CONDUCTING AN EFFECTIVE INTERVIEW:
How to Paint an Accurate Picture of the Candidate
Karen
is a Managing Director at a financial services firm. Her
previous two hiring decisions have turned out to be mistakes.
In each case the candidates were personable but lacked certain key
skills necessary to undertake their roles in the organization.
Karen is about to recruit an Assistant Vice President and hopes to
avoid the mistakes of the past. She dreads interviewing
because she never knows what to ask and she is very self-conscious. She has sought coaching to
guide her through the process.
Defining Skill-Sets
Karen
has advertised the AVP position, including all the academic
requirements (MBA), professional experience requirements (3+ years
in financial services business development), and skill set necessary
to succeed in the position (see below).
As
Karen's coach, my first step is to ask Karen to list in order of
priority the skill set necessary for a candidate to succeed in the
AVP position. Karen lists the skills in the following order:
-
Good Negotiator
-
Analytical
-
Organized
-
Handle Pressure
Interpreting a Resume
I ask
Karen to select, prior to our meeting, her preferred candidate from
among resumes received. I ask her what attracted her to the
candidate. She lists attributes she likes in the following
order:
-
She came from Turkey to study in the U.S. That has to take
a lot of guts, especially for a woman.
-
I
like that she is international.
-
She worked at the IMF. That's impressive.
-
She did graduate work at the London School of Economics and
University of Michigan and she has an undergraduate math degree
from MIT. That's very impressive.
I ask
Karen what her overall impression is of the candidate. Karen
says the candidate is very bright and a "go-getter".
I ask Karen if she thinks the candidate could do the job. She
says "yes" right off the bat. I then ask her if she has any
concerns. Karen is concerned that the candidate is too
ambitious for this particular job and imagines she is more of an
investment banker type.
These
presumptions represent Karen's first interpretation of the
candidate. They are
based on Karen's own personal experiences (including the fact that
she is a woman in a high-level position in banking) and her values
(she is impressed by well-reputed institutions). The
presumptions may or may not turn out to be accurate.
Nevertheless, making these presumptions is an important part of the
resume review process. And in fact, it is something
interviewers do all the time when they read a resume. Where
interviewers get into trouble is in failing to identify the
presumption as just that. In other words, the presumption is
so automatic that in the interviewer's mind it is immediately
perceived as fact.
At
this point, I guide Karen through a testing of her first
impressions. To do this, we analyze the resume together in detail.
Testing Presumptions
Below
are two of our dialogues:
Diana:
Why do you think the candidate is smart?
Karen:
Because she was a math major.
Diana: What
does that mean to you?
Karen:
It means she's analytical.
At
this point I ask Karen whether she perceives any difference between
analytical and quantitative. Karen realizes she has confused
the two.
Diana:
What kind of analytical work does the AVP job involve?
Karen:
Reading legal documents, analyzing them and writing memos setting
out the analysis.
Diana:
How relevant are quantitative skills for this job?
Karen:
You have to have basic MBA quantitative skills but analytical
thinking and writing skills are more important.
Diana:
Is there anything on this resume that indicates writing skills?
Karen:
No.
Diana:
We have just identified a new area of inquiry for the interview.
It's an important area too. Remember that you listed
analytical skills as the second most important skill for the job.
Next,
I ask Karen to look at the candidate's employment record. She
again points out how impressed she is by the IMF position and
reiterates that given her credentials, she thinks the candidate
would be dissatisfied with the AVP position and appears more suited
to investment banking. I then point to the fact that the
candidate had a Summer Associate position in investment banking at
Morgan Stanley the summer before graduating from her MBA program but
did not return after graduation, as typically happens, instead going
to the IMF.
Diana:
Does the fact that she didn't go back to Morgan Stanley change your
opinion of the candidate?
Karen:
Well I'm very curious why she didn't go back to Morgan Stanley,
especially since she seems so driven.
Diana:
Is it possible she's not as driven as you initially thought?
Karen:
It's possible. I no longer have a clear picture of her drive.
Diana:
Is that something you want to find out about in the interview?
Karen:
Yes.
Diana:
We have just identified one more area of inquiry for the interview.
Collecting Issues for the Interview
As you
can see from the above two dialogues, it is very valuable for us as
interviewers to test our presumptions against the resume. In
this process, it is particularly important to pay attention to how
our values and experiences lead us to our presumptions. For
instance, without this process, Karen might have hired a candidate
that was quantitative but not analytical because, on the surface,
Karen was seduced by the MIT math degree. The process also
allows us to collect "issues" for investigation during the
interview. This in turn gives the interviewer a focus.
The interviewer no longer needs to worry about what questions to
ask. The interview becomes a meaningful encounter and less
stressful.
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