Learn the strategies chief executives have developed through trial and error to help you go beyond the polished résumés, pre-screened references and scripted answers, to hire more creative and effective members for your team. And if you’re on the other side of the job hunt, you can gain insight on what your interviewer is really looking for in a candidate. Keep reading to find out how to hire the right person.
Related: Easy Steps to Speed Up Your Hiring Process
Avoid the Standard Job Interview
Use these basic principles to avoid the common pitfalls of the interview.
A typical job interview is little more than a social call with some predictable choreography. A conference-room meeting, a pristine résumé and the standard questions: Where do you want to be in five years? What do you consider your biggest failure? What are your strengths and weaknesses?
Add in some small talk — maybe the candidate and the interviewer have something in common, like an alma mater or an acquaintance from an earlier job — and that’s largely it. The candidate seems good, and the references check out. So an offer is made, and fingers are crossed that everything works out.
Then, a month later, the new hire misses an important deadline or starts complaining about the work. Cue that sinking feeling: You start wondering if hiring this person was a mistake.
Of course there’s a better way. Here are three principles that can help you hire the right person:
- Be creative. Every candidate will be prepared for commonplace interview questions. Find new ways to truly understand how a person thinks.
- Be challenging. Put the candidate in situations where they are more likely to show their true selves.
- Allow your employees to help. You are not the only person who is going to have to work with this candidate. There is likely already a team of employees you trust that will have to interact with him or her every day. Their opinion should matter.
Get Away From Your Desk
You’ll have a much better sense of your candidate if you get them out from behind a desk and watch how they behave.
The Goal
As you’re sizing up job candidates, there are two key qualities to check for:
- Is the person genuinely interested in the work of the organization?
- Do they treat people as equals, regardless of their title?
If you take them out of the office or conference room to see how they interact with others, you’ll get a better sense of their personality.
Take Them On a Tour
Stay in the building and show the candidates around your company, and maybe introduce them to some colleagues.Things to pay attention to:
- Are they asking questions about what everybody does and how things work?
- Are they curious?
- Do they treat everyone they meet with respect, and show interest in what they do?
Share A Meal
Take a candidate out for lunch or dinner. Going to a restaurant will reveal all sorts of clues about someone. For many leaders, this is the most important part of the interview process.
The key is to watch whether the candidate is considerate of others — an essential quality of effective team players.
Things to pay attention to:
- Are they polite to everyone who is serving them?
- Do they look people in the eye (a sign of respect)?
- Are they irritated or flustered by problems?
- Can they keep a conversation going, with smart questions?
- Do they barrel through the restaurant, or let others go first?
The candidate’s personality comes out during a meal, providing answers to key tests for Ms. Smith: “Are you going to connect with us? Are you going to be part of the team, or are you going to be one of these independent players who wants to take all the credit? Are you good with assistants?”
Throw Some Curveballs
Unusual questions will get candidates to open up and provide insights into what makes them tick.
The Goal
Smart candidates will be prepared for all the usual interview questions, and will try to find clever ways to turn any negatives into positives, worried that any admission of weakness or vulnerability will count as a point against them. This strategy usually backfires with chief executives, since it makes a candidate seem less honest and trustworthy.
To get beyond the rehearsed answers, many executives have developed their own interview questions to better understand what a candidate is really like.
Here are some unusual questions that will reveal a lot about a candidate:
Interview questions to ask
WHAT IS YOUR NATURAL STRENGTH?
A person’s natural strength is not about their current title or what they studied in college. It is a particular skill or ability that, for them, comes as naturally as breathing but that others may find difficult. Other ways to ask this question: If everybody is in the top 5 percent of the world at some skill, what is yours? Or what is your ninja skill?
WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL WOULD YOU BE? AND WHY?
This may strike you as silly, but the answer can tell you a lot, particularly when candidates explain why they chose a certain animal. If you want to test it before you use it in a job interview, try it out at your next dinner party.Ask enough people this question, and you’re likely to hear some surprising answers, and gain valuable insights that will tell you whether they’re right for the job. The chief executive who often asks this question, for example, says that if she’s hiring somebody for sales, she likes to hear a predator as the answer, like a lion. If somebody is going to be working in teams all the time, a social animal may be the right answer. The “why?” part of the answer will also tell you a lot about their level of self-awareness.
WHAT QUALITIES OF YOUR PARENTS DO YOU LIKE THE MOST?
We’re all influenced by our parents, often more than we’d like to admit. So it’s a good bet that the answers to this question will reveal a lot about the candidate. You can also ask how these qualities come out in their daily lives.One chief executive takes this question a step further and asks people about the qualities of their parents they like the least. (That may be a bit too heavy for some people, though.)
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST MISPERCEPTION PEOPLE HAVE ABOUT YOU?
The answers to this question will reveal candidates’ level of self-awareness. Do they know how they come across to others, even in ways that may not be a true reflection of who they are?This can also be a bit of a trick question, too, because what really matters is how people perceive you – in a sense, there is no such thing as misperception; in this context, perception is reality.Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of Zappos.com, uses this question often. Here’s what he’s listening for with this approach: “I think it’s a combination of how self-aware people are and how honest they are. I think if someone is self-aware, then they can always continue to grow. If they’re not self-aware, I think it’s harder for them to evolve or adapt beyond who they already are.”
Get a Second — and Third — Opinion
Talking to other people about a candidate can help you confirm your perceptions or prove you wrong.
The Goal
Even if you think you are the best judge of character, always take the time to get more opinions because we all have blind spots.
Make Them Run the Gantlet
To get different perspectives on candidates, ask a number of your colleagues to meet with them. They’ll spot things that nobody else sees.
Mr. Miller has job candidates interact with 15 or 20 people within the company, and each has what he calls a “blackball vote” to veto hiring any candidate. Ultimately the person you hire is going to interact with many people in your company, so they all have an interest in ensuring the person is a good hire.
Go Beyond References
It may take some effort, but with a little bit of internet sleuthing, you can probably find a couple of people you know, or whom your colleagues know, who have worked with the candidate. LinkedIn can also be a helpful resource in finding references for a candidate within your social network. Always do extra reference checks — not just the ones a candidate provides. Press those people for an unvarnished opinion about the person’s strengths and weaknesses, how the candidate performs under stress, how he or she treats their colleagues, and anything else that matters to your company.
Push for Diversity
Hiring an innovative team starts with finding people who think differently.
The Goal
Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. A crucial one is that it provides different perspectives for innovation, problem-solving and creativity.
With so many industries facing disruption — and companies creating new playbooks for strategy rather than following old ones — you need as many different perspectives as possible to find the best solutions.
Getting Past Implicit Bias
Hiring a diverse team requires pushing through the implicit biases we all have — the ones that can lead people to hire “mini-me” versions of themselves. Removing implicit bias from your hiring process starts early on and should be addressed at every step.
Things to consider:
- Is your job description limiting you? Words like “ambitious” or “driven,” can be seen by female candidates as too masculine in a job description.
- Are you casting the net wide enough? Experience doing certain kinds of work is important, but sometimes people with unusual backgrounds will bring fresh eyes to the task at hand.
- Conduct an initial phone interview before you meet candidates in person. That way, initial impressions are more likely to be based on the content of their answer than their appearance.
