BEFORE THE INTERVIEW

As well as all the factors we’ve considered previously, there are some other important things you need to think about before the interview.

Time

Devote a lot of time to the interview process. As a manager this is one of the most important jobs you’ll ever have to do. Picking a new member for your team is a vitally important job, and if you don’t take the time you could regret it later.

Do you remember the telesales team that I talked about in Chapter 2? How I took over an underper-forming team from another manager? I was interviewing one day for new telesales agents and John the ex-manager was aware of what was going on. He let me know his thoughts: ‘You’ve had that person in there for forty-five minutes,’ he said. ‘I used to get them in for an interview and made a decision whether to hire them or not in fifteen minutes, sometimes less.’ He was incredulous when I informed him that, ‘Yes, I’ll interview for about forty-five minutes and I’ll have them in again for another forty-five minutes before I make a decision.’ Of course, as you’ll remember, John had nothing but problems with this team.

It doesn’t need to be forty-five minutes. It’s possible that you could identify if this person has the talent you want (or not) within thirty minutes. However, I think fifteen minutes is a bit too quick.

Be prepared not to choose someone

Take your time and don’t feel pressured to make a decision. If you don’t find the person you want then start the selection process again. Some managers seem to believe that they need to pick someone out of the people they interview and pick the ‘best of the bunch’ – this is a recipe for disaster.

This is also where you’ll need your courage as a manager because you may come under pressure from your boss to appoint someone. I’ve had a senior manager say to me, ‘There must be someone in that group that you want to hire. Are you sure you’ve looked closely enough?’ I even had one manager insist that I bring interviewees in again so that he could interview them. He rejected them all.

Plan ahead

Before the interview you will probably have a CV to study and the results of any screening process. You may even have the results of some kind of psychometric test. However, none of these have any relevance to the interview you’re going to have with the applicant.

Some managers pore over the CV during the interview and spend time checking the facts with the applicant. That’s not going to help you unearth the talents that this person needs to do the job. The Motivational Manager will use all the information he can to come to a decision about an applicant. However, to identify the talent to do the job is going to take some careful questioning during the interview. You may only need to prepare about four or five questions depending on what you want to find out.

THE INTERVIEW PROCESS

Relax the applicant

This is nigh-on impossible to do because almost anyone being interviewed for a job will feel nervous. However, don’t make it harder for them by creating some kind of pressure chamber or interrogation room.

Be warm and friendly and welcoming. However, don’t get into too much small talk or before long they’ll be telling you all about their last vacation in Florida.

I can remember interviewing a guy called Steve for a sales engineer’s job. As soon as he entered the room I could see he was a big guy, the kind of guy you’re careful to shake hands with in case he crushes your fingers. He dropped himself down on the chair, sat back, broke the back of the chair and did a somersault onto the floor. I was trying not to laugh as I picked him up off the floor, his interview suit and his hair all disarranged and his tie twisted round his neck. I managed to get him into another chair and we carried on with the interview.

He was a real gentle giant of a guy and at a later stage I offered him the job; he went on to be very successful. Some months later when we were out seeing customers together he asked me, ‘When I came for my interview and fell over the back of that chair, was that some kind of test to see how I’d act under pressure?’ The poor guy believed that I’d loosened the chair back to see how he’d react to an involuntary backward somersault.

Set the scene

Let the applicant know that you want to find out if they have the talent to do the job you need. Make it clear that you will be asking some structured questions and that you want them to say how they feel and what they think. Explain that it could be different from any interview they’ve had before and that you want to make a decision that is best for both of you.

Make it clear that you’ll allow time at the end of the interview for them to ask any questions they have. However, let them know that if they’re invited back for a second interview then that would be the best time for them to ask questions.

This interview is where you will decide if this person has the talent to do the job; it’s not where you talk about the duties involved, the benefits or the salary. You can get to all of that at a second interview. If they ask any questions about salary (if it hasn’t already been made clear) then there’s no reason not to tell them. In fact, I quite like people who want to know what they’re getting paid.

The questions

Based on the talent you’re looking for, you need to have prepared questions before the interview. Do not interview by the seat of your pants and ask questions as you think of them. You could then end up just having a ‘chat’ and you will never uncover the talent you’re looking for.

You’ve heard all the stuff about open and closed questions; what you want in an interview is open questions that allow the person to go in various directions. You want them to reveal how they would respond if faced with the situations you know they’ll encounter every day on the job.

Be careful that your questions don’t give the applicant a clue as to the information you want. I once had an interviewer ask me, ‘Are you the kind of person who likes to lie in their bed in the morning or do you like to get up and get going?’ Strange but true!

You probably would never ask a question like that. However, you have to be careful of questions that ‘telegraph’ the answers you want. ‘What do you enjoy most about being a maintenance engineer?’ is going to get you answers like: ‘I enjoy the challenge of solving customers’ problems.’ Yuck!

Or how about, ‘How important do you believe accuracy is in reports?’. I’m not even going to comment on that one!

‘Tell me about a time’ questions are good

If you were looking for a customer service person who you wanted to build good relationships with your key accounts, then you might ask a question such as, ‘Tell me about a time when you built a relationship with a customer.’

If the individual is good at building relationships then they’ll immediately respond with a case history. If they ask you, ‘What do you mean?’ simply repeat the question. If you start to prompt them or put the question in a different way, then you’re in danger of telegraphing the direction you want the applicant to take.

Listen for specifics

Some applicants will answer the above question with something like, ‘I have good relationships with all my customers, it’s difficult to give you a specific example.’ The reason they say that is because they don’t have a specific example. They may just be a ‘processor of customers’ and don’t really build good relationships.

The good guys will tell you stories such as, ‘I’ve dealt with Susan at the Acme Tool Company for the past two years. We didn’t get on too well when I first made contact because we’d let her down on deliveries a couple of times. So I decided to set up a system whereby I’d contact Susan once a week and discuss the order situation with her. We get on really well now and she’s even asked me to come and visit her company.’

When you start to hear stories like this you can listen for the factors you need for the job.

‘How do you feel’ questions are also good.

You might ask an applicant, ‘How do you feel when a customer is angry about the service from your company?’ You may get the response, ‘It’s no problem to me, I can handle it, water off a duck’s back, I sort their problem out.’

If you were looking for someone with the talent to empathise with your customers, then you’re not getting it here. The response you’re looking for should be something like, ‘I feel really uncomfortable for the customer when we don’t get it right, I realise that it must be very frustrating for them. I listen carefully to what they have to say and make it clear that I do care about their situation and tell them what I’ll do to resolve it.’

‘What gives you great personal satisfaction?’ is another good question

Every individual is different and what is personally satisfying for one may not be for another. I’m sure there are many jobs that you wouldn’t think of applying for no matter how much they paid. I find it hard to understand what anyone would find satisfying in being an accountant or a dentist; however, many people do. Some people find it really satisfying to turn round a difficult customer or negotiate a loan. Finding out what an applicant finds satisfying will give you clues to their talents.

Keep thinking . . .

The benefit of having structured questions prepared beforehand means that you don’t need to be thinking about what to ask next. You can devote all of your time to listening for the information you need.

It’s also important to keep your thinking brain engaged: don’t let your heart rule your head. If you were to hear, ‘I hate customers who don’t know what they want’, don’t think, ‘It’ll be okay, they probably don’t mean that.’ The thing is, they probably do and it may cause problems with their ability to build the customer relationships you need. The trick is to believe what the applicant says and don’t put your own interpretation on the answer.

Remember what we said in Chapter 2 about not making people what they’re not. Too often a manager will interview someone and realise that they may not quite have the talent they’re looking for. The manager then thinks, ‘It’ll be all right. Once they’ve started in the job I’ll train them or I’ll sort them out.’ You’ll only be able to bring out a talent that’s there in the first place, so you’re going to have to be sure that it’s there. Remember what I said about my piano lessons as a youngster; I just don’t have the talent. You could probably teach me to play a piano but if you want me to play in your band, it’ll be a total disaster.

As long as the applicant is talking and you’re carefully listening and thinking then you’re more likely to pick up the information you need.

. . . but listen to your ‘gut’

I made the point in Chapter 2 about how difficult a manager’s job is. Picking people for your team is one of the hardest things you’ll have to do. Again, it’s because people are so complex. However, if you can keep focused on the talents you’re looking for then you’ll minimise the risk of picking the wrong person. I’ve made the point about thinking and that’s what you need to do to structure your questions. However, I’ve also made the point about listening to your intuition. If it doesn’t feel right with a job applicant then don’t employ them, it isn’t worth the risk. If you think, ‘This guy’s a good maintenance engineer but his interpersonal skills leave a lot to be desired’, don’t employ him if he has to work closely with customers.

Keep your eyes open

Up until now we’ve been talking about asking questions and listening. However, it’s also important to do some watching. I’m sure that you’re aware of the importance of body language and the fact that it can often contradict what we hear.

Just imagine or even remember a situation where you met someone and they said, ‘It’s so good to see you, I’m so glad we met!’ The only thing is – they don’t look pleased to see you or glad you met. There’s something about their manner that contradicts what they’re saying. We tend to believe what we see rather than what we hear. That’s why it’s important to use your eyes as well as your ears when you’re interviewing someone.

Here’s a story about me not keeping my eyes open. Christine, the telesales manager, and I were interviewing Joyce for a telesales agent’s job. Towards the end of the interview I asked Joyce if she had any more questions or if there was anything she wanted to say. She came back with, ‘You’re probably wondering why I’ve got two different shoes on.’ She then went on to explain that she’d changed her shoes in the car and didn’t realise till she came into the interview that she had slipped on two different but similar black shoes. I hadn’t noticed a thing but Christine had spent the whole interview thinking, ‘Why has this lady got two different shoes on?’

We had a bit of a laugh with the lady before she left. However, in our post-interview discussion, Christine and I both felt that this lady would have difficulty dealing with the customer situations that were part of the job. We felt from what she’d said that she was a little bit ‘scatterbrained’ and the incident with the different shoes only added to that conclusion.

You little liar

You have to accept the fact that job applicants will tell lies when they’re being interviewed. Not necessarily big, bad black lies but maybe some little white ones. The little white ones are sometimes just a little bit of exaggeration. They might say something like, ‘I was the most successful sales person in our team.’ Now that may have been on a particular day last November and it isn’t something you need to get too concerned about. What you do need to be concerned about, however, are people who say things about themselves that are blatantly untrue.

If you use the questioning techniques described earlier and you listen well, you’ll pick up inconsistencies in what someone says. There are some people who are so good at telling lies that they could fool a lie detector machine while under the influence of a truth drug. However, the majority of people aren’t that good at continually telling untruths. As you listen to the applicant you’ll sometimes find yourself thinking, ‘That’s funny, they said a short while ago that they fully understood the xyz software, now they’re saying something different.’ So the message is still keep listening. However, keep watching for other signals.

She ‘nose’ you know

There are lots of good books on understanding body language and I suggest you have a look at one. However, it’s not a very exact science and it’s easy to misread the signals. For example, is this person scratching their nose because it’s itchy, because they’re telling a lie or because they’re just nervous being interviewed? The trick is to match the body language with the response to a particular question. Say you had asked, ‘Tell me about a time you negotiated a big order.’ If the person keeps touching their nose as they tell you the story, it may be an indication that they’re making it up.

Apparently, and this has come out of research, your nose swells slightly if you tell a lie (and my nose isn’t swelling as I write this). It’s all to do with an increased blood flow to the nose which can cause it to grow or become itchy. So there’s obviously some truth in the Pinocchio story.

Sometimes nose touching is also an attempt to cover the mouth and stop the lie coming out. Just think about children when they tell a porky pie. They tend to put their hand up to cover their mouth – it doesn’t quite go away when we become adults.

The eyes have it

They say the eyes are ‘the window to the soul’ and they can certainly tell you a lot about what an applicant is thinking. We all know about people who look away appearing furtive or excessive blinking as a sign of nervousness. However, we can learn other things from the eyes.

Let’s say you ask someone one of your ‘Tell me about a time’ questions. If their eyes flick up to their left as they tell the story, this means that they are accessing their visual memory. In other words, they’re thinking about a real situation. If their eyes flick up to the right as they speak, then they’re creating something in their mind. In other words, they’re telling lies.

If you’ve never heard this stuff before then I know you’ll be a bit sceptical. However, it’s just one of the techniques being used by police and other interrogators. I suggest you observe some of the people you deal with in your personal and business life. Ask them about their trip to Hawaii and watch their eyes. I bet you see lots of flicks to the left. If their eyes are flicking to the right then maybe they didn’t really go to Hawaii and spent their vacation in front of the TV. Try it – I’ve been doing it for years and it works.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: picking people for your team is one of the most important jobs you’ll ever do. Use every bit of information you can get your hands on, read the CV and study any psychometric test that’s been done. However, be as good an interviewer as you can be – good questions – good listening – good watching.