“Your new supervisor?” I asked.
“Yes,” Stella explained. “Everyone on the interview team agreed this was the best candidate, but it’s been two months now, plenty of time for adjustment and it’s just not working out.”
“And this candidate had worked at this level before?”
“Well, not really, but he said he was ready for it. That’s why he was leaving his old job, not enough challenge in it.”
“This is a supervisor position, what’s the time span?”
“Nine months,” Stella replied.
“Tell me, what is the longest task?” I pulled out a piece of paper to make some notes.
“It’s scheduling,” she continued. “Some of our equipment is very expensive, difficult to get and difficult to move from one job to the next. It can cost us $15,000 just for the riggers to relocate some of the pieces. So we schedule our logistics about nine months in advance. And when we schedule it, we stick to plan. Too expensive to do otherwise.”
“And your candidate provided evidence of nine month time span work in the past?”
“Evidence? No, but he assured us he was up to the task.”
Always liked Lee Thayer comment to the question: How do you measure performance? Simply, he said, the measure of performance is: performance.
Ozzie
“…but he assured us he was up to the task.”
It’s always interesting to me how hesitant hiring managers are to ask very specific questions, regarding actual events/projects/results, in a job interview. And in multiple interviews, it’s always interesting how many of the interviewers thought that for sure “the other interviewer” had done the heavy lifting in getting chapter and verse about very specific results of the last job.
Asking only how a candidate **would** do a specific job is playing with fire, unless that **would** statement is also backed up by a **did** statement– something the interviewee has actually done in a past position.
Better the interviewer do the heavy lifting to ask these hard questions during the interview– and not just lament about how “it wasn’t as advertised” after the person has been hired.