Do you have a question about recruiting, interviewing or hiring and don't know who to ask?
Ask me.
I am creating this post so that if you have a question, you can use the comments section to ask it. I'd prefer to keep this as an open forum so that others can benefit from your question and my response. However, if you really don't want your question made public, then use the embedded link to send me a free message on LinkedIn.
The types of questions I am most equipped to answer are from the perspective of someone doing the recruiting or hiring. I am not skilled at job searching. My expertise is finding the right person for the job.
I don't know everything, but I do know quite a bit.
So if you have a question about recruiting and/or hiring --
Ask away!
Or if you see a question that you'd like to respond to, please do that!
I've made some very successful senior level hires in my career, and a couple of very bad ones. So I'm very interested in putting a really strong hiring filter in at Riskalyze.
ReplyDeleteSo if you had to pick the interview question that was most revealing and helpful in making a decision about a senior-level hire, what would it be? :)
Hi Aaron -- Well thanks for starting me off with a tough one!
ReplyDeleteOf course, I'd much rather try to diagnose your previous "bad hires" and make suggestions for going forward, but I'll stick with the game plan.
Granted that I know the candidate is qualified for the job and I can ask only one question, I will want to know how the person has responded to crisis or adversity. If this turns out to be a success story, then I want to probe further to know how the person has responded to failure or a significant mistake.
I want to know that the person took ownership of the problem(s) where appropriate, knew when to shift gears (or now knows as a result of this experience), the take-away lessons and how these were applied (or continue to be applied). You ask the question(s), then listen carefully and probe as needed. You want to detect any blame casting, repetition or patterns of unproductive or unsuccessful behavior, and to look for transparency and authenticity as well as a high degree of maturity and willingness to take responsibility for mistakes or poor choices.
That's the quick version. Of course there are other questions that I think are vitally important, and just as important are the questions that the candidate asks you. This can be especially revealing.
I'm curious, do you typically ask these types of questions in the interview? Is there a question that you generally think of as vitally important?
Thanks, again, Aaron.
(And anyone else reading this, please feel free to give your perspective.)
I have two rules for senior level hiring:
ReplyDelete-Don't ask this question in the office.
At a senior level, the commitment is beyond the office and there will be endless, dinners and drinks and plane rides that are work.
Being comfortable with the person is part of the answer.
-For marketers, sales execs, VPs of Finance and Customer Service there are situations where forming the question is the only way to get to an answer,
For each of these (and a few others), I create the situation where that exec needs to define the question, then a solution process to find the answer.
Thanks, Arnold. Love it. Thanks for weighing in. I always value your thoughts on hiring. Will someday want to pick your brain.
ReplyDeleteNot sure I follow what you mean by the statement "Don't ask this question in the office" unless you are saying that there are some things you need to gauge outside the office -- and that it isn't an actual question that you ask, but something you observe -- I can see that this is really key!Really good point about simulating the type of thought/question process actually required by the role.
In general, I am always interested in the types of questions the candidate asks -- to me often more revealing than the responses to questions.
Love it - great choice.
ReplyDeleteIn truth, I would say I've only made one bad senior-level hire. Bottom line with that individual...they were the top candidate in the pool.
But in hindsight, the pool was a failure and I should have pushed a reset button and gone out to search again.
There were a few red flags in the interview but I really wanted to get the position filled and I felt I could manage and grow the person. The cultural mismatch between this individual and the rest of my team was just too much and they all knew it within a few months.
The good news was...I'd already learned the hard way how to fix those problems, so we made a change relatively quickly when it became clear that it wasn't working.
So true...
ReplyDeleteMy team is very lean right now, but when I hired those guys, my question was "If I hired you, I'm going to be trusting you with my career. Are you comfortable trusting yours to me?"
We're not carbon copies, probably don't vote the same, and don't share all the same interests. But eight months in, all three of us would run through brick walls for each other.
I know you were just asking to be nice. Thanks for being the fire starter. Funny, had just commented to someone at AVC that it's okay to pivot during the recruiting process -- actually "reset" is a better word.
ReplyDeleteBottom line is that you are hiring people.
ReplyDeleteIn today's market there is no one that knows all the answers.
There's an intersection of know-how, experience, chutzpah, creativity and personality.
You are hiring a person as the amalgam of all that.
You need to get to know them as that person. Can't do that across the desk. Especially as a fellow executive.
Not very articulate but that's what I was trying to say.
So true. And well said.
ReplyDeleteAn aww moment. :)
ReplyDeleteawaldstein Donna Brewington White
Thanks for stopping by my humble blog Rohan. I'm headed over to yours shortly to read about @GothamGal !
ReplyDeleteAha. You're on my blogs read list.
ReplyDeleteI finally got organized enough to add all the new blogs I was following every once in a while. Now, you'll see me as soon as you write them.. ;)
& I navigated to this blog from your website Rohan. A great found perhaps!
ReplyDeleteOf course. This is Donna's blog.. definitely a great find! :)
ReplyDelete