The question we hear most frequently from managers is “What questions should I ask?” This is a fine question—and that’s why we license our Interview Creation Tool. But it’s not the best question.
The best question is How do I evaluate answers? Most of us do this poorly for all kinds of reasons. We over-rely on our guts. We haven’t prepared well enough to know what we are truly looking for. We believe “We’ll know it when we see it.” We like answers that sound like our answers. And on and on.
But let’s go back to first principles. What are we looking for? A person who can do our job well. What is the raw material that allows someone to do a job? Behaviors.
So we prepare behavioral interview questions, and then we ask them. And then, unfortunately, candidates don’t answer with behaviors! They have reasons, for example, most can’t imagine they have enough time to go through all of their behaviors in something like a project they’re discussing. They’re right. Also, many candidates have not professionally prepared for a behavioral interview by knowing how to highlight their behaviors as they describe one of their accomplishments.
What this means is we have to ask our questions, listen to the answers, and then probe for behavioral details.
This is not to say that any time in any answer we’re going to probe for more information on anything the candidate did. It would take too long. (We hope you’re seeing that as full an evaluation as we’re wanting to do, time is our enemy.) We can’t probe for everything. That’s why we did our advance work to highlight the most important behaviors relative to the job for which we’re hiring.
Asking behavioral questions and then probing for behaviors is the best balance interviewing science has come up with to both (a) give us a broad overview of the candidate’s experience and (b) the opportunity to dive deeper into those areas that are important to us.
Before we talk about what to probe for, though, we need to learn how to probe.
When we probe, we’re taking the candidate off of his or her narrative. And because we’re going to be probing quite a bit, we have to avoid giving the impression we’re constantly interrupting.
What this means is that when we probe, we start with an apology. Remember that we’re trying to make the interview conversational. That helps the best candidates be at their best, and it helps all candidates relax and describe their experiences positively.
And when we interject in a normal conversation, we naturally make some brief apology for the break.
Now that we know how to phrase a probe, what do we probe on, or for? As a general rule, there are two areas to probe into: (a) decisions candidates make and (b) the most important behaviors we have identified in our preparation.
We probe decisions because candidates who have made good decisions in the past will make good decisions for us. Good decision making is something that doesn’t get talked about very often when it comes to interviewing, unfortunately.
We understand the thinking and have used it ourselves. No sense hiring a great decision maker to design a building who has never designed a building, right? But there’s a missing bit of analysis here. Decision making is an inherent part of any skill. Peter Drucker would remind us that decision making is a behavior, because it includes not only the choice we make, but the actions we take to implement the choice. If we don’t probe decisions candidates have made, we won’t learn whether they have good decision-making skills.
Decision making is one of the key building blocks of one’s ability to act independently, to learn, and to grow one’s skills. If we want to hire directs who can function independently, and if we want them to be able to do more in the future, we have to know about their ability to make decisions. And the only way to do that with any reliability is to ask questions about how they have done so in the past. Probing on past decisions is a classic use of the fundamental principle of behavioral interviewing: Future behavior is best predicted by past behavior.
So we want to know more about candidates’ decision-making abilities. How do we know when to do this, since probes aren’t prepared like our core questions? It’s simple, really: We’re going to listen for situations in their answers where we think they made a decision.
In our experience interviewing surely tens of thousands of candidates over the years, we’ve learned that there are some words or phrases that candidates use that suggest a decision was made.
There are some trivial situations where you probably don’t need to jump in for elaboration. For instance, “He said it was okay to move forward, so I continued with my plan.” In this case, the rationale for the continuation of the plan is stated beforehand.
Unfortunately, with decision making, too many of us start with the idea that “the inherent if-then implied is obvious or explained . . . ,” and we don’t ask for clarification. A big part of the reason for this is we assume the candidate used the same logic we would have to have taken the action he took. This is wrong half the time—if not more.
One of our favorite examples came interviewing a recent college graduate. After mentioning he chose the quite impressive college he chose (and where we were interviewing) and his other (also good) options, we asked how he came to his decision. He said, “A couple of my friends were going there.”
That’s not an indicator of good decision-making skills. Yes, we would forgive this due to the inexperience of youth. But it was a reason to probe further on other decisions. It provides an interesting comparison to another graduate who laid out her choices, talked about their relative strengths and weaknesses, and chose the school that fared the best against her key criteria.
Here are some examples of full probes—apology and query—to understand a candidate’s decision making:
Probing about decisions isn’t hard. It’s just something most of us don’t do. We’re too busy thinking about a particular skill we need, whether it’s creativity with new media, or closing customers, or queuing theory, or cost-efficient structural design.
But for all of those skills and abilities, decision making is a critical underlying factor. And rest assured: The group of candidates who can talk about why they did what they did is the group who knows how to make good decisions. If you have poor decision-makers, you may end up making all of the decisions for all of your directs all the time.
We strongly encourage you to make communication skills one of the core behaviors you interview for in virtually all cases. Communication is the most frequent behavior all professionals engage in at work. Without good communication skills, a team member reduces the effectiveness of his team, almost regardless of their strength in other skills, even critical ones. Not only is his work not fully utilized when he communicates poorly, but he creates more friction among team members, which reduces performance overall.
One of the classic mistakes in modern interviewing is finding a great technical talent, and allowing the candidate’s technical skills to overshadow weak communication skills. It almost always ends in regret.
We’ve learned a few clues that suggest a needed probe to learn about a candidate’s communication skills. There are many, because we communicate so much at work. These should point you in the right direction:
“I talked with/to them.” This seems obvious, but most candidates assume we don’t want every conversation reviewed. They’re right. But in some cases, we do. Often, we want to know whether a candidate can change how she has a conversation based on what she knows about the person she’s talking to.
“We had a meeting, and . . .” Meetings are all about communication. And they’re different than one-to-one conversations. A meeting may imply group discussion, a presentation, voting, acquiescing to someone else’s idea. Perhaps the person did advance work socializing the idea or recommendation.
“We exchanged emails . . .” Email is a significant part of professional life and communication. But email is also only one of our choices, between internal chat boards, face to face, meetings, text messages, Slack, reporting, etc.
Listen for these cues and others, and make communication one of your screened for critical behaviors. The more you interview, the better you’ll get at it, and the more you’ll realize what a difference it makes.