It’s amazing how many people do poorly in interviews. In theory, this shouldn’t happen so often. If you are called in for an interview it is because at least one, and usually several, people were impressed by your resume. Often a screening call has also taken place—if you are invited in, it’s because everything so far is a go. The basics have been covered and the rest should be easy, but instead this is where things often fall apart.

We at HeadHire have several decades’ experience participating in hiring teams at high tech companies ranging from start-ups to multinational corporations. One of us has been a hiring manager at every level up to Vice President. We’ve put our heads together to give you some fresh insight on how to breeze through interviews.

Let’s start with the obvious. The good news is this stuff is easy to fix, and a pretty large percentage of candidates get the obvious stuff wrong, short-circuiting the decision. Mistakes in this category might be called “unforced errors.”

1. Show up on time and don’t reschedule. Showing up late or rescheduling multiple times is a black mark, not a deal killer. Don’t show up an hour earlier either—it’s creepy. In our experience roughly 15% of candidates fall into the “inability to show up on schedule” bucket, giving their competition a nice advantage right out of the gate.When you schedule the interview, make absolutely sure that you can do the interview at the scheduled time. Give yourself an extra half hour if you are local and an extra several hours (or half day) if you are flying in. Head to the interview location well in advance, but don’t go in. Find a good place outside to wait (e.g., bring a book or your computer and go to a coffee shop or sit in your car). At 5 minutes before your interview, show up: cool, unruffled, and on time.
2. Don’t make assumptions about your hiring manager. One candidate showed up a half hour late. Her statement about it (sans apology): “You know how it is when you have a toddler.” The hiring manager was a woman, so obviously she was a mom, right? Wrong. The stereotype was insulting.If you are late just apologize. If you have a good reason, give it but keep it short and simple. If an emergency happens (child must be rushed to the doctor, or child care arrangement falls through), simply call the office manager and reschedule. The next time, be on time.
3. Don’t do anything non-PC. One candidate complimented a hiring manager profusely on her eyes, her smile, and even her dress. He said she had “an impish smile.” Ugh. No hire. Avoid personal comments—stick to business.

   Moving on now to the not so obvious.

4. Be able to demonstrate that you can do what you claim to be able to do on your resume, and what you will need to do for the job position. About half or more of candidates fall apart here.For example, if you are interviewing for a senior software developer position, be ready to write some good code during the interview. If you aren’t really senior, be up front about that. It may be there’s another position for you, but at least you won’t have a really painful experience.If you are good at coding but not good at word problems, say so. There’s an unfortunate trend to ask developers to do some tricky lateral thinking problem on the spot during an interview. While this is a great test for being able to do tricky lateral thinking problems on the spot, unless that’s in the job description, don’t be ruffled if you aren’t good at those. Just say so and move on. Ask if they’d like you to write some code for them.If you are a project manager, be ready to analyze and scope a complex technical project. If you are a people manager, be ready to analyze a business situation and explain how you would handle it. And so on.
5. Make a personal connection with your interview team. This is one of the most overlooked areas. The people interviewing you are asking themselves: what will it be like to work with this person every day? At the end of the process, they should know that it will be great. You are professional, you do your job, you engage with the team, you inspire and motivate. You know your weaknesses and admit them easily, while leveraging your strengths for the good of the business.

One way to look at interviews is that your goal is to avoid big mistakes that cost you the offer. That’s certainly part of the picture. Most important, though, is to use the interview as an opportunity to make a connection with a team that will be beneficial to you and to them. When that magic happens, the offer naturally follows.

In the film Fantastic Mr. Fox, there’s a great scene when Mr. Fox comes out of his tree, sniffs the air, and immediately detects the presence of three enemies—the farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. This immediate, pre-linguistic knowledge is symbolized very appropriately by set of thought bubbles containing an apple, a chicken, and duck. Mr. Fox’s quick reaction saves his life, but he loses his tail.

This is a perfect depiction of what Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) calls “thin-slicing”, the ability to make a correct judgment using only a very small amount of information.

If you are like most people, you have to make judgments all the time with very little information. If you are a manager, you have to hire and fire people based on limited and often contradictory input. You might want to know more about thin-slicing: in particular, how to do it better.

There are definitely ways to do it worse. Blink is in large part almost nothing more than a recitation of the thin-slicing gone wrong. From the discussion of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to the disturbing story of Abbie Conant’s experience in the Munich Philharmonic in the 1980’s (Blink pp.245-7), we see case after case of what Gladwell calls the “dark side” of thin-slicing. All of us are subject to it—that moment when we just know something to be true that turns out to be utterly false. Is there a way to separate the good slices from the bad?

There are three clues to consider. First, returning to the case of Mr. Fox, he made a great snap judgment based on very little information, but the key is in the type of information he used: direct physical sensation. Apparently he either smelled or heard the dangerous farmers. Second, returning to the case of Abbie Conant—again, direct physical sensation. It was a blind audition—so the evidence was her performance, specifically, only the sound of the music as she played. Third, consider the evidence used one year later, in the decision to demote Conant to second trombone. According to the court brief, she did “not possess the necessary physical strength” to lead the trombone section. This judgment was made based on the “knowledge” that woman are weaker than men. It was made before any tests of that strength. (Tests were later performed, revealing that the judgment was unfounded.)

So what about hiring and firing? The trick is to do the thin-slicing based on the right kind of evidence. The right kind of evidence includes evidence of your senses—filtered down to the things that impact the ability to do the job. Obviously things like the ability to code, or to play the trombone, or to manage a project, count. Obviously things like ethnicity or gender don’t count. But the more subtle evidence matters as well—can you get along with other team members? Do you communicate well? And that’s when you are verging into the territory of being “strong enough” to lead a trombone section. “Communicating well” does not mean “being one of the boys”. The trick is to understand and if possible test for the kind of communication that is necessary for the job at hand.

The trick, as Malcolm Gladwell points out, is using less information rather than more, and in particular the right information needs to be used in the decision. “Before the advent of blind auditions, the percentage of women in major symphony orchestras in the United States was less than 5 percent. Today, twenty-five years later, it’s close to 50 percent.” (Blink, p. 273) The benefit of blind auditions is that now that musicians are judged only their ability to play, the musicians best able to play are chosen. This benefits everyone, because we all get better music. That’s what I want to see where I work: better work, from better workers.

If you haven’t played Jenga, it’s a game in which players must take turns removing wooden blocks from a tower without toppling the tower itself.

All the blocks look the same, but some blocks slide without much resistance.  Others won’t budge at all.

Players lose the game when they wrongly estimate the difficulty of removing a block and unwittingly bring down the whole tower.

Jenga is an apt metaphor for the situation that talent-hungry businesses are in today. They must try to “pull” talented people away from other companies without knowing the incentive required to be successful — or whether the person would even be interested at all.

Just like Jenga blocks, two people can have similar resumes but vastly different propensities to change jobs.

In the past, this information — this “willingness to switch” — has only been discussed in back-room deals and private conversations.

But if talent had the power of anonymity, they could post their asking prices in public without fear of reprisal.

Suddenly the talent market would gain significant liquidity.

If you are like other talented and creative individuals, you probably define yourself at least partially by your job.

But most of us don’t fit neatly into the mold of a typical job description. There can be huge differences between people who share a common title (and often, a common salary) like project manager, software developer, or general counsel.

Businesses often slot people into pre-defined roles as a way of comforting themselves. If people can be categorized neatly into roles, and everyone in a given role can be paid a similar amount, people suddenly become a known quantity — like inventory and balance sheets.

Unfortunately this categorization is a crude approximation at best, and a fatal mistake at worst. Most people are multi-talented; in a job setting, they deliver value in subtle and unique ways that aren’t captured well by a corporate title.

At HeadHire, we know software developers who started as piano teachers and knowledge engineers who worked for ballet companies. And we know there can be huge differences in the dollar-for-dollar value produced between two people in the same role, at the same salary.

That’s why we believe hiring should not be about filling pre-defined roles, but acquiring great people of all stripes and doing what it takes to get them to stay.

You are what you measure. When the recession hit, news media and blogs became obsessed with measuring job security. Popular headlines included “How secure is your job?” and “Job security at an all-time low.” But is job security the right measurement for the 21st century economy? We don’t think so.

The very idea of job security implies that the employer is doing some sort of favor for its employees. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. You need only to witness the talent war between Microsoft and Google to know that if anything, it’s the employee who is the one doing the favor.

The way to take responsibility for yourself is not by looking for more job security, but income security.

In any job, your income can be cut off instantly and with only a moment’s notice. It need not have anything to do with your performance; the whole business could go belly-up.

This is simply the reality of the new economy. Businesses and jobs are now transient things. They come and go much more regularly than in the past.

Taking responsibility for your income security means proactively seeking out new job opportunities, even when your current job seems perfectly good.

It’s good for business too: the Netflix example

Good businesses don’t want job hoppers, but they do want employees who are responsible for themselves — not tethered to the payroll umbilical cord.

Consider these points from Netflix’s slideshow on their talent philosophy:

• “It is a healthy idea, not a traitorous idea, to understand what other firms would pay you by interviewing and talking to peers at other companies”
• “Netflix doesn’t have to be for life”
• “We should celebrate someone leaving for a bigger job”
• “Individuals should learn to manage their own career path, and not rely on a corporation”
• “Economic security is based on skills and reputation”
• Source: http://www.netflix.com/Jobs

Netflix has an extremely rational people philosophy: let’s do great things for each other while we’re together, but understand and accept that we’ll eventually part ways.

Talent retention over employee loyalty

It’s the business’ responsibility to retain its top talent, not the talent’s responsibility to be loyal. NetFlix — and other companies like it — understand this reality and adapt to it by hiring star performers and paying them top-of-the-market salary.

Employees of Netflix who create talent profiles on HeadHire will probably have sky-high asking prices because Netflix has such great values around employee retention. In fact, Netflix would probably encourage their employees to create profiles on HeadHire.

But we suspect that other companies would be worried about their employees being open to new job opportunities. That’s why, at least for now, our profiles are anonymous.

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Thanks.

The HeadHire Team

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