Interviewing – Challenge Your Assumptions
We’ve all been there. This guy comes in to interview, and three minutes into it you get this feeling. He’s all words and no action. He’s an arrogant bastard. He’s an architecture astronaut.
The interview goes on and on, and with every new topic, you find more and more reasons around why your initial sense is true. Hey, he didn’t give any credit to his peers. He invented it all himself, ha. What an ass!
This is all nice and great, except that you’re really sucking as an interviewer at this point. You had a gut feeling – you made a decision in the first few moments since you met the person – and you’re essentially looking for proof for your already made-up mind.
Since hiring superstars is your #1 priority, this mistake, in my book, is in the category of “lethal” if you’re a founder of a company and you’re bringing in employees #3, 4, and 5.
I’ll go further and stipulate that we’re hard-wired to be making such mistakes. There’s a curious amount of research on first impressions – the amount of judgment people pass on from the first 5 seconds of their interaction. In one leadership training class I took, they brought together a diverse group of people – completely different ages, industries, seniority levels. They had us pair up with a random person in the class, without exchanging a single word with the partner. Then, each of us gave some thoughts about the role, seniority, and industry of the other.
It’s shocking how precise – and how correct! – most of the observations were. The other person didn’t even open their mouth!..
The reason we’re hard-wired to make such a fast, snap call, I believe, is because of the basic fight-or-flight response. You need to judge whether the oncoming object is a danger to us; if we’re bad at it, we’ll get eaten. Thus, natural selection helps advance those that are good at it.
The problem, of course, is that at the workplace, the interactions are much more complex. You WANT to hire people that are radically different from you. You want to hire nay-sayers. You want people with radically different backgrounds, those that approach problems from the other angle. You want the whole of your company to be more than the sum of the individuals. If you fail to challenge your snap judgement, you’ll have a bunch of copies of yourself – creating an environment that magnifies your weaknesses, instead of compensating for them. Like the kings of the medieval times, you’re risking to suffer organizational hemophilia – the disease of “too much blue blood.”
Instead, I invite you to state the assumption that’s popping up in your head, and ask: what could this person say to convince me that they’re NOT what I think they are? If I think they’re not technical enough, can I ask them to code something? If I think they’re too full of themselves, can I ask them about a time when they were wrong? Literally, drop the current conversation topic, and abruptly switch to this new question.
Note that your first impressions, in some cases, will turn out to be exactly true. For example, one gentleman I recently met, I was getting a sense that he’s quite stubborn. I asked him to recall a time when he was convinced by someone else. A time when they thought one way was good and true, but someone jumped in and convinced them of a different approach.
The gentleman thought for a while, and came up with quite a telling example – as a business leader, he saw the technology group gravitate towards a process that he thought was dumb. He didn’t force his opinion down their throats; he let them have it their way. Note a subtle difference: he was NOT convinced himself; he merely allowed his people to make what he considers a mistake. This was quite eye-opening – by focusing on the assumption I made and precisely targeting it, I gave him an honest chance to convince me that my assumption of his stubbornness was wrong; instead, he reinforced it.
I encourage you to do the same the next time you’re interviewing someone for your team. What could this person say to convince me that they’re NOT what I think they are?