Hiring the Best by Using Smart Interview Questions

Hiring the Best by Using Smart Interview Questions

In recently going through a series of interview processes and in preparing to interview others, I started thinking a lot about hiring practices and the interview process. Nowadays in many large companies, there is a very structured and rigid set of questions a potential employer can ask. Many interview questions are based on HR practices and rules/regulations in regards to hiring practices to minimize discrimination. In order to limit the liability a company has in hiring someone. Questions are asked from a subset of possible approved questions. This has limited the hiring ability, but in order to hire the best, one must be able to ask the perfect follow-up questions to make sure the right person is getting in the door.

The Interview Overview:

The end goal of filling a position is to find the best candidate, but the end goal of any interview is to determine if the person being interviewed can improve the probability of a business unit’s and company’s success. This is not to say that you need to hold out for the mega-superstar, but you want someone who is intelligent, can close out projects and has the base functional skills necessary for the open role.

On paper, most everyone looks like a superstar and has a variety of great accomplishments, but what one is looking for in the interview, is to test those accomplishments. In an interview you want to discover the candidate's approach and involvement in a situation, in order to make sure they can get stuff done. In order to do this, the interviewer has to drill down on examples to see if the candidate was a leader or a casual observer, a driving force or a follower. This can taking a standard STAR (situation, task, action, result) interview question and then learn more about that particular opportunity. With follow-up questions find out: what was their role, how did they evolve it, what was the scope of the project, what did they learn from this experience? Additionally, find an example in which the interviewer can really determine if the candidate knows their stuff and became an expert or learned from the experience.

Start General, Learn Values:

For nearly all interviews I have been in, I have been asked “Tell me about yourself” or “Walk me through your resume”. I do not see this as high value questions, as the resume should state what the interviewee is going to say, and will add little value to the interview and gain little insight. Starting an interview with an introduction of who you are (interviewer) and of the open position, helps understand the objective and end state of the interview. Setting the interview this way helps the interviewee gain some perspective. After this opening, the introductory question can be more along the lines of getting a baseline for the candidate: “What are you interested in?”, “What gets you excited?”, or similar questions. This sets the stage to be more personal, while gaining a deeper insight of the candidate.

In learning about the background of a candidate, ask about their accomplishments. Learn about what they think was their greatest accomplishment and greatest failure. You will at a basic sense learn about what they see as their definition of success. Using follow-up questions, one can learn about the candidate's role in the situation and their contribution to create the result. This seems like a very basic question, but in learning about the candidate’s values, you can see if they are in alignment with the position needs and requirements.

Technical Interview Questions – Get Specific:

The next step is to test the technical expertise and knowledge of the candidate, to see if they really are a good fit for the position. Questions need to be very specific about the particular position and should have responses which the interviewer can judge as good or bad. For example, if I am going to hire an engineer for a particular position where I think 6Sigma is necessary, I could setup an example of a situation and ask them how they would use 6Sigma methodologies to solve it. This would test their knowledge of the skill or knowledge which I think is important, as well as learning about their problem solving abilities, leadership abilities, depth of knowledge in a particular area (manufacturing, design, etc.), among other knowledge, skills and abilities which directly relate to the position. This can derive from the standard "Tell me a time when..." format, but follow up in directing that experience to desired position attributes.

The important aspect of the technical expertise test is to align it to the open position and to make sure there is a way to determine if it is a good or bad response. It is also important to note the questions that the candidate responds with as it greatly helps to see the candidate's critical reasoning and probing ability to get a complete answer. For technical expertise questions, it helps to have examples that would normally be found within the position and derive from real-world situations, as it brings reality and the knowledge of the interviewer, as the interviewee can determine a complete and thorough answer vs. an ambiguous or lacking answer. With this insight the interviewer can also ask further questions to have the candidate think about a situation from multiple viewpoints.

Depending on the role, it is also important to test their critical reasoning, technical and creativity ability. For marketing, it is important that one be customer focus, while still maintaining the financial, new product development and operations abilities. In the interview process, a hypothetical situation can be asked of a candidate to take multiple viewpoints, seeing if they can talk intelligently about marketing and finance, but still have the ability to translate a customer design to and engineering concept. These questions tend to be more involved and longer, so ensure that you have enough time by making the situation specific enough to be answered in the allotted time.

Interview Questions - The Wild Cards:

In one particular interview, I was asked a very different question which caught me off guard: “Do you think you are lucky?” In analyzing the question one case see how it would help determine the fit of the candidate for the position. It shows humility. People who are more modest tend to use luck or teamwork to describe extraordinary events and events which turned out very successfully and tend to focus more inwardly on failures. It is important not to lose focus on an individual’s contribution to the project, but at the same time one must be able to work in teams and have accountability for actions.

Most interviewers ask the strengths and weaknesses question, but to get a less scripted response to that question, ask “Which three adjectives would your professors, coworkers, or managers use to describe you?” This puts the question in a different light and easily allows follow up questions on why they believe that.

In following these interview questions, I believe you can more critically analyze a candidate for a position. The interviewer can gain a better sense of fit, learn about what characterizes the candidate and objectively analyze the candidate on their future/current/previous abilities and what was gained through each experience. Through the process you should be able to justifiably determine if the candidate was a fit, can get stuff done, and can critically analyze a situation to get results by having the right mix of inter-personal communication and technical knowledge skills and abilities.

As is the philosophy of Google Sr. Vice President of Products, Jonathan Rosenberg,"Instead of laying off the bottom 10%, don't hire them. It's way harder to fire people than it is not hire them." So hire the best - which is done through effective interviewing.

-thePonderingNick