e-Columns
March 2006 e-Column
Speculative Interviews
Recently, I asked one of my technical colleagues to join me in interviewing a new high-level sales person. He had no real experience with sales, but I thought he might bring a good outside perspective to the process. After one of the interviews, he had few comments (which was very unlike him), besides the fact that they all seemed so “sales-y.” I said “Why yes, that’s precisely the kind of person we are trying to hire!” But he was not convinced by my enthusiasm, so we did a bit of an interview post-mortem.
After a brief discussion about the position and its criteria for success, my coworker and I realized that he was resorting to stereotyping and superficial data, because he didn’t know how to drill into a subject he knew so little about. (Ignorance may be bliss, but in interviews, ignorance is risk.) Thus, in the interview, he could not challenge his own assumptions. All he could offer up was the rather lame comment: “they’re so sales-y!” He did not gain any real insight into the candidates. Why? Because he simply didn’t know enough about the job and the criteria for success to find the right questions or decipher the good answers from the not-so-good ones. For him, it was an entirely “speculative” interview.
A “speculative” interview is the kind of interview you dread. It’s awkward, you are mainly silent, and you are looking at your watch every few minutes. You’re interviewing for a position that you understand only superficially, and you’re not sure what questions to ask or how you would determine a successful candidate. It all seems like chance. Unfortunately, a large percentage of interviews are speculative, or are speculative for one member of a team of interviewers. (By the way, you know you’re in a speculative interview when you’re thinking to yourself the whole time that the candidate seems to know what he or she is talking about, but you’re not quite sure whether they do or not.)
This is in stark contrast to a “detailed” interview in which you, and all the other participants, know the subject and the requirements for success in the position. When you’ve done the work before or have good second-hand knowledge, you know the kind of criteria that is going to determine successful performance and you know how to gauge it through question and answer or role-playing. In a detailed interview, you are engaged in talking to the person as a peer and the answers prompt you to think - she really knows her stuff. And you are confident that your judgment is right.
In a detailed interview it is fine to go along with the current prevailing wisdom and “go with your gut” (based on various popular theories.) Your gut is an invaluable tool in judging on subjects where you have depth of experience and detailed knowledge. However, for speculative ones, your gut is not reducing the risk of the hire, it is re-affirming the stereotypes you have about a type of position or type of person. Gut-based decisions based on speculative interviews leads to hiring people you like, but who may not be above average in work performance (since neither your brain nor your gut knows how to judge this.)
So what can you do? The best advice is to avoid speculative interviews when you can. However, if you want or need them (say because you want validation from an “independent” source), then mitigate your risk. You will be well served in doing so - your intuition that a speculative interview seems like chance is not far off. A great speculative interviewer is probably only slightly better in judging work performance than chance based on resume selection. Here are a few tips:
- Bring in an expert. If you neither you nor anyone else is knowledge, bring in an advisor or someone who is. Preferably the person would be there during the interview, but if they are there before to coach you that is good too.
- Think it through. If you don’t have any experts lying around, then you’ll have to think it through on your own. Try to imagine what this person is going to do be doing every day as best as you can. Get as close to the ground-level as you can and put yourself in their shoes. This gives you a better perspective for drawing up role plays or interview questions.
- Prepare to ask dumb questions. This is essential in any interview but especially when you are ignorant about the topic. For most people, preparing questions ahead of time saves some of the embarrassment factor of spontaneously blurting out an example of your ignorance. When you acknowledge this ahead of time you enable the interviewee to show off his teaching/explanatory skills and this gives you another insight into how or he or she thinks.
