Secrets of a Moderately Decent Interviewee

Interviews are nearly worthless.

The fact that we put so much emphasis on them is a testament to our falling prey to our illusory superiority, aka The Lake Wobegon effect - ‘where all the children are above average.’

While we’d all probably agree that others are prone to being fooled by good interviewees, we’d rarely put ourselves in that same boat.  We think that we can intuitively get a sense for who a person is and how well they’ll work out on our team after meeting with them in person.

Yet, it’s worth pointing to again, but half of new hires fail within 18-months.  Failure, in this case, is defined as exiting the company.   You can bet the real failure rate is even greater given how slow many are to fire.  Interestingly, the vast majority of those people fail because of the interpersonal dynamics between manager and subordinate.

How can that be?  That’s a primary reason we conduct interviews.

Interviews fail because the interviewer is human.  It’s a likability screen and little else.

While I’m not an expert on interviewing from either side, I’ll disclose what’s worked for me in the past and it’ll be pretty easy to see why our human subjectivity is so easily tricked.

My strategy falls from understanding the real reason we conduct interviews.  Most people want to see if the candidate is moderately personable (does the candidate make you feel comfortable?), moderately likable (can you see going to lunch with him/her a couple days a week?) and has a decent grasp on the job/industry (will s/he embarrass you?).

1. Talk as little as possible. The less I talk the more interesting and intelligent you’ll think I am.  Like meeting someone at a cocktail party, thinking they are fascinating and then realizing you know nothing about them.  You like them because they let you talk the entire time.
2. Find the connection. A good interviewee does their homework.  Not just about the job but about the people interviewing them.  They’ve found the point of connection.  Interviews are a likability screen.  Identifying a shared home town, grad school or interest is the first step.  Once identified it says ’see, we’re the same.  We’re going to get along great.’  Asking open-ended questions around the topic also eats into the interview time and allows the interviewer to strengthen the bond by reinforcing the connection points herself.
3. Defer expertise. Take advantage of the interviewer’s lack of preparedness. Everyone is busy and it’s shocking how little preparation goes into interviewing people.  After all, the hiring manager is rarely evaluated on how well they hire.  Anticipating the usual battery of questions is pretty easy.  I, as the interviewee, like to get home-court advantage right away by asking the first question after we establish the point of connection.  If steps one and two (talk very little and make a connection) are done right, the interviewer has done a lot of talking and it’s only natural for you to speak next.  Ask them about how they’re addressing their challenges or about a specific action they’ve taken that you’ve recently read about.  This will give you an insight into how they’re thinking when they want to ask you the same question in return and allow them to feel good about themselves by proving their expertise.
4. Body language. Body language says a lot about you, particularly from people who think they are incredibly intuitive.  You don’t want to overdo it, but occasionally mimicking the interviewer’s body language (naturally) reinforces the subtle clue that we’re a lot alike.  When not mimicking, take an interested, open and slightly aggressive posture.  Lean forward to show you’re interested and ready, keep the hands open to show you’re not a threat and keep the shoulders back to show you’re confident.  Sounds too simple, but it’s amazingly effective when compared to someone who is sitting back with a slouched back.
5. Judo questioning. End questions with questions. Ending questions with questions reinforces that I’m curious about you and your company.  Plus it’s unnatural for someone not to answer when asked a question.  It disrupts the flow of the interview and turns it into a conversation.  It’s harder to negatively evaluate a conversation since the interviewer is responsible for half of it.
6. Show your work. I take several notes about the company, challenges and ideas I have to help out prior to interviewing.  Let the interviewer see that work.  I like a clip board because there is no cover on it.  It allows you to be very subtle about showing off what you’ve done.  It may all be rubbish, but the interviewer can’t read it (tip: make sure to put the name of the person and company in a font size big enough to read across the table).  The perception will clearly be that you know your stuff.

There are some who have been trained in the process and they can cut through these tactics and effectively evaluate, but those folks are a very rare breed (read: it’s probably not you.)

In sum, the interview isn’t going anywhere.  But we need tools that are objective, uniform and rigorous.  That’s what RoundPegg is all about - predicatively figuring out whether we’ll successfully work together.

Subjectivity has very little place in the hiring process.  When we rely on our ‘good gut instincts’ we barely beat the flip of a coin.

With that, like Christopher Columbus, I’ve burned my ships.  RoundPegg has to work out because I’ll now never successfully interview again.

Your Resume Sucks

What started as providing a few suggestions on a friend of a friend’s resume the other day turned into a soapbox rant about the worthlessness of the resume.  While I typically don’t write about resumes and finding jobs, I’m posting this so I can save myself time and refer people to this post rather than re-rant every time.

Resumes have become the dark suit, white shirt and ’sincere’ tie of IBM’s days of yore.

If the goal is to stand out, why do we keep following the same boring template?  And following it poorly, at that.  We are not all the same so let’s get ourselves onto that meaningless invaluable piece of paper.

A few thoughts on the traditional resume:

1. Results, not responsibilities. Presumably you are a bad ass.  Provide evidence of that.  The person hiring you doesn’t want a warm body to fill the space and merely complete tasks.  They want someone bright who will go beyond the job description, solve problems and accomplish great things.  You’ve done that in the past.  Talk about it.
2. Every bullet counts. Space is limited.  Make sure every line on the page counts toward promoting you.  This is derivative of the above but just as describing the job doesn’t do you any favors neither does a line or two describing the company you last worked for.  Who cares?  If they do exactly the same thing as the company to which you’re applying the new company should know all about them.  If not, why would they care anyway?
3. Unquantified successes. Another derivative, but you so often hear about providing metrics that quantify success (a good thing) that I wanted to point out other ways to do that.  Did you turn a low-performer into a high-performer that got promoted or won an award?  Unquantified success.  Did you talk others into doing something differently?  Unquantified success.  Sometimes just implementing change is enough.
4. Brevity. Unless you’re 147 years old or hold more patents than Ben Franklin there probably isn’t any reason to go beyond two pages.  You’re resume will be sitting in a stack of dozens.  Would you want to read a novella about yourself, not to mention someone you’ve never met?  It’s just going to piss someone off.
5. Objective, really? Isn’t everyone’s objective to land the job?  Don’t say you want a job at [flattering description of hiring company X].  If that’s all you’ve got, kill it.  What do you want to be doing in the next couple years?  In other words, why do you want the job?  Or better yet, incorporate #1 below.
6. Whitespace. This is short attention span theater at its worst.  Somebody will decide how comprehensively to read your resume within a second and based solely on looks.  If there is a massive block of text it’ll get skipped.  Having the right content doesn’t matter much if it won’t get read.  Indents and paragraph breaks are your friend, use them liberally.

And a few thoughts to improve the resume:

1. Know yourself. Describe the environment in which you work best.  If you don’t pass the screen, that’s a good thing.  Your odds of succeeding when you’re out of your element are low.  Outline your strengths.  What are you inherently good at?  What do you enjoy doing?  How do you work with others?  Focus on what you bring that is truly unique.  You’ll be competing against people as smart and with similar successes as you.  Our differences often come out in how we work.
2. Get personal. Lots of people don’t like the ‘personal’ section on a resume.  It may violate point number two above for some.  But I disagree.  Clearing that first hurdle and doing well in the interview means you pass the likability screen.  People often get offered jobs because they were well-liked.  So offer up some bullets that can help you make a connection.  What have you done that’s interesting and conversation-worthy?  What makes you smile?
3. Lose some history. Stop with the blow by blow of your professional career. In fact, ditch your early career.  You’re not applying for an entry level position, so why is that relevant?  Identify the highlights only (see: brevity) and focus on who you are, how you work and what you have to offer that’s unique (see: knowing yourself).
4. Get creative. If you’re not afraid of standing out, design something that looks totally different than all the other resumes out there.  Mix font sizes, put your name vertically instead of horizontal, whatever.  You want to give someone pause and pique their interest.  Unless you’re a Realtor though, please don’t put your picture on your resume.
5. Don’t rely on your resume at all. They are worthless.  The 21st century’s buggy whip.  Relentlessly tap your network to get in front of the right people.  But that’s a different post.

Your thoughts?

First, Know Thyself

We had a great conversation this morning with the head of HR at a local Boulder company.  While talking about the issues around hiring she had a very zen approach,  “know thyself.”

Her point was that you can’t hire great people if you first don’t know where you want to go and how you’re getting there.

Two companies may work on solving the same problem but they will take different paths to get to the finish line.  And in each case it will take people with different skills (both functional and interpersonal) in order to contribute successfully.

And while it sounds simplistic it’s incredible how often we don’t take the time to actually think through exactly what it is we need.  We’re dealing with people, not McDonald’s hamburgers.  There is going to be a lot of variation in two people that have held the same title.  Therefore, in order to evaluate them you need to have the yardstick by which to do so.  And that’s you.

• What do you want to accomplish?
• How do you plan on getting there?
• What types of people are needed to accomplish the goals?
• Are you sure?
• What are your company’s idiosyncrasies and constraints exist with which the new hire will have to adjust?
• What works so well you wouldn’t want to change it?

Knowing what needs to get done and how you want to accomplish it is the starting point for evaluating a potential new hire.  The last thing you want to do is get suckered into the trap of falling for skills you don’t need (even if they are expert skills) or making the hire just because you like the individual.

People succeed within your company because you put them in a position to do so.

First, know thyself.  It helps you make better decisions, it shows the candidates the respect they deserve and it helps them become successful employees.

The ‘A’ Player Myth

There is quite a lot of chatter on the paradox of hiring ‘A’ players in a downturn.  Briefly summarized, hiring is harder today because the number of schmucks has dramatically increased while the true talent has remained constant.

While I can’t deny there is more noise I frankly think it’s the wrong conversation to have. The mantra of hiring only ‘A’ players is a fallacy that has gotten us into trouble.  To lay my biases on the table early, they are:

1. We have a totally misguided perception of what ‘best’ means so hiring the ‘best’ isn’t really doing us any favors
2. A team comprised strictly of ‘best’ people isn’t a team
3. A concerted need to hire ‘only A people’ means you’ve given up on developing talent
4. (More like 3a.) Hiring ‘only A people’ means you see people as cogs in a wheel - true A talent probably shouldn’t work for you

To set the table, I think there are two viewpoints on this topic:

The first advocates the traditional ‘A’ player mantra and sees a fixed world.  We all have a fixed ability and what we’ve have shown in the past is all we’re capable of in the future.  What you see is all you get.  The onus for being engaged and kicking ass at work falls squarely and solely on the worker.  They get a paycheck, it’s up to them to earn it.  If they can’t, we’ll find someone who can.

The other view sees a dynamic world.  Where actions do indeed have equal and, in this case, not-so-opposite reactions.  While we may have ceilings on our potential, we are not limited to what we have done in the past.  After a certain level of basic intelligence (a hurdle many - but certainly not all - knowledge workers will clear) we can flourish when properly utilized and engaged.  Engagement and ass kicking is a two way street.  The worker must bring the right abilities to the table, but those abilities won’t be fully utilized unless the worker’s needs are met.

Needless to say, I’m in the latter camp.

Now to expand upon my three and a half biases above.

First, how we currently define ‘best’ only evaluates one’s skills.  It doesn’t credit people with having an appetite for learning.  It doesn’t acknowledge that people can be good at something other than what they’ve already done.  It accepts ‘any means necessary’ in order to accomplish a task.  It rewards the hoarding of information and the loud, chest-thumping, spotlight-seeking blowhard.  Skills and knowledge are only part of the equation in most corporate situations.  And you can get by with them if you have a bunker to isolate these lone wolf geniuses.  But if you expect them to contribute on a team you also have to add how they work with others to the evaluation.

Dovetailing into my second bias, the attributes that make our teams successful are the antithesis of how we reward individuals.  I’ve worked with several ‘A’ players who I’d politely classify as assholes.  They only cared about the greater good of the team in the sense that they could take credit for something and use it to feed their egos and propel their careers.   Who wants to work with that guy?  Who wants to actively work against that guy?  He may be good at what he does, but he brings down the effort and talent level of the people around him.

Teams are successful when information flows freely, people trust the team not to use their idea larvae against them and there is mutual respect that allows those larvae to breathe another breath and potentially bust out of the cocoon.   Not exactly what jumps out at us on a resume or at the heart of the questions we ask in an interview.

Finally, the idea of player development goes out the window if you’re only look for ‘A’ players.  You believe rewarding these people is a matter of throwing more money or a bigger title at them.  You’re rewarding the selfishness and ever-ballooning ego by throwing gas on that fire.  Under our current evaluation system, you haven’t hired ‘A’ players that care about your business, you’ve hired mercenaries that care about themselves.

True ‘A’ people are motivated by more than extrinsic rewards. By not taking the time to understand that you’ve essentially cut off the long-term, sustainable avenues for true ‘A’ players to get rewarded.  True ‘A’ players are the intellectually curious who want to tackle new challenges.  Yet, you haven’t taken an interest in them, their career or their goals.  You don’t have the inclination to help them acquire new knowledge or skills because you believe those are fixed.  You haven’t set up the structure by which ‘A’ players can challenge themselves in an unfamiliar role or the support for them to succeed should they happen to accidentally get there.

This is already too long so I’ll end with this.  How many championships have the Yankees been able to buy with the ‘A’ talent on the free agent market in the last decade?  Their string of championships in the late 90s were the result of the players they had taken the time to coach/mentor through their minor league system. The business of hiring the best of the best doesn’t win when we incorrectly define ‘the best’ and wind up with people unwilling to do the little things that help the team, but hurt individual stats.

I’ll hedge my bets by saying that these aren’t wholly universal truths, but our current behavior is prevalent enough that I don’t feel badly making these blanket statements.

The morale of my soapbox rant is to reevaluate what it means to be great.  Judge not just the on skills on brings, but how they affect those around them.  And put the effort in to elevate the game of your existing team.  They may not all have the motivation and intellectual horsepower to go from a B to an A player, but you can’t expect them to get there on their own.  It takes two to tango.  An ‘A’ leader understands that.

Feel free to set me straight.

Hiring For Engagement

In the last post I stated a case for engaging employees.  In a nutshell, competitive advantages for knowledge businesses come from ingenuity which can only be fostered when an employee is engaged.

The first step is making sure we get the right people on the bus.  My starting point is to focus on fit.  Engagement comes from a number of sources, but how well someone fits into our company is step one and within our control.  If you aren’t in an environment that can leverage your strengths you’re going to be wasting your energy conforming instead of innovating.

Our current thinking is that we need to find the best and the brightest. Exclusively hiring ‘A’ players makes sense, right?  We should all be so judicious.  Why then do we keep getting it so wrong?

Let’s change how we identify ‘A’ players.

Unless everyone works in a silo, stop looking for the smartest, most accomplished applicants for a position.  Seriously.  It’s killing your business.

A simple, illustrative example:

Allen Iverson cements his ‘A’ player status based on his 10 all-star appearances.  Looking at his accomplishments (i.e. stat line.  A resume for you and me.) it’s a no-brainer.  But he hates practice, takes too many shots and looks to get his before involving his teammates.  Not surprisingly, his teams have never won a championship.  Not many coaches and ‘teams’ are set up for one man circuses that only come to town on gameday.

Would working with that type of co-worker bring out your best?

How we accomplish something in the workplace is as important as what we accomplish.  Your actions define you and influence others.  If we merely tolerate each other, what are the odds we can create excellent work that drives our businesses forward?

Being a selfish star or a lone-wolf genius may work for the short-term, but it’s not sustainable.  By virtue of how we’ve created our current work systems we win and lose as teams.  Most of us are symbiotically dependent upon others in order to do our job well.

Some suggestions on how we change our identification of ‘A’ players:

1. Recognize that you’ve developed a unique company culture, processes and ways of interacting whether you’ve consciously thought about it or not.  Be honest with yourself about what that is.  Highlight both the positive and the negative.  Then start looking for the smartest applicants who best fit your entire ecosystem: company culture, the hiring ‘manager,’ and the team.
2. Describe the traits needed for a job rather than the tasks that will be performed. Hire those before hiring for experience. 
   
3. Don’t mistake delivery for substance in the interview.  We’ve trained the shit out of people for how to answer our ‘trap’ questions in an interview.  You need to know what they really believe and how they really act rather than whether they can remember the best answers.
4. Look beyond the resume.  Dig deeper than ‘A’ accomplishments for ‘A’ methodology.
   

The two best ways to do this would be to 1) put applicants through a day of situational collaboration with their would-be team in lieu of the series of interviews and 2) shameless self-promotion alert - wait for RoundPegg’s solution to come on-line in the next month or so.

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