From the Ask Tom mailbag.
Question
When you talked about interviewing for “fit” with our company culture, you said that we should interview for behaviors. I understand what you mean, but I don’t know what the questions sound like.
Response
Creating interview questions for candidate traits like fit, values and attitude just takes a couple of steps. First, we have to translate the warm fuzzy into a behavior. Let’s start with “fit,” since that is the one you asked about.
Ask yourself the question, “How does a person who fits our culture behave?”
I work with a company that has a real sense of urgency in everything they do. People show up to work early, they start projects early, they return phone calls quickly, they turn paperwork around fast. It is a real culture of “gitter done.” People without that sense of urgency don’t last long at this company. It is an important area to interview for.
So, step two is to ask the person about those critical behaviors. Here is how it sounds.
Tell me about the working hours at the XYZ company? In your position, what time did you arrive for work? In your position, what was the most productive time for you?
In your position, what kind of customer interaction did you have? How many phone calls per day did you receive? How did you handle that phone call volume? When you could not answer a question in the first phone call, what was your system to make sure you returned the call later with the answer?
In your position, tell me about your paper workload. What kind of paperwork did you handle? How quickly did it pass across your desk and on to the next step? What was your system for handling that paperwork?
Remember that the purpose of these questions has to do with behaviors that “fit” the culture. I am not looking for the correct way to run an “in” basket. I am looking for momentum, energy and action, because those are important to “fit” in our culture.
What if you hired someone and they are coming up on their 90 day review and they just aren’t “fitting”. We deal with a lot of customers and she is constantly “sighing” if she gets frustraited and she doesn’t smile hardly at all. When we hired her she seemed more bubbly and I didn’t think it was going to be a problem. The sighing is probably mostly her being frustraited with how much there is to learn here and the different systems but sometimes it makes me feel that she’s sighing at me and I don’t want our customers to feel that she is doing that to them. Also, we’ve addressed her smiling issue and it’s getting a little bit better but it still needs some work. How do I effectively handle these “fitting in” issues. I want to make sure our customers know that we appreciate them and are happy to help them, not frustraited and annoyed.