Job Interviewing

In my current position, I have interviewed hundreds of candidates for various open positions on my team. In all the hires I have made, I consider only 2 as mistakes. I believe the job interview is the place when the candidate will tell you 99% of what you need to know to make a hiring decision. The interviewer must craft their questions well, and listen carefully. When executed correctly, the candidate will tell you if they are a good fit on your team.


I always like to start the interview with a harmless sounding question like "tell me your story, what are you interested in, what do you do when you are not at work? It can start with I was born as an infant, and end with how you travelled to this interview. Fill in the rest". My intent is to get the candidate started with something easy that will make them comfortable. There is no chance they will offer up their interest in pedophilia, or augmenting their income through petty larceny. But as they describe their interests, I tune into references to family and friends. I want the employees on my team to be grounded with a support structure. I also become wary if they are not willing to share their interests. After all, we all have interests. Watching TV is an interest I can even related to. If a person is not willing to share interests, you have to wonder what they are up to.


At some point early in the interview, I ask how they have been evaluated in their current or past positions. The question seems innocuous and I normally get honest answers, especially when interviewing internal hires. They know that one call to HR will reveal the truth. Most applicants respond that they were rated 2 or 3 on a 5 point scale, 1 being the highest. I then move on to other questions.


Later in the interview, I follow up with a question about how many people have roughly the same role on their current team. If they have 3 or more peers, I ask how they would compare themselves to their peers. Invariably they respond that they are the best or in the top 2-3 contributors on their team. I will then ask how they square their self-assessment with the average evaluation provided by former bosses.


If I am interviewing a poor candidate, this is the point they tell you take a pass on them. I have seen multiple candidates melt down with explanations of favoritism, office politics, or a stupid boss as the reasons for the discrepancy. A good candidate will either assess themselves based on evaluation feedback from past bosses, or build up the abilities of their current team and peers.


The single most important part of an interview to me is to listen to how the candidate describes their past accomplishments. It is difficult, time consuming, and nearly impossible to check out every interview or resume claim, but if a candidate can describe their accomplishments with excitement and pride, they are probably telling you the truth.


It is also during this time I look for the "twinkle in their eye" that tells you they understand why the accomplishment was important and indicates a competency at the job. I would rather have a slightly under qualified employee that has bought into a bigger picture than a completely qualified employee that mails it in every day.


My best example was a hire I made in 1999. In order to mitigate potential risk, I opened a position as a contractor spot, but interviewed candidates as if I would eventually hire them full time. I learned early that hiring a bad contractor could be remedied immediately, while a bad employee hire can be with you for years. Of all the candidates I interviewed for the new position, the man I hired had the thinnest resume and admitted that he could not perform in the role without training. I hired him simply based on his enthusiasm and his ability to quickly pick up on why the job was important to my team's goals. He was not qualified to do the job, but convinced me that he would put forth the required effort.

I brought this candidate on as a contractor and he performed so well that I hired him to my staff 6 months later. He quickly learned the technical aspects of the role, worked hard, established processes to govern the assignment, met every deliverable given him, and excelled beyond anything I could have expected based on his resume. After working for me one year, this individual applied for an engineering job in a peer team. I spoke to that hiring manager and shared my thoughts. I gave my guy good marks for enthusiasm and execution, but mentioned that he was not a qualified engineer at this point in his career.


My guy must have made a good impression on the peer hiring manager because he got the job. I checked back a few months later to see how he was doing. Not only was he meeting expectations, the engineering manager said that all high priority, short time frame projects were given to my guy because he was tenacious and delivered when established engineers would not.


The only canned interview question I ask is "what do you want to be doing in 5 years". The answer I am looking for is different based on the specific job. If the job is a highly technical position, I want the candidate to tell me that their goal is to be the most competent person on my staff in 5 years. The last thing I need is to hire a subject matter expert whose goal is to leave my team. If the role is more a general staff position, I am fine with an answer that indicates movement into leadership roles within the company. I want my staff positions to assume leadership roles in the projects they are assigned.

The worst interview candidate I have ever spoke with was a woman, approximately 40 years old, who applied for a administrative assistant position on my team. She was a 10+ year veteran of the company and had spent those years in the procurement division, mostly processing purchase orders and invoices. Her demeanor through out the entire interview made me wonder if she had been given a lobotomy. Her responses were completely emotionless, deadpan, and dry. She offered no information unless prodded by a question. When asked about her expertise with Microsoft Office products, she indicated a proficiency. That was good, since the job required a working knowledge of Word and Excel. When pressed on her abilities at entering formulas into Excel cells, she replied "I mainly like to type stuff into the boxes. I don't do formulas. I really don't like details like that". She did not get the job.