Tuesday, July 5, 2016

The Best Interview Question Ever

The Best Interview Question Ever
There is a single question that you can use to assess whether a candidate understands the job and if they are an A or a C player.

The secret to hiring your next great employee might just come down to how they answer a single question. And it's not asking them what kind of tree they would be or their Meyers-Briggs profile. It all comes down to measuring performance. Let me explain.
The authors of the book, "Who", suggest that you can immediately begin to distinguish A players from B and C players beginning with your initial phone screen. You do that by telling a candidate exactly how you will be measuring how they perform in the job you want to hire them for.
How the candidate reacts to that will tell you plenty about them. C players, for example, probably can't hang up the phone fast enough since they don't want any part of being measured. A players, on the other hand, will take your bait and get excited for the chance to excel. They might even up the ante by asking you what's in it for them if they really crush it and exceed your expectations.
It turns out there's an even better question you can ask candidates to help assess if they are a true A player or not once you have them in for an interview. I learned about this magic question from Joel Trammel, the CEO of software company Khorus, who I wrote about in my book Great CEOs Are Lazy.
Joel is a big believer in the fact that CEOs can't delegate hiring decisions to someone else like HR. He perfected his hiring method by interviewing every single one of the hundreds of employee who joined his company.
And based on all of those interviews, Joel found that there was a single question that helped him assess whether a candidate understood the job they were applying for and what they needed to do to excel in it.
"If I was to hire you, how would I know if you were doing a good job?"
The reason this is such a great question is that it forces the candidate to put themselves into the job and be thoughtful about how they might be measured by you, their boss. The answer you get in return will tell you a lot about the candidate's maturity and comfort level with having their performance measured.
If you ask a C player this question, for instance, you might get some stammering followed by some non-critical metrics like maybe how they will show up for work on time and not take extended lunch hours.
A players, on the other hand, will give you exactly what you're looking for. Let's say you are hiring a software engineer. When you ask them the magic question, they might respond by saying that you will know they are doing a good job based on three metrics: the total volume of software code they will produce on a weekly or monthly basis; the quality of the code based on a limited number of bugs; and their on-time delivery rate where they hit the targets they said they would.
This would be a great answer because each of the metrics is measurable and quantifiable. You know that if you had a group of engineers who all were willing to be measured on those metrics, you'd have a high performing team.
Similarly, if you were hiring a sales person, you might want to hear them answer the magic question by saying that you could tell they were doing a good job if they were: exceeding their quota, selling profitable business, and their customer satisfaction rating was off the charts.
A key point here is that while you might know what you want to hear from a candidate, leave some wiggle room to be surprised and to learn something new about the position from an A player--someone who might think of a metric you never considered before.
The beauty of asking the magic question is also that, after the candidate gives you their answer, you pause for a second and say: "Let me write these down because, if I hire you, this is exactly how I will measure you after you start your new job."
In other words, you can use the answer to the magic question as a great onboarding tool where you have eliminated any chance that your new hire will be surprised about what is expected of them after they start their new job.
How magical is that?

Thank you to Jim Schlesker for writing this article.

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