Here’s an interesting fact: Doing a quick Google search for “common interview questions and answers” will yield you 25,100,000 results. I’m not sure what’s more surprising— the results or the questions that people ask in an interview?!
When I joined EO a few years ago, I learned everything I needed to know about employing Gestalt Language Protocol—that innovative approach to communication they teach you in Forum—to my personal and professional life. For those who are still warming up to the process, here’s a quick recap from the philosophy’s Wikipedia page:
“Gestalt focuses more on process (what is happening) than content (what is being discussed). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought and felt at the moment rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should be.”
Gestalt therapy is a method of awareness, by which perceiving, feeling and acting are understood to be separate from interpreting, explaining and judging. This distinction between direct experience and indirect or secondary interpretation is developed in the process of therapy. Put more simply, when I share my experiences and how I reacted to a situation with my colleagues, it’s much more valuable to them than if I went ahead and told them what I would do if I were in their shoes. In other words: opinions are worthless.
Mary Schmich wrote an op-ed piece in the mid-1990s, titled, “Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted On the Young.” In this article was a very appropriate quote:
“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”
To bring this idea back to the focus of my point—how to help you hire better—let’s examine the following random questions typically asked during an interview, all of which I fished from the Google search of 25,100,000 results:
- What’s your biggest weakness?
- What motivates you to do a good job?
- How are you when you’re working under pressure?
- Are you a team player?
- How long would you expect to work for us if hired?
Can you guess the common theme in every one of those questions? The answer: Every one of them can be answered with an opinion.
One of the ways we’ve made our hiring process so consistent and effective in my business is by not allowing prospective employees to share their opinions in interviews. Opinions in an interview are worthless. As a hiring manager, you’ll find that you’ll have a lot more success if you’re asking questions that require someone to share with you how they behaved in a situation. When we hire, we use a lot of the questions from the book, Topgrading, by Bradford Smart, to assist in our evaluation of talent. Here are some examples:
- What are a couple of the best and worst decisions you have made in the past year?
- Describe a situation or two in which the pressures to compromise your integrity were the strongest you have ever felt.
- What are examples of circumstances in which you were expected to do a certain thing and, on your own, went beyond the call of duty?
- Describe a complex challenge you have had coordinating a project.
- When was the last time you missed a significant deadline?
Upon review, what do all of these questions have in common? They require the candidate to answer based on their experiences. The bottom line: If you’re asking questions in an interview that allow someone to offer their opinions, there’s a likelihood that the interviewee also turned to the Web in search of the right answers to commonly asked questions.
When you ask the right questions, however, no Web site can give the job-seeker the answers they need, which forces them to talk about their experiences. While there are a lot of people who will argue that past experience is not the greatest indicator of future success, you, as a hiring manager, often have the choice of either relying on those past experiences or listening to someone’s rehearsed answers and opinions instead. Personally, I’d much rather learn about the employee’s experiences than hear canned answers and recycled opinions.