In addition to each interviewer using the same core set of questions, there is a most effective way to structure each interview they conduct. From the interviewer’s perspective, there are eight phases, each explained in detail below. The phases will seem familiar to you and to prepared candidates. That’s good—it eliminates the distress of interviewing anxiety. It helps unprepared candidates too—but it helps prepared candidates far more. That’s good because we want to “spread the field” as we make our hiring choice. We want it to be as easy for us as it can be to separate the excellent from the merely good.
The first thing to do in every interview is to introduce yourself to the candidate. Use both your first and last name. “Hi, I’m Mark Horstman” or “Hello, I’m Mark Horstman. Nice to meet you. Come on in and have a seat.”
To really do this well, there’s a best way to state your name. Don’t say both of your names the way you always do. To you, it’s normal, and you’re good at it. You say your name fast. But to a nervous candidate, it’s pretty darned fast, and often hard to tell where your first name ends and your last name begins. So do it right: Say your first name more loudly than your last, and pause between them.
So it’s not: “Hi, Mark Horstman.”
Rather: “Hi. I’m Mark . . . Horstman.” Feel that full stop after your first name.
If you doubt this guidance, try it the next couple of times you introduce yourself to someone new in a social situation. Accentuate your first name. Then pause. Then say your last name.
On the other hand, the idea that forgetting your name is the kiss of death for a candidate is silly. Maybe he did, and he’s forgotten, thanks to nerves. It’s normal. Half of the human population isn’t good with names. No job has as its primary criteria being good with names. This means don’t take off your desk things with your name on them and then ask the candidate halfway through the interview, “What’s my name?” This is embarrassing and unprofessional. If they forget, forgive them and tell them your name again, for heaven’s sake.
The interview you’re going to be conducting is so well prepared and comprehensive that if they’re good at everything else, you’ll be happy to forgive them their moment of forgetfulness. And if they don’t do well, you won’t need the gotcha of “they couldn’t remember my name” to rule them out.
Surely you will have studied their résumés before the interviews, and you will know their names. But it’s reasonable for them to respond to your introduction with their own names. [Haven’t you introduced yourself to someone and then been a little surprised, even disappointed, when she doesn’t respond in kind?]
After the candidate has responded, it’s often helpful for each interviewer to say where he or she fits in the org structure: “I report to Mike Auzenne. I handle content and client relationships. I’ll be one of your peers here.”
You probably don’t need to do this if you’re the hiring manager and are the candidate’s last interview. You can if you like, but he probably already knows. Remember, he started the interview day with you going over the schedule.
Last, in this introduction phase, thank people for coming in.
All together, it sounds like this:
Candidates report that they respect and appreciate this standard way of starting every interview. As you surely have experienced, an interviewing day is a whirl of emotions. By the end of the day, every face has probably blurred together. The structured beginning resets the candidate and reduces the stress that’s over and above what’s helpful.
Before you get into the meat of the interview, engage in some brief polite chit-chat with each candidate. Jumping right into what is your best first big question (“Tell me about yourself”) is still a little jarring.
Ask some open-ended questions about the weather, their logistics, daily news, sports, or even the interviewing day so far. Note that we don’t recommend asking yes or no questions. We’re trying to establish a conversational tone. Starting with, “Good trip in? Good day so far? Did you see that the Dodgers won yesterday?” all engender short answers, and what will feel more like a questionnaire than a conversation. And if you start with yes/no questions after not introducing yourself, that begins to feel like an interrogation.
For instance:
All of the above takes two necessary minutes to help candidates take a deep breath after their likely fears about making a good first impression. And, although this may help the unprepared nervous candidate, it helps your best candidates even more. They’ll be relaxed and ready and be able to be conversational immediately. Even though the formal part of the interview may not have started, you’re still evaluating.
Now you’re going to give each candidate a brief overview of how the rest of the interview is going to progress. You’ll tell them you’re going to ask them a series of prepared, largely behavioral questions. You’ll be taking notes and interjecting/probing for more information regularly. You’ll also leave them some time to ask you questions, in most cases.
Here’s a standard overview statement that is part of the Manager Tools Interview Creation Tool (ICT) output, which you can also find as part of the sample interview in the Appendix:
Thank you for interviewing with me today. Here at Manager Tools we use a behavioral interviewing style. I’ll be asking you a series of questions about experiences you’ve had, and how you handled them. I’ve got a series of about 10 questions. Don’t be surprised if others here ask you the same questions in other interviews—that’s normal. We want to be sure that each person we hire has the same qualities that have made us successful thus far.
There will be times when I interject to ask you for more information. Don’t worry—that’s normal. I will be taking notes. Please don’t let it distract you. First I’ll ask you my questions, and then I’ll answer any questions you have of me. Then we’ll finish up. I’m excited you’re here, so let’s get started.
We recommend the first significant question you ask in every interview be “Tell me about yourself” (TMAY). It does several important things for a first major question.
Remember that this guidance is for everyone interviewing the candidate, not just you. If you did your own screening, you have already asked this question during your phone screen, and you may choose to skip it. Or you could still ask it as a natural ramp up to the bigger behavioral questions.
What could be an easier first big question than asking candidates to do what the entire interview is about—talking about themselves? That’s at the heart of every interview (despite the Internet saying candidate prep should be about the company). Great candidates will have good, prepared, structured answers. Poor candidates will have thin answers and struggle with your probing about decisions and outcomes.
Typically, answers to TMAY will be higher level than a rote recitation of what’s on the résumé. This means you’ll be hearing more about career and professional decisions. You’ll want to probe the “why” of those decisions. Candidates who will be good at making decisions on your team will be able to describe the options they considered, the pros and cons of each, and the process they went through to arrive at their decisions. Candidates who can’t remember, or give simple “why” answers like “It seemed right at the time,” “It was my only option,” “I didn’t really have a choice,” “It’s what everyone else was doing,” and so forth, are sending a message that they don’t have good decision-making skills. Even if a decision turned out not to have mattered, a candidate who can’t articulate a decision-making process or paradigm won’t be able to make repeated smart decisions working for you.
One of the problems with TMAY is the bad Internet guidance that so many candidates follow. The common guidance is that the best answer is “only one minute long, because the interviewer is only asking this in order to allow him to probe your answer. They know what they’re looking for, so don’t overdo it.”
This guidance has crept into the mainstream because these would-be advisers don’t know what a good TMAY answer is supposed to be. They know good interviewers are going to probe, so they don’t have to have more specific guidance.
This is poor guidance. It leads candidates to appear unprepared and makes our work much harder in an interview. In many cases it means you cannot probe because the candidate doesn’t say anything meaningful. Yes, you can work hard and unearth the decisions and outcomes that mattered, but it will usually take a long time. That means that you won’t have time to get through enough of your more detailed behavioral questions that are actually about the core parts of the job so you won’t learn enough to decide whether someone can do the job. Unfortunately, since our purpose is to find reasons to say no (and we don’t have unlimited time), that means the poorly prepared (or advised) candidate is ruled out of our consideration.
[For the record, briefly, a good TMAY answer lasts three to five minutes. It gives a good overview with enough information to make probing around career/life decisions easy, but not so much that the answer is 15 minutes long, too detailed, and inefficient. You can learn more about our guidance on answering TMAY in our Interviewing Series of 50+ podcasts.]
It’s worth noting here that time is a critical factor working against all candidates. Candidates who aren’t prepared, who haven’t studied their own backgrounds, and haven’t practiced delivering answers to reasonably expected behavioral questions take longer to interview. If their early answers are poorly structured and we have to work harder to unearth what we’re looking for, we will have less time to have all of our questions answered. Since we will probably run out of time without learning enough to say yes, we end up having to say no.
You might think, “Well, okay, that’s an artifact of interviewing. With enough time, we might find them a great fit.” You’re right. They might be great.
But it doesn’t matter: You don’t have the time. It seems silly to us that so many managers aren’t prepared with the right questions and don’t have the time to study candidate résumés and take notes of interest, but then expect to have much more time to conduct much longer interviews.
Further, when we start taking more time to find what we’re looking for, our confirmation bias starts to kick in, and we start to find it. Now we’re trying to find reasons to say yes. Reasons to say yes are always there, especially if a candidate has gone through previous screening steps. This is violating the first principle of effective interviewing: finding a reason to say no. Never get so caught up in avoiding a false negative (saying no to someone who would have been a good hire) that you bring into play a false positive: Hell on Earth.
You might also say, “This is a communication problem.” Again, you may be right. But usually it’s much more one of lack of preparation, which surely is a good reason to have doubts about how much someone wants to come to work for you.
The problem with this mindset is that communication is the single most frequent behavior of all professionals. The inevitable result of thinking through communication skills and time limitations in an interview is that someone who communicates poorly in an interview is going to be a poor communicator on your team. Candidates know the limitations of interviews, certainly in terms of time. They know they won’t be able to tell you everything. They know they’ll have to highlight their best qualities relative to your job.
How many highly effective professionals do you know who would say, “Well, she is our best, but a terrible communicator?” That only happens with the rare genius whose role is usually specialized for him or her. That’s rare enough to be beyond the scope of this guidance.
We have found that many managers think that the question, “Walk me through your résumé” is equivalent to TMAY. It isn’t. “Walk me through . . .” rarely gives us any new information, which a prepared interviewer already knows. It also causes virtually every candidate to describe chronologically all or almost all of the jobs he’s had, which, again, we already know. If someone has had seven or eight jobs, we’re stuck listening to five minutes of things we already know. If you’re interviewing a less experienced candidate, she doesn’t have enough background to fill up the time she thinks is required for this answer. She then mistakenly start delving into specific accomplishments. This may or may not be relevant because she may be highlighting behaviors we’re not interested in. That might be interesting, but it’s inefficient because we may not have enough time left to find out whether she’s done the things we want her to have done (and done well enough) to consider her.
After you’ve probed through TMAY, move right to your prepared behavioral questions. Ask them in descending order of importance relative to the most important skills and abilities required in the job. We’ve talked about how to create them earlier.
You may have some custom questions (these can still be behavioral, following the three-part structure) you wish to ask. These may relate to your culture, your team structure or processes, or specific knowledge areas you wish to probe. We don’t mean technical abilities here, generally. Technical evaluations—the most common today are in software development—are covered in separate interviews covered earlier.
Once you’ve finished asking the questions above, it’s appropriate to allow candidates to ask their own questions. Typically, candidates only have two or three questions.
If there’s one portion of this interview structure that you can jettison in the interest of time, it’s candidate questions. We don’t recommend it, but it happens. Frankly, too often, candidate questions are unremarkable. If you have two or three minutes left at the end of the interview, asking for a question or two is fine. If you have five minutes, though, it may be smarter to ask another of your prepared behavioral questions or your custom questions.
Taking candidate questions brings into play the possibility that you have already made up your mind to recommend not hiring the person. If you’ve already made up your mind, and you’re fairly close to the end of the interview, ask for candidate questions rather than asking more of your own questions.
Asking more questions (versus taking questions) holds a subtle danger worth considering. Once most interviewers have decided to say no, we get sloppy. Don’t kid yourself: Candidates notice. It’s off-putting to continue to field questions as a candidate when it seems fairly clear from the interviewer’s demeanor (it’s harder to hide and easier to see than you think) that he is no longer interested.
The way to avoid the sloppiness is either continue to ask your prepared questions while still diligently taking notes or, if you are near the end of the interview, take some questions from the candidate. But don’t make the mistake of “resurrecting” the candidate who suddenly asks brilliant questions. Questions they ask are a lot less valuable than your comparison of their behavioral skills to the job requirements, which was what led you to that no recommendation.
If you decide to say no and then depart from your prepared questions, for far too many interviewers we’ve observed, that means you’ll stop taking notes. Those are red flags for candidates.
Also keep in mind that we’re only one person providing input during the Interview Results Capture Meeting. While we generally recommend an offer be made only to that candidate who receives unanimous yeses, that doesn’t mean every situation is so clear-cut. It’s better to keep your evaluation hat on, even if you’ve decided to say no. As we’ll learn later, you’re going to have to support your recommendation of not hiring with specific observed behaviors during the interview. The more behaviors you can cite, the more weight your recommendation will carry.
There are impressive questions and not so impressive ones. But before we give guidance about how to evaluate them, it’s valuable to consider the general idea of candidate questions.
Be warned: The vast majority of candidates think that interviewing is a “two-way street.” Candidates have been told that their interviews are a time to learn about you and your team and your firm. This is true after a fashion, but it leads to more really stupid candidate Internet guidance. “Two-way street” and “learning about the company/job/team” become “the candidate is conducting his own interview,” “the candidate is an equal partner in the interview,” and “the candidate is deciding yes or no during the interview, too.”
From the seeds of truth great lies are born. This guidance is often peddled by the same charlatans who encourage candidates to “answer questions with a question.” But hey, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
Of course candidates are evaluating us as we are evaluating them. That’s healthy. But the idea that this implies some sort of equitableness as we are interviewing is ludicrous. Candidates are not equal partners when we are interviewing them. If that were the case, they’d get to ask us as many questions as we ask them. Five minutes of a 75-minute interview is 6% of the interview.
No, we are in charge of the interview. We hold all the cards at this point. The candidate’s evaluation of us is virtually meaningless if we don’t make her an offer.
You’ll note that we said “virtually” meaningless. It’s completely meaningless for the candidate’s relationship to this opportunity, which is why we’re interviewing. But the candidate’s sense of how she was treated certainly matters when she goes back to her current workplace or schoolmates and friends and has to admit she isn’t getting an offer. If we haven’t behaved professionally, or politely, or respectfully, she’ll justify the lack of an offer with the interviewing version of Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Grapes, from whence comes “sour grapes”: “I didn’t want to work there anyway.”
This is why we do so much to communicate in advance, explain what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, do what we said we were going to do, and make the candidate’s logistics and interviews as pleasant as possible. It is really no harder to have high standards while being nice about doing it. Greatness in the workplace doesn’t come from being so tough on decisions that you can be tough on people. Greatness is high standards gracefully achieved. As the saying goes about great managers: She can step on your shoes and still leave a shine. Be nice while you’re holding people to high standards.
The kernel of truth about the duality of evaluation in the process is still true. The problem occurs when we or candidates think that those two evaluations occur at the same time. They do not.
When we’re trying to make a decision, we hold the upper hand. Ninety-five percent of the work is about our decision. The candidate’s decision only comes into play after we make an offer.
And then it’s almost 100% his or her decision. In fact, among most serious interviewers, the concept of an offer is best summed up by the phrase, when control passes from the company to the candidate.
When the candidate does get an offer, his evaluation really starts in earnest. When we were evaluating, we were asking the questions. Once the candidate is in control and evaluating, that’s the time for his questions. We’ll talk more about that when we talk about closing the candidate whom we’ve offered.
All this means that the questions candidates ask during the interview are less important to our decision and to theirs.
Good questions show preparation, invite conversation, are related to the candidate’s role, and ideally reference something discussed in the interview. Bad questions are questions about what the candidate will get or have in the role, or are not conversational.
Off-the-cuff simple questions aren’t prepared. Isn’t it funny that interviewing is a “two-way street” and yet while you spent hours preparing questions, the candidate can get away with off-the-cuff questions? It’s not funny, of course: It’s embarrassing to the candidate.
A question that shows preparation alludes to the preparation in the lead-in to the question. For instance: “I noticed that demand is still strong for your legacy product. How will my role relate to the legacy product versus some of the emerging technologies?” “I’ve read that you’re excited about new uses for your service due to legislation changes. How will the team’s work be related to that, and how might that affect my work?”
You’ve just finished asking conversational questions, interjecting, probing. For the candidate to then start asking yes/no questions, or questions whose answers are numbers is a miscue on her part. First (and you’ll feel this when it happens to you) the conversational nature of the interview will suddenly die. It will significantly decrease the energy in the interview.
Further, yes/no/numeric questions (if they’re truly going into the candidate’s thinking about her interest) imply by their nature that there are right and wrong answers. This despite the fact that, in many cases, the candidate can’t know whether supervising five or 10 people at your company is either a tip of the cap or a slap in the face. The behavioral interview questions you’ve just finished asking don’t imply rightness or wrongness. They send a message that you’re gathering a lot of subtle and complex interrelated information to inform an important decision.
[This guidance doesn’t hold for positions—usually at the very top of organizations—where corporate strategies and factors are part of the job for which the candidate is interviewing?]
Candidates in 2019 (and for the last 10 years) have been told that their preparation should be on the company with which they’re interviewing.
Much of that is in response to companies telling recruiting firms that they were tired of interviewing candidates who knew almost nothing about the job, and definitely nothing about the company. This was because they themselves knew that, thanks to web growth, there was information about their companies available easily to anyone. Before the web, getting information about companies took time and money that probably would have been better spent on preparation about oneself.
This turned into, regrettably, excessive preparation about high level corporate entities, strategies, competition, and business/financial news that had no relevance at all to the job for which the candidate was being considered. That’s what was easily available. Further, except for more senior positions (which take up a large percentage of the money spent on recruiting and interviewing and the majority of hiring news coverage), in our experience the vast majority of interviewees do not have nearly enough knowledge to be discerning about the answers they receive, because they don’t understand them. And it’s entirely possible they’ve asked someone who doesn’t know enough to give a good answer. [This isn’t a slight to someone below an executive-level role: Most directors (managers of managers) aren’t privy to the product and profitability mix of the company by geography (as an example).]
Further, questions about company/strategy/industry are primarily to help the candidate decide how interested he or she is in your company. This is a waste of time if the person does not receive an offer. That makes it a poor tactical decision for the candidate. Every minute the candidate spends in an interview gathering information to make their own decision is a minute wasted on convincing the hiring manager about our decision.
Candidates who ask about how much they could be paid, what benefits are like, and how much time off they’re going to have are making a similar mistake. Why does it matter yet what their pay is going to be when (a) we haven’t decided to hire them and (b) we would be wasting our time figuring that out before the hiring decision is made.
All this said, you may wonder: Would we recommend not hiring a candidate based on poor or selfish questions? Absolutely.
There’s no sense in engaging in any step in this process that doesn’t help us make our decision. Remember that the first principle of effective interviewing is to find reasons to say no. We are prepared to miss a good candidate if our process does so in service of avoiding hiring the wrong person. Better to have a false negative than a false positive.
But because candidate questions are less valuable than candidate answers, it’s reasonable to ask, What’s the balance? We’ll try to give guidance about this balance with two examples.
First, you have a candidate who, until he asks questions, is outstanding. He has great answers. He clearly has the right behavioral background in skills and abilities so that he could do the job. And he’s a good or very good communicator. But then he asks a series of poor, and maybe selfish questions. Certainly, it’s a letdown to what previously had been a good interview.
Faced with this dilemma, ask yourself: Are his questions indicative of a selfishness or lack of preparation that I have already seen evidence of?
Maybe his background is great, but you’ve had a vague sense of arrogance or self-centeredness during the interview. Or maybe you didn’t sense it before specifically, but something was bothering you, and when you hear his questions, you’re pretty sure there’s a fit problem: He’s going to be hard to manage or is not a team player. In this case, we’d probably tell you to recommend not hiring the candidate.
Or he has great answers, and there is not a hint at all of selfishness. You really like him and think he is a good cultural fit. In this case, it’s probably reasonable to conclude that he has simply learned a bunch of bad interview preparation guidance and has asked bad questions thinking they are good (and they’re not indicative of his character). In this case, we would probably suggest you recommend hiring him.
Second, you have a candidate who has done okay, but has not impressed you. Her answers were okay, but you had to work really hard in probing to get acceptable answers. You’ve probably concluded that her communication skills aren’t that great. Then she asks a series of poor or selfish questions.
We recommend not hiring this person, in part based on her poor questions.
Regarding communication skills more generally: Remember that communication is the single most frequent behavior of everyone on your team. Poor communication skills are enough to not hire someone. Take, for example, the candidate who gives you a one-minute answer to a substantive behavioral interview question. You probe repeatedly to get at the underlying behaviors. Then he or she answers every successive behavioral question with another one-minute answer.
This candidate is not a good communicator, and we would not recommend you offer him or her the role. Candidates who have all the technical skills but not enough contextual and situational awareness to change how they communicate may get the job done, but will be weak team members.