Hiring Smart! by Pierre Mornell

Author:Pierre Mornell [Mornell, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79128-3
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2011-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

If you’re still interested in the candidate, always have a final interview in which you talk about potential problems. It’s never a question of if problems will arise on a new job, but what those problems will be. If you’ve not discovered any, you’re missing something in the candidate’s background.

Several years ago, I evaluated an executive who was a finalist candidate for a local company. On a scale of one to ten, I thought the woman was a ten. But in the course of our time together, two potential problems surfaced. First, her husband was unemployed. How would he feel if she was making an executive salary and he remained out of work? Second, how long would the candidate’s future mentor at the new company, the chief operating officer, remain in his post? Understandably, the candidate didn’t want to begin a new job only to have a key reason for her interest in the company, her potential mentor, leave two months after she accepted the position.

In both cases, I asked the candidate to discuss the matters with her husband, and with the chief operating officer. Her follow-up was predictable and unpredictable. Predictable, because the candidate raised the question directly with her future boss who said, “Eighty percent I’ll stay on.” Willing to take the 80/20 odds, the candidate assumed the COO would keep her posted if she accepted the job. Unpredictable, because the candidate discussed her husband’s sense of self-esteem in a disarmingly candid way. She said, in essence:

“I didn’t tell you this during our first meeting, but my husband and I have been trying to have children for several years. I’m forty-two years old and we’ve had all the tests; I’ve even taken fertility drugs, but no luck. So we’ve given up on a larger family, even though we’d love to have children. However, for the past few months we’ve been reevaluating our marriage and our lives. Do I work? Does he work? Do we adopt children? What’s our next step after a very difficult five years? And that’s where our discussions led after you interviewed me last week. My husband knows that I want the job, and he thinks it’s worth a try regardless of his job prospects. Should we choose to adopt children, it will take six months to a year. Meanwhile, my husband will continue to look for work, and we’ll see what the future holds.”

To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. How rare it is to see such candor, humanity, and intelligence operating in an interview situation with a relative stranger. Although the candidate was later hired by the company, I was wrong about her being a ten. She was a twelve!

Count on discovering problems with candidates. Your goal is to address whatever difficulties might arise. Here is another example.

After a two-year search, a college president found the perfect academic dean. She was comfortable with herself (a rarer quality than you might expect), and she was highly respected in her profession. Soft-spoken,

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