Job Interviews Gone Wrong
A guide to better understand errors and how to make a good impression
Hey Everyone 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
This post comes from a series related to managing the interview process, but now let’s go into details regarding the interview itself.
What differentiates this series compared to other literature?
Is very common to see tips and tricks for the candidate, but there is little coverage for the interviewer’s role. This series is very much focused on organizing and leading a recruitment process for a team. Sharing below the first post where we deep dive into the recruitment needs with a team-focused approach:
Followed by an overview of the recruitment process itself:
The goal now is to focus on the main part of the process: The interview. Or at least the main Teams or Zoom call where you get to know the candidates much better. Most of the content posted here comes from shared experiences by colleagues and friends, where I am trying to demystify and deconstruct what the interview meeting is all about. This post will be written as a set of advice for managing and leading the interview call on which you can adapt to your reality for a smoother interview call.
The first piece of advice: Make the candidate at ease by doing all the talking in the first minutes
Unless you are handling very experienced interview candidates, the majority of them are very nervous especially when they see a panel of two, five, or even seven unknown folks on a call. As a candidate, is very normal and OK to be nervous, and the one who is conducting an interview needs to understand the candidate might not relax at all during the interview. It’s the interviewer’s job to have a relaxed conversation because the goal is to know the best part of each candidate.
The interviewer can start by describing or presenting the company and position. This can be the most boring part of the conversation especially when you are well underway after interviewing some candidates. As someone who recruited more than a hundred IT professionals for my projects and teams, I got immensely bored when needed to repeat myself call, after call, until we hired the perfect colleague.
During these initial minutes, I would present how the conversation is structured, and I gave a heads up about my “scripted” presentation, but I would encourage the candidate to interrupt me if needed. My goal is to make the candidate comfortable to interrupt and ask questions about the position, and that way I could make a tailor-made description for the points the candidate values the most. These interruptions will be like a breeze of fresh air because they allow you to go over the script and do a personalized introduction based on the candidate’s questions.
These initial minutes serve two main objectives: 1) Making the candidate at ease and make time for them to relax and set into a conversation type of approach. 2) Provide details about the position and what is expected.
You are running a conversation, not a checklist
Is perfectly normal for the interviewer to have a structured way to conduct the meeting and a checklist to follow. These are guidelines and help to cover all your important points. However, you are organizing a conversation. Is in the interviewer’s best interest for information to flow to see the best part of the candidate and each person is very different. Some candidates will only reply when asked questions, others will take parts of your presentation and immediately share past experiences relevant to your project. What is a big “No No” is to cut the candidate while speaking about an insight, because someone has a checklist and decided to go through point by point in a specific order.
An interview meeting is a visitor card for your organization, therefor the recruiter also needs to impress. At first glance, someone might think the recruiter would have the ultimate decision power, but high-performing professionals need space to show their skills and they already have options on the table. If someone cuts them out, those candidates get easily bored and move on. Some of them might even say mid-interview they aren’t any longer interested in the position.
As a recruiter, depending on the profile you are looking for, you might have to interview people with more experience, more skills in a given area, than you and your team. And it’s OK. The interviewer needs to leave a good impression if wants to hire the next big-shot colleague.
The goal of the checklist is to make sure all the points are covered, but should not dictate how the flow of the conversation will be. The ideal conversation it’s upbeat, and everyone should enjoy the experience even the non-selected candidates. I hired several people who were on multiple interview processes at the same time, and I won just because they liked my team’s vibe the most. The way the conversation is conducted matters a lot.
The Illusion of Power
As a recruiter, you might feel that you have all the decision-making power and the last word on the process. This assumption is completely wrong.
A lot of candidates are just “hitting the tires”. If the candidates come from an outsourcing company, they might not even like your project’s profile nor feel that they have the desired skillsets. They are just there because someone asked them. Other candidates are in multiple processes at the same time and your team might not be in the pole position.
If you are chasing the best ones, your decision power is leveraged on how well the project is sold. High-quality candidates know exactly what they are searching for but they don’t trust the recruiter to share those expectations honestly. Your team or project could be a second handy alternative without you realizing it. The recruiter must show, with honesty, how advantageous it is to work on your project and assess their motivation. However, if you see the project is not a match, it’s OK to move on. Is preferable for both parties to move on if the expectations are not aligned rather than managing turn-overs and frustrations later on the road.
‘What’ has less value than ‘How’
While making questions the recruiter should make sure it’s asking the right ones. Avoid the “What” on skill-based questions. If you are hiring a Project Manager, asking “What are the main strategies to handle communication with difficult stakeholders?” has less quality than “How do you manage communication with difficult stakeholders?”
The difference seems subtle but the latter will be replied with practical examples of how the candidate handled difficult stakeholders. We want practical examples not google based answers. Every time you have the feeling the candidate is answering with theory instead of examples, remember that you not hiring ChatGPT, but a human who needs to know what it's doing and solve problems.
Scenarios based questions
These are my favorites. It is a great addition to the checklist to bring some scenarios in case the candidates don’t share examples of their own. But the trick here is to be precise. Avoid vague scenarios and be ready to be asked questions. Once I heard a story about a recruiter who asked “What is the bicycle market size in the US?”, for a Project Manager position for a European finance-based company. The question was to understand the problem-solving skills, however, is not aligned with the company’s products or the candidate’s skills or experience. More weirdly enough was the lack of replies from the recruiter, when asked for information that would be relevant for getting somewhere. Oddly this question was made for a Project Management position, where people should act upon facts and not assumptions or wild guesses.
The best scenario-based questions are the ones you have on the project. Take real-life challenges and ask how the candidate would do in the given scenario. If the candidate asks more questions, this needs to be welcomed. It’s OK to ask for more information, get to understand the context, and to make an informed decision or action. If done like this, you might be surprised by the solutions and different perspectives the candidates would share for the problems your project is facing.
Be challenging but make sure you are on the same level to pay it off.
I am surprised by how many recruitment processes there are with multiple phases, some of them taking more than one hour, with multiple challenges given to candidates, and the result is a vanilla project with a below or average market salary. If a company is searching for a Technical Architecture Lead, makes sense the process is more difficult than for a developer position. But if a project doesn’t have enough budget to get a 5-star architect, it shouldn’t make a bunch of candidates go through a difficult process to reject an offer in the last step. The candidate might not like the project enough to cover the risk of changing, or the project is not ready to cover the higher end of the position’s budget.
Give Space for Candidate’s Questions
If I need to leave only one piece of advice is: The interviewer should give room for the candidate to ask questions. So many processes leave only 5 minutes for candidates to share doubts and impressions at the very end. This is OK if you are filling a team with 10 developers and you aren’t searching for Cristiano Ronaldo or Messi. The majority of the staff only care about the pay and benefits offered first, and leadership and personal development ambitions second. But if you are searching for high-quality candidates, they might have prepared a set of questions beforehand. They have heard what you have said and took notes. These candidates might need 20 minutes only for their questions. The risk of not doing this is if they are on multiple processes at the same time, they will accept the one where they got most of their information needs. The project might even be a good fit, but they never got a chance to realize it.
Hope this set of advice helps you to get the best for your team. These processes take a lot of time and energy, but if done right, you will have the best people on your project and potentially save you a lot of headaches.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur