This is a reprint from a recent article on LinkedIn. This is exactly the same conversation I have with whoever I’m working with, about interviewing and what a hiring manager is looking for. I couldn’t have said it better myself. ~jan
- Published on Published on January 4, 2018 by: Ed Zschau
Over the years, I’ve come to prefer starting a conversation with a statement rather than a question: “Tell me about yourself.” Or sometimes, I’ll start with “Take me through your background.”
Really, that’s it? That’s a softball. Way too simple. Yeah, I know. It’s casual and unstructured.
But I find I learn more about a person in the first few minutes by letting her walk me through her career than any other question I ask.
As we talk, I purposely put her resume or LinkedIn profile aside and listen very intently to how she describes her experience … as if she’s recounting an abridged version of her professional resume to me.
How she responds to that simple statement tells me with a fair degree of certainty whether or not she is a strong candidate for the role. By listening to what she says and how she says it, I’m able to form a fairly certain view of her viability. I spend the rest of the interview trying to corroborate my initial opinion one way or the other.
Regardless of how many years experience she has, a potentially qualified candidate should be able to talk eloquently for five to ten minutes and provide a fairly complete snapshot of her career.
I pay attention to aspects of her Communication style in her opening narrative:
- Did she provide enough detail to give me a reasonable sense of each professional stint? If she is too high-level or provides way too much detail, she comes across as a weaker communicator. If she provides a lot of content and holds my attention, then I conclude she is a Substantive Communicator.
- Did she present her background in a logical progression or did she jump around? The order with which she presents her background speaks to how she processes and communicates information. If she can walk me through her background in a way that I can understand it, then I’ve learned she is an Organized Communicator.
- Did she present her background in a rehearsed or natural narrative? It’s easy to detect the chronologically rehearsed narrative. If she comes across sounding like she’s reading from a script, chances are she is less dexterous in her ability to think quickly. If she comes across off-the-cuff, uses a wide range of descriptive words and isn’t repetitive, those are queues that she is a good Extemporaneous Communicator.
- Did she provide the right information? I expect a good candidate to explain her role, contributions to the business, unique situations and transitions. I pay particular attention to career transitions and to information she leaves out. If I need to go back and ask a lot of details that I wanted to know, that raises a yellow flag. If she provides the right information that I expect her to know to share, then she is a Self-aware Communicator.
Of any attribute I evaluate in an interview, Communication is the most important. The quality of a person’s professional narrative — role, impact, progression, transition — tells me a great deal about her likelihood to succeed in the next role.
Her opening background narrative also provides the jumping off point for the rest of the interview. I take detailed notes as she talks and I’m noting points in her background where I want to dig in, hear more specifics or learn more details about a particular experience.
After capturing the additional detail, the second half of the interview focuses on specific requirements, experience and skills I want to understand she has for a particular role. I ask situational questions to get at some of these specifics and use the information she provides in her narrative to dig into these topics.
A strong candidate will provide a lot of additional context and specifics whereas a weaker candidate will offer more limited responses or cursory information.
The vast majority of roles for which I recruit are senior executives in venture-backed startups. In addition to Communication, I evaluate a few other characteristics:
- Leadership — Does she have natural people leader skills? Does she hire strong people and is she able to motivate them to generate great outcomes? I like to ask about her leadership style and how she manages people.
- Adaptable — Does she adjust to new situations easily? Can she tailor her style to different people? How comfortable is she with uncertainty? I’ll often ask someone to recount how she adapted to a challenging situation or challenging person.
- Sense of urgency — Does she operate with a bias towards action? Does she drive towards outcomes and results? I don’t always ask a question but try to assess this characteristic based upon how she engaged with me to set up the interview, communicated results in her career and kept in touch with me and the client through the interview process.
- Collaborative — Does she work well with other people? Will people work with her again? I pick up a lot of this attribute based on how she describes her experience. Using words like “we”, “team” and “us”, showing humility in describing good results, mentioning others, and being able to build personal rapport with me in the conversation are great indicators of a team player.
- Scrappy — Though she is a senior team member, is she willing to walk into a situation that requires a lot of hands-on building? Is she able to get a lot done with few resources? I’ll ask questions to get a sense of her willingness to do the work versus delegating all of the detail.
By no means is this interview approach and set of attributes a definitive blueprint for evaluating talent. You can read one hundred articles on interviewing and hiring and you’ll get one hundred different recommended strategies. Hopefully, though, you’ve got some additional ideas as you explore what interview techniques, criteria, and questions work best for you.
