The personnel file was on the desk. Sandra looked despondent. “She has worked for us for two years. We thought she was ready, so we promoted her into the position. It is obvious now that it’s not going to work out. I don’t want to fire her, but if we demote her, she is going to quit. Either way I lose.”

“What’s the lesson learned,” I asked.

“To know whether a person is ready for a position before you promote them, but how do you know?” asked Sandra.

“Exactly,” I responded. “How do you know? How can you find out?”

Sandra thought, but the answer came quickly. “I know what all the responsibilities are. I could have given her bits and pieces over time to see how she did. If I had done that, I would have known that she had difficulty with three of the core elements of the position.”

“And so you could have continued to work with her, now it looks like she is on her way out. How much did this lesson cost you?”

Comment on Textbook Answers –
While actual tactile past experience is necessary to understand capability. Wouldn’t we also be looking for information on adaptability? Possibly ferreting out a task as you have mentioned might have been out of their wheel house and what they did to overcome that?

I am still learning and adapting everyday. Just like a company I believe that if I am not growing I am dying on the vine. To me, that quality is just as valuable as what a person has accomplished, depending of course on specific immediate needs, how soon you are expecting results and what you are ultimately grooming for. I like to think that I am hiring a seed, not a tree.

Response:
Don’t try to draw me into asking a future based question or a hypothetical question. You may think you are asking about learning or grooming, but, you are falling into a trap where the candidate can make up stuff and lie.

If learning is important (and most often, it is), ask specifically about something learned in the past.

• Tell me about a time when you had to learn something new, something significant, on a project.
• What was the project about?
• What did you have to learn?
• How did you learn what you needed to know?
• How did you apply what you learned?
• What was different?
• what was the result?

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Three more days to sign up for our online program, Hiring Talent. Sign up here.

This didn’t come from the mailbag, just a real conversation.

Question:
We’re glad that you’re here. We have a candidate down the hall. Our interview team has talked to him and everybody likes him. Can you spend a few minutes and see if you like him, too?

Response:
Sounds like an innocent question. But, no. Whether or not I like a candidate, makes no difference in the selection process. If you want to sit down with a role description and determine what capability, what skills, values and behaviors we need in that role, then you and I can have a conversation. Our conversation will help to craft 50-60 questions to ask the candidate.

But, in the end, I am not accountable for the performance of the selected candidate, it’s the hiring manager. I get to go home, the hiring manager is accountable for the output of the team. Part of that accountability is for the selection of team members.

Doesn’t matter if I like the candidate.
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Pre-registration is closed, but you can still sign up for our online program Hiring Talent, Hiring Talent. You can find out more information about the program, here. We released the Orientation yesterday, June 6, 2011. No one can be added to the program after this Friday.

From the Ask Tom Mailbag:

Question:
In yesterday’s post on hiring, you said, “Candidates, when they come to work for you, are most likely to repeat their behaviors from the past. Even when, in the past, those behaviors were not successful.” If some behavior (technique, approach) was not successful, wouldn’t the person learn and NOT repeat the behavior? Especially in a new role?

Response:
Alas. We are slow learners. That’s why, in an interview, I listen carefully for textbook answers and watch out for hypothetical explanations. They are useless. I am ONLY interested in actual past behavior.

We can understand and even agree with stuff beyond our capability. Just because we understand it and agree with it, does not mean we can actually do it. For example, I can clearly explain how a piston engine works, including the role of fuel, oxygen and combustion. I can explain why rings and bearings wear out. But the last thing you want me to do, is tear down and rebuild your engine. I have never actually done that.

In managerial tasks, I may understand and agree with a coaching process, a delegation process, a planning process. I may even be able to explain those things (according to the textbook), but until I have integrated those processes into my habits and practiced them day after day, I am just a candidate who tells a good story.
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We are closing registrations (last day – Friday, June 3) for our next online program, Hiring Talent. You can find out more information about the program, here. It starts next Monday, June 6, 2011.

From the Ask Tom Mailbag:

Question:
This new hire has me perplexed. In the interview, we described the exact problems this candidate would face and the response was quite good. The candidate’s prescription for solving those problems was right on point. Five weeks later, none of those problems are getting solved and we are way behind schedule. The customer just called. You get the picture.

Response:
And the candidate got your picture. Look, candidates do their homework. They visit your website. They read your trade magazines. You asked hypothetical questions and got textbook answers.

Don’t ask, “What would you do if?”

Ask, “What DID you do when?” Then go for details.

Candidates, when they come to work for you, are most likely to repeat their behaviors from the past. Even when, in the past, those behaviors were not successful.
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We are currently taking registrations for our next online program, Hiring Talent. You can find out more information about the program, here.

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
Here we are again. I thought this was the best candidate, but, now only three weeks into the job, I might have made a mistake. It turns out, I misinterpreted things that were discussed in the interview.

Response:
Why do interviewers constantly misinterpret candidate responses? Simple reason. Interviewers misinterpret because they are asking questions that require interpretation. Any question that requires the response to be interpreted is a poor question. Worse yet, now the interviewer has to do something with that interpretation.

“Tell me, how important was planning in your last company?”

Terrible question. Any response to this question requires the interviewer to make an interpretation, an assumption or a leap of faith. Do we depend on the person to be telling the truth, or do we take it with a grain of salt? None of this is helpful.

Here is a better set of questions.

• Tell me about a time when it was important for you to create a plan for a project you were working on?
• What was the project?
• What was the purpose of the project?
• How long was the project?
• Tell me about the plan?

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We are currently taking registrations for our next online program, Hiring Talent. You can find out more information about the program, here.

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
I thought I had a pretty good strategy going into the interview with the candidate. But I am only one of five people on our interview team. It seems the other four weren’t prepared and came out of their interviews with completely different observations. One said the candidate reminded him of his college drinking buddy. Another was impressed with the candidate’s technical background, from the resume. I think this is a bad decision, but now I have to argue with the opinions of the rest of the interview team.

Response:
This is not unusual. Most interview teams are loosely banded together without any coherent approach. The good news, since you have an approach, you have the power of influence on the behavior of the rest of the team.

The trick is to start early. Get the interview team together to review the role description way before the job posting. The team can be very helpful crafting interview questions together, based on the role description. If you remember, my bias is 60 written prepared questions. If you have five people on your interview team, that’s barely more than 10 questions each, piece of cake.

The next step is a decision matrix with the decision criteria listed across the top and each candidate down the left side. Each member of the interview team should prepare the matrix after their candidate interviews and bring it to the debrief meeting. Now, the conversation is totally changed. It’s no longer opinion, but a true discussion of the facts uncovered during the interviews.
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We are currently taking registrations for our next online program, Hiring Talent. You can find out more information about the program, here.

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
We are three weeks into a new hire that showed all the promise of a superstar. This new hire was an impeccable interviewer. He had done research on our website, knew all about our company. He had done significant research on our industry, was familiar with specific challenges our company faces. He established immediate rapport with every person on the interview team. He looked wonderful. But here we are, three weeks later and I can already tell, this guy doesn’t have a clue. Everything in his department, which was relatively stable, has started to go haywire.

Response:
If you had interviewed me for the role, I guarantee that you would have hired me as well. Candidates are coached to do exactly what you described. I would have scoured your website, specifically your About Us page, so I would be able to identify all the players in your company by name. I would have spent an hour or two on industry websites to figure out what your challenges are. I would have concocted a couple of brilliant stories (with enough verifiable truth) to WOW an interview team.

Here’s the bad news. I have never worked in your industry, have never done what you need done, never worked with, much less managed a staff like yours. Three weeks into the role, you would notice me failing. PREDICTABLY FAILING.

Predictably failing, if you had asked the right questions. Your entire interview team was derailed from the facts of my experience. They were hi-jacked by my specific knowledge about your teammates. The only qualifications demonstrated were those of a researcher.
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We are currently taking registrations for our next online program, Hiring Talent. You can find out more information about the program, here.

After observing a ton of hiring interviews, I have created a list of the top things that go wrong in the conversation. Here is a big one:

The interviewer fails to find out important information about the candidate’s experience, skills and behaviors relative to the job profile.

Interesting, since this is the primary purpose of the interview, what causes this failure? Most often, time and again, the interviewer is not prepared to ask the right questions and pursue the details of the candidate’s experience. Manager’s think they can wing it.

“Just give me the guy’s resume. I’ll spend a few minutes with him and tell you what I think.”

Quite frankly, I am not interested in the opinion of the interviewer. I am interested in how much hard information is collected, that has a direct bearing on the person’s probability for success in the role we are trying to fill.
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We are currently taking registrations for our next online program, Hiring Talent. You can find out more information about the program, here.