The Approach:

• Focus on personality, not paper – Is this someone you can work with? Someone who will get along in the office? Someone who will be eager to learn? Finding a candidate who will be easy to work with and who has the ability to learn new skills is far more important than someone with a resume that perfectly matches skills or experience. You will thank yourself later.

• Focus on potential, not perfection – Just because someone says they are an Excel expert doesn’t mean they are, and you won’t know till they are already hired. Look instead for someone with the ability to learn, because that person is a multi-faceted resource. In fact, someone who is an expert may be set in their ways, hard to mold to your organizations methods.

• What questions do they ask? – Lots of questions are good, as it indicates a genuine interest in the company and the position. The best questions are more about culture, growth opportunity and training, which indicate an invested employee. Too much focus on pay frequency, immediate promotions, or petty logistical concerns are sign of an employee who would put their own needs above the company’s needs.

• Talk much? – Particularly with a sales candidate, if they can’t sell themselves, it’s not a good fit. In any role, though, you’ll want a good communicator, and someone who is not uncomfortable approaching their manager. Someone with the ability to turn an interview into a conversation will likely be easier to work with. It will also help you get to know the candidate’s personality; the quiet interviewee often leaves no impression.

• Lower their guard – You’ll learn more from a conversation than an interview. Don’t immediately hit them with a barrage of questions or an analysis of their resume. Let down your hair; tell a humorous story about a time that you messed up an interview – anything to give them confidence and to make them feel like it’s okay to open up to you and be real. Not only will you see the real person instead of the rehearsed Interview Candidate, but they may reveal their faults or even deal-breakers. I have had interview candidates tell me drunk stories – you’d be surprised (and grateful!).

• Avoid the standard questions – The answers you get aren’t real, they are rehearsed, and calculated to tell you what you want to hear and what will get them hired. Instead, pic one or two open-ended questions that will (hopefully!) tell you a lot about the candidate. What do you do in your free time? and What did you want to be when you grew up? can give you an opportunity for insight.

• Don’t be dazzled by the overqualified candidate – If it seems too good to be true that someone with ten years’ experience or a master’s degree applies for a job that requires two years’ experience and a bachelor’s… that’s because it is. Don’t rule this candidate out completely; they may have a great motive for wanting this position. Generally, though, this is someone who may not plan to be in the position long-term.

The Questions:

• “Where do you see yourself in five years?” – This is the ONE standard interview question that I hold stock in, mostly because there’s so much value in the response. What is the candidate’s ambition? Will they be with your company for long? Is there a career path for them in your department? It can also be very telling – it’s a red flag when you work at a bank and they tell you they want to get into non-profit. And yes, I’ve had answers that direct from candidates!

• “Why is my company a fit for you?” – The answer to this question tells you if they did their homework. If a candidate is not familiar with your company’s mission, they have not invested much in this interview, they do not care about this job, you don’t want to hire them. It’s also an opportunity for them to explicitly refer to skills and goals that align with the job. An effective answer to this question can really help distill the interview process.

• “Is there any highlight from your resume that would suggest you would excel in this position?” – Honestly, this helps you out by letting them do some of the work for you. Yes, you’ve assessed their resume enough to see that they may be a good fit. However, you’ve looked at dozens of resumes and they are each packed with a lot of information. This gives the candidate an opportunity to highlight the most salient points and give it some focus that is relevant to the position. It’s a chance to give you helpful information, and for a deft interview candidate, it can double as a sales pitch.

• “If you would have me tell the hiring manager one thing, what would it be?” – This is helpful to a recruiter in a first-round interview if they are not the ultimate decision maker. It is one last chance for the candidate to sell themself, and it also gives them a final opportunity to say something shrewd… or something really stupid. The type of information they choose to pass along says as much as the content itself. “I really want this job” or “I would be perfect for this role because of how I care about customers, and I think the sales awards at my previous job demonstrate that.” You be the judge.

Avoid The Bad Advice:

• Don’t make them go through their resume thoroughly – You have seen it. Use that time for some more free-form responses that will tell you more about the candidate and make it less formal (and them less nervous).

• Don’t make them do all the talking – An interview may be an audition of sorts, but it shouldn’t be the hot seat. Don’t put them on the spot. You’re selling your company to them almost as much as they should be selling themselves to you – talk plenty!

• Don’t dismiss someone with no experience – You get more for less with a college grad than with a mid-career candidate. They are eager to prove themselves and freshly prepared to learn. There is a saying about old dogs/new tricks, and you’d be surprised how often it applies.
  

  interview tips

Human head with question mark

General managers should be involved up to their eyeballs in setting human resources strategy and policies, adapting the strategy and policies on a divisional or regional basis (and then on a plant or facility basis), and implementing the policies by adapting them suitably to particular employees and groups. In fact, general managers should take the lead on these tasks. Why? Given the interdependencies with other aspects of the organization, it takes general management perspective or, if you prefer, general management gut feel to integrate a strategy with other aspects of strategy. And, moving onto the line, because of her day-to-day contact with her subordinates, it is the line manager who is best situated to provide evaluation, meaningful feedback, and useful advice up the line about what a specific employee requires. Moreover, we are keen in most cases on maintaining a “personal touch” when it comes to work force administration, because employees tend to appreciate it. Who better to give this personal touch than one’s immediate supervisor?

It is worth observing here that if general managers are going to be given primary responsibility for implementing nontrivial human resources policy on the line, then there is another good reason to have general managers be responsible for formulating those policies in the first place: When the people who make policy don’t have to implement it, the discipline imposed by having to bear the costs of implementation is lost. And, to reverse the argument, when those who must implement a policy did not help formulate it, we can anticipate less commitment to that policy in the first place. Having policy set by top management back at headquarters and then implemented by line managers in the field doesn’t conform precisely to the rule that “those who implement should decide,” which will lead us later in this chapter to some thoughts about which general managers should set human resources policies. But there is likely to be a tighter connection between those who set policy and those who implement when both groups are drawn from the ranks of general management than if human resources specialists are primarily responsible for either policy formulation or policy implementation.

Those who are responsible for formulating a strategy and handling the implementation of policies confront a set of tasks that are ambiguous and uncertain, involving outcomes that are noisy and that can take a very long time to be realized. This makes it very difficult to rely on direct, explicit tools to motivate and reward those who are responsible for these tasks. Handing these human resources tasks over to general managers doesn’t solve this problem, by a long shot. Indeed, to the extent that general managers (more than human resources specialists) must attend to many different agendas, some of which may be more easily monitored, measured, and motivated, this may lead to the bad outcome whereby human resources management is put on a far-toward-the-back burner. But if a culture and performance management system can be put in place for general managers that emphasize the critical importance of human resources-if there is a sense that this is an important prerequisite to rise within the organization – then the motivational problems may not be insoluble.

Young managers “produce”- they design, manufacture, sell, and so on. Mid-career executives manage the young managers – they spend the bulk of their time developing the human resources in their care and are evaluated in large measure according to how well they do so. And senior managers manage big – picture issues and external affairs. The point is twofold. First, the (historical) lack of labor mobility means that mid-career managers develop a fairly long and detailed track record as managers of human resources. For performance data that are both noisy and delayed in coming, this is a great advantage. (Unhappily, it is not an advantage that can be replicated in all environments.) And second, the culture of management in these firms attach primacy to human resources. This is a lever that many organizations can pull.