“Seeing” Beats “Hearing” In Predicting Job Success

Lou Adler’s article How To Uncover The Four Best Predictors of Success in 30 Minutes sets forth some good interview questions.

Even with great questions, it’s really tough to determine from an interview whether someone might actually come in and help get us the results we expect. And, in a growing number of hiring situations, determining job fit has moved beyond conversation:

1. Action is more important than talk.  It’s not enough to hear the candidate tell stories about success in similar situations.  He or she ought to be ready to show results of building something similar. Programmers don’t get to talk their way into a job developing applications.  They’re expected to actually bring and demo a working app they’ve already built.
2. People doing the hiring want to know that others have already approved of the candidate’s work product.  People these days don’t seem as willing to make hiring decisions strictly on the basis of their own independent evaluations of what’s right there in front of them, but to look to “the crowd” for their opinions of the candidate’s output.  Bands and other entertainers don’t audition for recording contracts and gigs anymore. They have to prove they already have a following by the number of YouTube subscribers and views.

This perspective has spread to all kinds of corporate jobs and calls for a new kind of interviewing:

1. Describe the results you’re looking for, then ask for a demo of some recent similar accomplishment. Suppose you’re hiring someone to help introduce a new system to support client engagement. Ask the interviewee to bring and demo a client engagement system he or she has built. A sales campaign?  What were the results of a similar one the candidate put together?  A new product?  Ask to see it and the sales results.
2. Ask for info about the rollout — number of subscribers and feedback from users — and responses to it.  What did the people using it have to say? What did the candidate do with the feedback he or she received?
3. What does the candidate think the position will look like with him or her in it?  Everyone seems to understand and accept that the role, responsibilities and daily activities of a senior level position will depend to a great extent on the incumbent. Actually the same is also true of jobs at other levels.  Instead of just focusing on “filling a job” you’ve already designed, take the conversation up a notch by engaging the candidate in a conversation about the corporate goals and objectives you’re trying to achieve and ask the candidate — right then and there — to brainstorm with you a job description to address that need and the profile of an ideal candidate.
4. Ask the candidate to brainstorm “first actions.” Have him or her walk you step-by- step through their early days at previous jobs, what he/she did and why, the results and what he or she would do differently if he were reporting for this job tomorrow morning.

We typically spend so much time telling senior management why we need to fill a job and writing a job description, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we have to find a candidate who will tell us why he or she is the ideal person to fill it.

It’s worthwhile to take the conversation to a higher level — from job description to desired results — and to shift the proof from what you’d like to hear to something you expect to see.  The exercise will help you get more clarity about the job itself in addition to making it more likely you’ll find the right person to do it.