting them with their body language.
Too many interviews are too polite and too gentle. Consequently, you only learn about a candidate’s persona under the best conditions. One thing I learned in the military, reinforced throughout my life, is that you don’t really know your partners and colleagues and teammates until you see them under stress. The strong and weak points of most people’s personalities, skills, and judgments become obvious when they are subjected to stressful situations such as boot camp, survival training, challenging physical exertion, or high-stakes competition. So why not apply this to interviews? Stress is extremely effective at exposing strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to discern the real candidate from their interview façade.
Here are a few techniques for adding stress to an interview.
As discussed earlier, ask the candidate to rank or grade their previous interviewers. Most people are stressed when they are required to judge others. This is especially true when the interviewee knows that the current interviewer knows the other interviewers well and the interviewee does not.
Take an opposing view to something they say. Exaggerate your perspective enough for them to realize that they have hit a negative nerve. Observe how they reconcile the situation.
Give them 5 minutes to do an exercise that cannot be done well in that amount of time. Walk out of the room. This will cause stress, allowing you to assess their time-management capabilities.
Raise the stakes of the interview by stating your biggest concern with their resume, or the most challenging part of the role that this person will struggle with, based on your understanding of their background and the needs of this role.
There are many other possibilities. The point is to force the candidate from a comfortable place to a stress-filled place during the interview. The role you are hiring for is probably not stress-free, and you will learn more about how this candidate might react to stress and observe more of their true colors by seeing them deal with stress first-hand in an interview setting.
Control the interview. You shouldn’t speak more than 25% of the time. Be sure that you get to your whole agenda. Tackle the hard things first and look for discriminators. Stress the candidate in at least one interview. Don’t overlap with other interviewers unless a topic is so important that you need multiple perspectives, or you are following up because previous interviewers had concerns. Don’t waste their time, and don’t let them waste yours.
A Typical Interview Scenario
Here is a template for my typical interview. This layout usually allows me to get a meaningful opinion of a candidate in less than 90 minutes.
Homework: In preparation for the interview, have the candidate read a short paper, a newspaper article, or a specific excerpt from a book that is relevant to the role for which you are hiring. Provide two or three questions that you want the candidate to be prepared to answer during the interview. I sometimes ask one of these questions and then a totally different question that they are not prepared for.
Agenda: Lay out your plan of topics and questions for the interview.
Get context: Assess the candidate’s view of previous interviews (stress accurate assessment).
Apply stress: Give the candidate a relevant 10-minute assignment to do in 5 minutes. Leave the room. When you return, have the candidate present their opinion briefly.
Evaluate: Discuss the stress test results and homework results with the candidate. Assess their time management and communications skills, as well as the quality of their response to your assessment.
Go deep: Take one important topic from the homework relatively deep to gauge the candidate’s knowledge.
Go broad: Determine the candidate’s passion for your organization’s mission or their understanding of your organization’s strengths/weaknesses.
Problem solving: Present a tough relevant situation such as a customer conflict, human resources issue, technical issue, or team dynamics challenge. Assess the candidate’s organized reasoning toward a solution.
Summarize: Ask the candidate what grade they think you will give them as a result of this interview. Assess whether they have read you and the situation accurately. Tell the
m your grade and explain how you arrived at it.
Follow up: Ask the candidate to follow up with an email that assesses their day of interviews.
This approach may look daunting to interviewers and frightening to interviewees. Good. Here are the benefits I have realized with this approach.
Over the years, numerous employees have told me that they had nothing but respect for the tough interviews they went through to join our organization. Universally, the feedback from those we hired was, “Wow! This organization cares about the people they hire. I definitely want to be a part of this team and I am happy to see such scrutiny in hiring.”
We scared away numerous candidates who were frightened to be subjected to such scrutiny. Unlike qualified candidates, who are likely to be confident and not fearful of this process, wannabes who cannot reach the performance bar you are setting are likely to be frightened away. This represents significant savings and efficiency in your hiring process.
The quality and efficiency of hiring and interviewing have improved dramatically. Interviewers and candidates who know that the interview process is scrutinized and somewhat transparent take it much more seriously.
Some Favorite Questions for Interviewers
An interview can go in a jillion directions. The candidate, the team, the boss, the domain, the job, the economic situation, and the organizational culture are all widely variable. Here is a repertoire of questions that have worked well for me in exposing strengths and weaknesses in various candidates.
Your resume is long-winded. Can you differentiate the big accomplishments from the noise?