Once, during an interview, my glasses fell in half as I was answering a question.
In this moment of sudden catastrophe, my urbane veneer, my projection of ‘interviewee in control’, my self assured canter to a successful finishing line, were destroyed by the humiliation of having a lens dangling from each ear, swinging southwards like a pair of earrings one might wear on the red carpet at the Grammys.
What happens next, at moments like this, isn’t just up to the victim of misfortune, actually what happens next is much more in the hands of the people running the interview. There’s plenty of advice out there about how to be a successful interview candidate – you can find my thoughts on how to succeed at interviews. But there is far less available advice about what should and shouldn’t happen from the control side of this process. How do you interview someone well and how do you embed the understanding of how to interview well across your organisation?
It’s all very well for the HR team to have a clear view about the processes that surround interviewing, onboarding, induction, appraisal, development and eventual offboarding of talent – but in many organisations, it isn’t HR who are sitting opposite the nervously sweating candidates at the sharp end of the process. I’m sure it will resonate with some HR professionals when I say that often managers actively try to keep HR out of the interviewing process.
Why? Well it turns out that interviewing is one of those things that everyone thinks they can do but very few people in organisations are ever taught how to do.
So upon what knowledge do we base our individual techniques? You’re ahead of me – we do as we were done to when we were being interviewed or we copy what we’ve seen our seniors do when first we joined interviewing panels.
This is a bit like developing our social skills in the crowd at a football match or learning how to listen in the House of Commons.
I will come back to my dangling eye wear later but let’s leave me there to squirm for a bit longer…the first time I was ever witness to a similarly catastrophic event was when I was a young Vice Principal. My boss at the time wasn’t generally in favour of anyone apart from himself speaking in any given situation so interviewing was something that he didn’t really enjoy. He satisfied the need for unaccustomed silence by going through a range of motions with his eyebrows which were designed to evoke fear and uncertainty in the hearts of the trepidatious interviewees. His classic knockout was the single-raise arched left eyebrow. Faced with this, some candidates simply trailed away into miserable silence.
The interview that I’m sharing now was with a young PE teacher. As we all know, PE teachers never look particularly comfortable in suits – it’s not their professional wear and they always carry that air of being compelled to interview in an ill-fitting suit of armour. This particular young man had already lost the day by coming into the room with the top button of his shirt undone – my boss’s stare of welcome was stone, the eyebrow arched towards the ceiling.
Seeing that he had already committed some unknown faux pas, the candidate threw himself heavily into his chair and crossed his legs in defence.
Unfortunately, his crossing foot passed too close to the low coffee table in front of him, on which sat his glass of water.
The next moments will forever be an etched memory in slow motion. Demonstrating excellent skills on the volley, the candidate’s right foot swept the glass clean off the table. It travelled several feet across the room before crashing against the wall and shattering into a cloud of glass and water.
An eternal second of silence followed…a ghastly look on the young man’s face…what would the person in charge do next?
Perhaps the most difficult challenge I’ve ever faced as an interviewer is working with Board members. If my old boss could be unpleasant, at least he was predictable. I recall interviewing for a period with a Board member I’ll call Keith. Keith was a pleasant enough man, in most situations refreshingly normal. Put him into an interview situation, however, and the devil entered his soul. Keith liked to keep candidates on their toes by being unpredictable. I could write a book about some of the things I saw him do but my most treasured memory comes from a set of interviews for a Geography teacher. For this interview, Keith wore his usual tweed jacket with generously patched elbows and in the pocket of this jacket he hid a medium sized rock.
When it was Keith’s turn to question the candidate, rather than go for something obvious like, ‘hello, how are you?’ Keith subtly dipped into his pocket, withdrew the rock and tossed this surprising prop across the room towards the first candidate with a, ‘what do you make of this?’
The first time he did it, the rock hit the startled candidate squarely in the chest and dropped into her lap. Between interviews, the Principal (not me) remonstrated with him – so the next time he threw it more softly and it fell underneath the candidate’s chair resulting in a general scramble on the floor. The third time he crossed the room with it and presented it much like an Oscar…
There are many inherited or copied behaviours which actively play against the chances of a successful interview. Here is my top 5 how NOT to interview:
- In advance, share the bare minimum of information about the organisation, the role and the interview process
- On arrival, make the candidate uncomfortable in a range of ways – which may start with a frosty reception, lead on to cramped or noisy waiting spaces and be escalated by a lack of access to refreshment, sanitary facilities or information.
- Do not allow candidates to meet other members of the organisation in casual or uncontrolled circumstances.
- In the interview:
- greet the candidate with heavy formality, give no indication about what is about to unfold and launch into a set of questions designed primarily to trip them up
- retain an austere, blank or thoroughly bored expression while the candidate is speaking – be careful not to offer any encouragement or to enthuse about any responses
- stick rigidly to the prepared questions regardless of how the dynamic of the interview unfolds
- under no circumstances smile
- At the conclusion, dismiss the candidate without any information about what happens next, avoid eye contact as they exit the room.
Far fetched? If you think so then you’ve been a lot luckier in interviews than I was when I was younger.
The Problem
The problem is not only that interview norms are often either copied or assumed, it’s also a common situation that interviewers are less experienced than interviewees. I once worked with a head of department who had been in the same school for 30 years. There was a very low turnover in her team. As a result, she had interviewed just three times in 30 years – and yet she was assumed to be the wisest middle leader in the school (which she was in so many ways – she just didn’t know how to interview). No one would have dreamed of checking with her before an interview process to see if she knew what to do. In fact she didn’t and when I came to interview with her, her model of interviewing was to aggressively drive the candidates into corners that they couldn’t get out of – ‘to see how they coped’. That’s what she thought good interviewing was: only the strong survive. She was a lovely person who never said a cross word to anyone…until the dark Mrs Hyde took hold in the interview room.
The Solution – how to interview well
Can there be an organisation these days that doesn’t have a Value Statement in some shape or form? A very basic first step on the road to successful interviewing is to ask yourself the question, ‘Do we interview in line with our organisational values?’ That’s not the same question as, ‘Do we onboard in line with our organisational values?’ In many organisations the answers would be, ‘no’ and ‘yes’ in that order. That’s because the HR professionals often onboard and know how to do it well but I’d argue that not even HR professionals always know how to interview appropriately.
Here is my checklist on how to interview well:
- Remember that interviewing isn’t playing poker – you don’t have to outwit the candidates, you have to find the best one.
- To do this you need to catch people at their relaxed best, not when you’ve stressed them and engaged their reptilian brains to a point where they can’t think at all.
- An interview isn’t an exam – your prepared questions are a guide, sure general equity between candidates needs to be observed, but you also need to allow the candidate to tell you their best and most relevant stories – don’t shut them down because it isn’t on the script.
- Do as you would be done by – give information in advance: about the organisation, about the process, about who will be interviewing; make your interview process a safe and warm place, not a stress test chamber (people do the stress in their own heads without needing any help from you).
- Use active listening techniques – encourage, help and support the candidate. See the human being in front of you and be the person they need – this doesn’t mean you have to offer them the job but it’s almost certainly what your organisational values say that you do.
- If there are a series of panels – ensure that each panel has explicitly understood the principles of values-aligned interviewing, some of these panel members may have very little experience with interviews (and so will use their own maps).
- Make the interview day the best professional development that candidates have had all year – help them see your organisation, understand you, assess for themselves the contribution they could make, tell their stories, laugh with your community members. There’s no risk involved for you in doing this.
- Remember that interviewing is also marketing – if you have one vacancy and six candidates, five of them will go away disappointed. What will they say about your organisation when they return to their organisations, to their friends, to their colleagues? Scale that impact to the number of disappointed candidates in an annual round of recruitment.
A practice I’ve developed over the last few years is to give candidates the questions they will be asked in advance. Counterintuitive? Not at all. I’ve found that this approach is hugely appreciated by candidates and results in much more thoughtful and varied interviews – responses are much less generic (exam prep) and much more individual. It isn’t cheating – only one of them will get the job anyway, but if you’ve given out the questions and the answers are still not what you want to hear, then you know for sure that this person isn’t the right fit for you. This is actually a great test of their judgement.
During senior appointment processes which stretch over more than one day, I routinely speak one-to-one to each candidate before their final interview and tell them how to get the job the next day. The effect this has is remarkable. It’s authentic, helpful, real time feedback which is much more valuable than post disappointment justification of failure. On several occasions it has led people to try for positions a second time. To my point about marketing – what stories will those unsuccessful candidates talk about when they get home? Telling them what to do doesn’t mean they will be able to do it – that’s what you need to find out.
And what of the three interviewees in crisis that we left hanging?
The PE teacher melted and left the room humiliated and despondent.
The rock was left on the table after candidate 3 and actually went on to provoke some interesting discussions.
And my dangling glasses? The whole room burst out laughing and we shared a moment of playfulness. I got the job and years later told the story in a blog.
