Welcome to Backing your Leadership. I'm Chris and I'm Lorenzo, and welcome to
this week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking your
Leadership and leave us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, I
want to talk about interview questions. Oh, I like this. Are you
gonna interview me? I'm an interview yes. Now. The reason I want
to bring this up is because I've seen a lot of kind of guides online
about, you know, interview questions to ask, and a lot of them
are good, but some of them are seriously lacking. I think with the
amount of interviewing that a lot of people are doing, people have gotten better
at answering questions in a way that satisfies whatever that interview question is, but
that doesn't necessarily allow the interviewer to truly assess the kind of person that they
are hiring. And I think what that leads to is a lot of organizations
having people who interview very well and they end up not being able to execute
in the moment on the on the things that you need them to execute.
And obviously, you know, no one will argue with you that there's that
there's a better way to figure this out than to actually see a person in
action. But how do you see a person in action when they haven't been
hired yet? Right, So it's this age old kind of problem of you
want to know how they're going to do the job before they do it,
but you can't hire them before you hire them. An example I can just
think of off the top of my head is in on my recent interview with
Stephen shad Letsky. He talks about in his book Speak Up Culture about how
his sister went to go interview to be a doctor at a hospital that prided
themselves on doctors with great bedside manner, and one of the questions that she
was asked in the interview was to teach the interviewers how to do something that
she was passionate about. And she shows dance because she had had years of
kind of dance practice, and they didn't care about knowing how to dance,
and they were terrible dancers. But what they wanted to see is how would
she respond when they inevitably didn't dance well, or follow instructions well, or
do what they were supposed to do. Did she react with positivity? And
encouragement and know, Okay, you're getting it and you're moving through this,
or did she roll her eyes and be like, no, I told you
to put your arm here, you know, like is how how did she
react in the moment? I thought it was a brilliant interview question, and
it's made me think about other interview questions that allow that kind of disarm the
process and allow leaders to really get a sense of who they're interviewing as opposed
to just going by the book of these are the questions you answer and ask,
and these are the points you score, and here's how you objectively move
through people. There has to be a better way. Yeah, No,
I think it's a great conversation. And I remember there were books written about
this, what fifteen maybe twenty years ago, some of the big like crazy
questions that they would ask in some of the really big like at the like
I think it was about like Microsoft or Google or something like that. Yeah,
Yeah, they had these crazy questions they would ask, and that was
the intention was to like how do you problem solve, how do you work
under pressure? How do you imagine? How how do you kind of like
step out of the kind of the box of the norm and come up with
creative solutions. And they were trying to assess for a lot of those types
of things, and I really like that. I think I think that there
is there is value in having a consistent kind of interview experience that allows you
to assess people against specific you know, skills or competence or maybe even some
value aspects to get their opinion on an interview process. But to what you're
sharing, I'm a huge fan of, like what are the different types of
questions or things that you can do. They give you a greater look into
who the person is, yeah, you know, and and what are their
passions and what do they do and like how do they think about whether it's
the work or or the perspective of the work. Like, there's a lot
of things that can be done and questions that can be asked that allow you
to really get a better sense of like who are you hiring, not just
the skills maybe that they bring to the job. Yeah, we can all
agree that attributes are more important than skills. You can teach the skills,
the attributes of what makes a person who they are are things that are are
a lot harder to teach them they're impossible, but people largely are who they
are from an attribute standpoint, is a person creative, does a person think
outside the box? Do they like people? Do they have empathy? You
know? These kind of attributes are things that people bring with them and that
allow them to learn the skills. So give me somebody who has all these
positive attributes who doesn't know anything, and you can teach them anything. But
give me somebody who has a ton of skills and doesn't have these attributes.
And they might work well for the moment, but as soon as the business
changes or new skills are required, they're gonna be a lot harder to bring
along for the ride because they kind of want to say things the way they
are. Another question I can think of that gets asked in a lot of
interviews is you know the old you know, tell me your biggest weakness,
right, And then I hear that, and I think the cliche answer is,
well, I'm I'm too honest, or I'm a perfectionist, or you
know whatever that is. And it's like you have to watch these interviewees do
mental gymnastics on how how do I say something that's a negative but really have
it be a positive? And reframe it in a way that doesn't make me
make them decide not to hire me. And you know what I like to
ask instead in a question besides or instead of what's your biggest weakness? Is?
You know, when things get stressful, tell me what kind of support
you need from me? So, if I'm your leader and you're having an
issue, what kind of support are you looking for? And what I'm looking
for is for a person to say to me how they're going to respond or
how they're going to react in a situation that is stressful, because that's when
a person's weaknesses come out, is when they're under stress and pressure versus when
things are you know, hunky dory. And so what I'm going to ask
you, Lorenzo, is what's a question that you have gone to in your
interview process that you think has reliably been a good predictor of how a person
will actually perform in the job they are being hired for. And so I
want to ask you that, but first I want to give up toward one
of our sponsors. All Right, Lorenzo, what's a go to question you
have that has not been You've found people can't haven't figured out how to fake
it yet they actually have to. It's actually a key determining factor in how
a person's actually going to do their job. There's a couple of them that
I like that give me kind of a good kind of look into who the
person is. Is the one that I would probably say sticks out the most
is I like to ask people, like, tell me about a time in
your life where you really exceeded your own expectations where maybe you set a goal
to do something and you didn't only achieve the goal, but you were just
blown away by how well you did and kind of how that shocked you.
Why do you like that question? Because I think it allows me to understand,
like, what what are people's intrinsic motivations? What bar do they set
for themselves? You know, what are the goals that they have not just
to work, but in life. How do they measure those types of things?
What is that We talk a lot about perseverance and grit, but I
think a lot of times you kind of hear those factors come out in a
question like that, because many times that will spark an answer where it's something
really big, you know, in life, and sometimes it's not, And
that's okay. Because even if maybe you haven't had you know, maybe life
or work experience where you've had these really big things that have happened, but
there's still something there. And if there's not, if it's a tough answer,
if they're not able to kind of speak to some thing where they've set
a goal for themselves and they've overachieved it, that's also a little bit of
a peek into maybe where they are in regards to how they would show up.
Right. So I'm thinking about this specifically in like the leadership context,
because if I'm looking for somebody who is going to be a leader, that
element of lifelong learning and setting the bar and evolving is really going to grow
from that kind of approach to life into thinking about, like, there,
I know that when I apply myself and I put my mind to something,
not only can I achieve it, but I can exceed it, And like
that's a very powerful element of kind of focus and confidence that's needed to be
able to then kind of feed into that as you're helping them with their growth
and development. So what's something that you could hear from an answer to that?
In an answer to that question that would set up a red flag that
would make you think, oh, this might be might be the right candidate
from a leadership standpoint, if it does not have an element of maybe leading
people or leading themselves, if it does not have a really clear, kind
of like self motivated goal. If I hear something that's like, well,
like at my last job, my boss asked me to achieve this, and
then I achieved it, and then some again like this is kind of what
I'm listening for. It's like, Okay, I want to dig a little
bit deeper then, because again, like does it have to be an assigned
goal or is this something that you're kind of pushing for yourself if the goal
or I'm sorry if the example is very kind of like me based and like
I over the team type of a thing, Like that's something that I would
kind of listen into where it's kind of like I achieve this type of goal,
you know, in spite of other people or other people that are on
my team. Like those are types of things that I would say, like,
let me dig a little bit deeper to understand this type of an example.
Yeah, I like that a lot. So it's not really about what
they accomplished, it's about the mindset going into it, and did they set
the goal on their own or is something that was assigned to them, Like
a person says, yeah, my goal was to make sure I attended all
of the anger management classes the judge assigned me to go to, and I
managed to get to all of them. Right, That's not necessarily the same
thing as someone who their goal was to you know, get you know,
three people promoted from underneath them over a period of a year and they managed
to get four absolutely, or they were able to say, hey, you
know, I wanted to further my education outside of work and you know and
that type of thing, and so I took some additional classes, or I
did this, or you know, I have a really big passion or hobby
and it's something that like I challenged myself to go do and spend time doing,
and then I was able to kind of like make that into you know,
something that was either an additional source of income or just get accolades for
something that they put out like these are things that I'm kind of looking for.
Again, it's it's more around the are you setting goals for yourself and
then are you able to see yourself through the work that has to be done
and then are you you then able to understand how do you apply that continual
mentality of getting work done into the work that you have. Sure, because
if you know how to do that and you like doing it, a person
who has experienced doing that and who likes doing it, that gets applied everywhere.
Right, Yeah, you can apply that to anything. And yeah,
for sure if a because eventually they're going to be asked to set to they're
going to be given goals and ask to achieve things that aren't necessarily self driven,
and they have to be able to have the kind of the storyboarding process
in place that gets them through it when it isn't necessarily self motivated, when
it's when it's because it's the goal of a team, or and it's because
it's the job they've been assigned to do. Yeah, so all of these
things, just the ability to get through it is necessary because sometimes it's going
to be self motivated and sometimes it's not. I like that a lot.
I think. I think if you're an interviewer and you're asking questions, the
goal is you almost have to work backwards. You have to start with what
is it that you're hoping to see out of this person? And then how
do I figure out if that person is going to be able to do that
in advance, but in a way that they can't just say what's appropriate in
the moment where you know that they've been through it, you know that they've
actually experienced. They're not speaking in hypotheticals. They're not talking about, you
know, what they would do if something happened. They're talking about what they
did do when this happened. And if you have people that can show that
in a way that says these are the attributes I'm looking for in a new
hire or in a promotion, I think that's a great way forward, because
again, skills can be taught. These are the types of things that you
know, it takes a lot more effort to teach these things if they're even
teachable at all. Absolutely, and with that it brings us at the end
of this episode, this is how your leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris,
and have a great day.