Having a long list of special questions and top-secret interviewing techniques simply isn’t going to attract and motivate the people we actually want to hire. Rather, generating a consultative peer-to-peer (mutual colleague) discussion is going to pay dividends for us big time. It’s okay to be clear early in the relationship that we are in a hiring mode; in fact it is probably best to be up front that way. But more to the point, it is important to be able to identify one or more challenges that we are willing to discuss in an open and honest way, in a way that is both fearless and “safe”. Whether we are having a very informal preliminary conversation with a potential candidate, or we have set up in a formal interview, we must not come across as being a “power broker” grilling them on their qualifications…. Instead, it is so much better if we just act as a human being sharing a problem or two common to our marketplace. A combination of humility and curiosity is very powerful (and captivating).
What we want to do in our initial conversations is threefold:
(1) paint a vivid picture of what our business is trying to do for our clientele and market;
(2) see to what extent the candidate understands and grasps the problems and challenges we have been describing; and
(3) have them describe how they would plan to meet the opportunities presented by such difficulties.
The goal would be to see to what extent the candidate would become a vital part of our problem-solving team, to illustrate how much they can contribute immediately to what we really need to do. Ideally we would also like them to be aware of and explicit about how they would personally impact our bottom line. Beyond those three areas, everything else is more or less just fluff. Such conversations tend to be rich and rewarding to both parties whether they are ever hired or not.
If in the course of these conversations, we become serious about one or more of these candidates, what do we do next? That will be our the topic of June’s blog.