96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire by Paul FALCONE

Author:Paul FALCONE
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: AMACOM
Published: 2008-11-11T14:00:00+00:00

Good Answers. Whatever the orientation of the prior company’s performance appraisal techniques, look for areas of performance weakness that are really “overstrengths,” or virtues driven to an extreme. For example, someone censured for not delegating work appropriately or occasionally forging too far ahead of projects requires only mild tempering of his or her ambitions. In essence, those so-called weaknesses hold a lot more future value than they do downside risk. In contrast, beware of the candidate who provides information regarding lackadaisical performance standards, low tolerance for adversity, or reliability problems. These problems typically reveal themselves when candidates blame others for their own shortcomings.

Again, because candidates realize that they will have to provide an actual performance evaluation some time before you make them an offer, they will typically feel much more obliged to come clean regarding past indiscretions and failures.

58 In hindsight, how could you have improved your performance at your last position?

Why Ask This Question?

Even candidates with stellar performance evaluations would opt to rewrite history in light of their 20/20 hindsight. Improving performance is sometimes a factor of increased personal involvement. Sometimes it’s a matter of wishing to change organizational limitations. Whatever the case, look for solutions in the candidate’s response that show creativity and ingenuity in reframing problem issues and their outcomes.

Analyzing the Response

The ideal limitation in any employee’s work history is time. High-performance job candidates do their jobs exceptionally well but continuously try to increase the impact of their results. Newly opened sales territories could be larger; reductions in departmental operating budgets could be deeper; new program launchings could have had greater market penetration. Accordingly, the hallmark of high achievers’ productivity is the desire to cut themselves in half to capitalize on their accomplishments.

In addition, when a candidate provides you with a specific shortcoming in the previous query regarding performance appraisal disappointments, this natural follow-up demands (a) specific actions that reveal how the weaker performance could have been strengthened, and (b) the candidate’s willingness to accept responsibility for things gone wrong. For example, you might ask, “Tell me, Dorothy, about your last performance appraisal. In which area were you most disappointed?” Dorothy, a human resources manager, responds that her greatest disappointment was in not reaching the goal she set for herself of lowering the company’s cost per hire from $1,500 to $1,100. She instituted an internal referral program that she assumed would account for a 20 percent increase in staffing. Because of market conditions and less-than-ideal marketing of her plan to coworkers, the program never really took off.

How to Get More Mileage out of the Question. Your follow-up sounds like this: “So tell me then, in hindsight, how could you have improved the results of that program?” Dorothy then explains:

“I still believe that the internal referral program could have been successful. I was told when I first proposed instituting the plan that it had been tried before and failed miserably. I wanted to prove them wrong because it had worked so well for me at my previous company.

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