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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Manager Tools.
- [00:03]
B
This is Sarah and I'm Mark.
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A
Today's podcast, teaching your directs how to interview, Chapter one, part one of two.
- [00:12]
B
As always, our content has been crafted by humans, and we are now certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, should my directs interview someone who would become their peer? How can I teach my directs how to interview? What do I need to teach my directs before they get a chance to interview me?
- [00:34]
A
If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. If you're new to managing managers, the game has changed. The Effective Senior Manager conference is built specifically for you. The tools, the frameworks, the peer conversations you can't get anywhere else. This isn't a generic leadership event. It's Manager Tools Live and we're coming to Chicago on June 4, and seats are limited, so head to manager-tools.comesmc to register today. Mark, we talk all the time about how the Manager Tools interview process recommends having each direct report interview for the job of their peer, essentially. Right.
- [01:21]
B
Not necessarily each, but most depending upon how many directs you have.
- [01:25]
A
Yeah, good correction, good correction. So today we're going to talk about something that I think is very important that is helping those hiring managers out there ensure that the directs of theirs who are interviewing their peers are qualified to do it.
- [01:40]
B
Yes. And let's be clear. If you're a senior manager and you've got managers reporting to you, you might make the assumption that those managers are good interviewers. But I don't think that's necessarily so. I would suspect that most people in our community who are senior managers and again, have managers reporting to them. If you're a director and you have managers reporting to you, you would have assessed their ability to interview. But I will tell you that the biggest gap in the importance of a skill and the relative effectiveness of managers, the biggest gap in all of Manager Tools is interviewing. And I don't think, like, if you're my senior manager, Sarah, I would tell you, or, you know, manager Tools would tell you, don't assume Mark knows how to interview. You have to be careful.
- [02:32]
A
Well, we all know what assume does, right?
- [02:34]
B
Yeah. You might say, hey, Mark, you've. You've done interviews for like, oh, yeah, because I know I'm a manager and so I'm supposed to know how. But I would suggest to you that if you're a senior manager and you're in our community, do not assume that. That your managers know how to manage and they're know how to interview. And I would encourage you to consider following this Guidance as well as obviously the, the, the really target audience, which is frontline managers. Because those frontline managers may not know how to interview, but definitely your individual contributors probably don't know how to interview. And don't believe them when they say, oh I've, I've conducted a lot of interviews because they've probably done it wrong. I mean I would say that 80% of the people who tell me that they're companies, that their organizations have some sort of interviewing training. It's not about asking questions and learning how to evaluate answers. It's about the process that they use from sourcing to screening and so on. They don't teach probing, they don't teach listening for behaviors, they don't teach behavioral interviewing questions, they don't teach chit chat, they don't teach answering questions, they don't teach ending the interview. So there's a lot. So don't make the assumption, assume nobody knows and then take them through this process and make them better. And look what have we said for ages? If you want to make managing easier, learn to hire better. That's our core guidance relative to hiring. For managers, hiring is the most important tactical behavior because we all think of it as something that's around, you know, hiring a new person. But it's the most important tactical behavior that contributes to the strategic future of your company. So we need to be excellent interviewers because the most important contribution we're making long term to our organizations is the people we bring into it.
- [04:25]
A
And we've said this before, I mean we've talked about this before. If you think about the average frontline manager, they've likely not been taught they how to interview by their employer. And to your point earlier, again, if individuals were taught how to interview, if you will, and I'm doing that in Joey air quotes, how to interview, they were really just taught the process by which to follow, which doesn't teach them how to conduct the actual interview itself. It just refers to the interview as being part of the larger process which they follow. Which again doesn't qualify you for interviewing.
- [05:03]
B
Well, yeah, and the HR people who train it, they've never been trained on that interview, they've never had multi day interviewing training. I went through that at Proctor and Gamble and it was exceptionally good. Look, what frontline managers are left with is to believe that being interviewed as a candidate is all the training they need to conduct an interview as an interviewer. But that's like being a passenger in a car as a kid and believing that's all the Training, you need to learn how to drive. It's crazy. It's unsustainable. It leads to poor hiring among frontline professionals and everybody. And of course, five years later, you discover, gee, we don't have the talent we need. And if you combine poor hiring with any failure to build a trusting relationship followed by weak feedback, which is true of 95% of the managers we know are from 95% of the managers in the world, not 90, 95% of the managers we know. You're setting yourself up for a recipe where you don't. You don't have the talent, you don't have the skills, because you've never really tried hard to upgrade the caliber of the people that you hire.
- [06:11]
A
Yeah, that's absolutely it. And given how few people do this, I mean, you'd think it would be really difficult to achieve somehow. But, I mean, there's a really simple solution to all of it, folks. We recommend managers have their individual contributors, the individual contributors on their team conduct interviews of candidates who will become their peers. Now, we recommend this for two reasons, really. Both because we want them to contribute to the hiring process and learn how to interview before they become managers. But also there's the. If your peers had a chance to evaluate you, they're more bought in. They're more willing to ensure that your onboarding goes successfully. I mean, there's a lot of reasons that we would recommend a peer interview.
- [07:00]
B
Yeah, I don't know that we've ever done a podcast on it. I've mentioned it probably two or three times in the last five years. When interviewing has come up as a topic we wanted to. To address in podcasts. But most people don't understand that interviews have two fundamentally different responsibilities. One is obviously to vet a candidate and to determine that they're in fact good enough to be hired.
- [07:24]
A
That's the one.
- [07:25]
B
We all know they want a quality decision on that. Fair enough that everybody gets that, otherwise we wouldn't do interviews. The other thing they miss, though, is that interviews are not just supposed to have what we would. That would be called an internal validation. The process of evaluating someone was successful. We evaluate someone and they're good. We give them an offer and they're good, or we evaluate them and we decide they're not good. That's called internal validation. But there's another piece which is external validation. And external validation means when someone goes through this process, other people believe the colleagues that they're going to have, and your peers as well, if you're a manager, if they Know of the process that you have that is full, it's robust, it's fair, and it's tough without being rude or disrespectful or mean spirited. Those people know that they went through a fair and good process and that allows that person to come to work on day one and already have built up some trust. This is one of the reasons why companies have nepotism rules. Because they don't want somebody getting hired just because they know somebody or because they're a family member or so on. Because when you bring that person into your team, if they haven't gone over that high wall you're supposed to build with a tough but fair interviewing process, that person is not trusted. They're given the side eye when they start. And they actually probably start on a bit of a negative in terms of the trust, the trust number that they have. And it takes them longer to get up to speed. And it doesn't matter if you brought somebody in through a back door, you're probably going to be thinking, well, they'll get used to them and so on, and it'll be fine. The beginning was kind of rocky. You know, I'm really kind of mad at my directs for not making this person feel at home or welcome or whatever, when in fact it's your fault. Because you didn't build a process. You didn't teach your people how to interview. So you didn't build a process that had enough external validation. That person can come, be trusted and make immediate contributions. Now, could you hire somebody from your family? Sure, you could. If you had an externally validated process that people go, yeah, he or she didn't get in because they know somebody, they got in the same way the rest of us did. They had to go through a tough set of interviews. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 interviews. Somebody said to me, you know, Mark, I'm worried I'm gonna have like 11 interviews with person. Good, good. What if somebody said to you, you know, I don't, I don't think you need that many interviews. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm really good. Okay, you're not for us. This is not just for us to determine how good you are. It's also to help you show how good you are to other people who are going to interview you. So they know, yeah, I'm on board. And that's where the interview results capture meeting comes in. Right. Everybody goes to that meeting and say, yeah, I recommend we hire him or her, and here's why. And so when we actually do get to hire them. We're all excited and we're ready to help them and we're ready to bring them up to speed as fast as possible.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
Sorry. This is a classic case where folks, if you don't know it, when I write podcasts for manager tools and executive tools, or I help Sarah with career tools, and I wrote Churchill's years ago before Wendy came on board our podcast. Roughly, you know, a 20 to 30 minute podcast is going to be about 1200 words. And a two parter then would be roughly 2400 words. Well, this one is 1800 words. And Sarah asked me, do you think it's going to be a one or two parter? I said, I don't know, but we're going to be talking about interviewing. And I really like talking about interviewing and hiring because it's the most important strategic thing you do in a tactical way. And so here I am already that the last five minutes, what I just said, we're 12 minutes in, definitely two parts. I do need to make a note here that we absolutely have to have an external validation podcast. We've got to teach that so that everybody understands the purpose. All right, so let me just mention the outline. We've got four items. First, we're going to cover at a very high level. We're not going to teach everything because that would be 100 podcasts, the manager tools, effective hiring process, which includes interviewing, obviously. Then we're going to tell you our first step is you've got to teach your people the process so they know everything the candidate is going through. Okay? Then first step in their learning of how to interview is you have your directs, who you're training, the people you're training in this process. Observe interviews. Okay? They sit in on an interview and no, it's not a panel interview. We'll get to that in a minute. And then lastly, we recommend you have them conduct interviews. After they've gone through watching, then they conduct interviews. But the first couple of interviews, maybe two or three or four actually, they don't actually get any input into the hiring decision, but they go through the entire process just like every other interviewer does. So they know what they're getting into and they can hone their skills, they can calibrate with what everyone else is doing. They can learn from other people who are doing the interviews and so on. And that's just a start. By the way, folks, this is only chapter one, which is just the basics. There's more to be taught in terms of teaching your Directs how to interview. This is, again, this is just chapter one.
- [12:28]
A
Okay, so we're going to start with a. A little recap, I'm going to say, of the manager tools Effective Hiring Process. Because before we can teach you how to train your directs in these basic interviewing behaviors, we first need to outline the process itself. Some of you are going to be familiar with it. You may have read our book the Effective Hiring Manager, which outlines it very clearly and in grave detail, as well as the Effective Hiring Manager conference which we host. It's very simple. It's very repeatable. It's a very teachable process for ensuring that you're bringing in candidates that are ones which would truly add value to your team.
- [13:09]
B
It has several linear steps. The Effective Hiring Manager MT Effective Hiring Manager Effective Hiring Process okay, first you have to create the interview. Now, we've talked about this before, but the first step in hiring is not to find candidates, but rather to create the interview. So you're thinking about the job. And I believe me, the job has changed in the last couple of years. I don't know how you could interview somebody today and not ask them about what they've done with AI. I just don't believe you. You should do that. But if you're hiring for the same job you hired somebody into two years ago that you didn't have any questions about AI, so you've got to update your interview. That gets you in the thinking of the criteria you're going to apply to this job. And it helps you assess where the job is, the validity of the job, how it fits in. Maybe the job needs to be changed. Maybe there's some responsibilities that need to go away. Maybe, maybe some new responsibilities need to be added. And that happens. That that's how you keep your jobs fresh. And don't believe, folks. Please don't believe. And I don't mean any disrespect at all to HR here, but because HR is where we keep job descriptions, people think that HR owns the job descriptions, and that's not true. You own the job descriptions for your people. You do. And you've got to keep them fresh. And so creating that interview and thinking about the job, what's different about it? The classic way to do that and we'll have a cast on this is the person who's best at this job in my team, what do they do that's different than the person who's average and the person that's worse? How can I have questions in the interview that address those behaviors? So you create the interview, then you've got to source candidates. HR plays a role there in sourcing candidates, folks. They do. But don't forget about your bench. What we would love is to have in the entire manager tools community every manager going, I don't need HR to source me. I'm okay, I have a bench. I've created a bench over the last couple of years and I know who I think I want to hire. Now, be careful because somebody on your bench who you mentioned before could be perceived as a nepotism hire. Right? A friend hire. But again, that's why we build a process that has external validity. Okay, you've got to conduct screening interviews. We've talked about this before. HR will often want to do that for you. They'll screen resumes. And we've talked about screening resumes alongside hr. And we've also talked about potentially, yeah, HR does a screening interview, but you do too. Okay, you want to screen if at all possible. Now, if Mark Horstman or Sarah Horstman are your HR business partners, we're pretty good screening. You could probably trust us. But if you don't have a great relationship with your HR business partner, you may want to do that screening as well. After you conduct a screening interview and you decide, yep, they've made it through another wicket, another gate in the process, then you conduct multiple full interviews and we have guidance for that. In terms of creating the interview, we mentioned creating the interview earlier and using. We assume that people often in our community use the interview creation tool, which is available to all licensees. And I think we're over 100,000 interviews created in the last 15 years or so since we've had the ICT out there. Maybe even more than that now, I don't know, but that's a nice round number. And then after you finish multiple full interviews, usually on site, but they can also be virtual if you like, depending upon the nature of your work arrangements. You're going to use an interview results capture process. That may be, I think I've said this before, one of the 10 or 15 most important contributions of manager tools to the practice of management, the profession of management is, is a process for changing the way interviews happen. Because you change the way people have to report out on their interviews as opposed to a short interview. And then everybody getting together and just talking about the candidate. There should be some structure there. Then you've obviously got to make an offer or not, right? Or politely decline someone. And then as well, in the hiring process, you've got to onboard people and we're not going to cover that one again because we have an exceptional podcast. That sounds really weird. I probably shouldn't say that. Maybe I should say, if I do say so myself, the onboarding process is exceptionally good. I think our onboarding checklist that we've created for licensees has over 200 items, and people kind of balk at that initially. But the reason there are 200 items in there is it's easier for you to delete things that you don't use than having to create one on your own.
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Yeah, it's more likely to get missed.
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B
Yeah, exactly. And the big thing a lot of times for managers is they don't know what to do. They don't know how to get from 0 to 1. So we've already created a huge one that you can delete 50% from if you want. I mean, if you. If the other 50% are really good for you, that's great. But we've gotten you from zero to one. And then you can use your own knowledge of your company to figure out what part of that actually works. And as I like to remind people about onboarding, onboarding starts the moment you make an offer. Everybody misses. Not everybody. 90% of the people I talk to miss that. Onboarding starts. Oh, the day they start. No, no. If they're not starting for six weeks, there's all kinds of things you can do between the time you offer even before they've accepted to onboard them. And not all of that is administrivia. You can't do administrivia until they accept. But there's all kinds of other stuff you can do to welcome them. Well, I've told people before, if you've got an offer from us and you want to learn more about us to make your decision, come to one of our meetings, sit in on a meeting and learn how we interact with one another, what we talk about, how we treat each other, so on. So that's the process at a very, very, very high level.
- [19:08]
A
Yes, exactly. Because those are. Those are not the details of the process, folks. That's just an outline of the process. And again, we are not going to teach you every step of the process in this series of guidance because there are many, many podcasts and again, a book and a training all designed to do that we're only going to teach you today the interviewing portion, which comprises only full interviews and using the interviews results capture process. Really the parts of the process that, that you yourself as the hiring manager don't own sole responsibility for facilitating the Parts of the process that you need to ensure other people on your team are aware of as well. So that's what we're talking about today.
- [19:52]
B
Why are we not going through the details? Because again, that's where you start teaching the entire process with the core of the evaluation, which is the interview. That's what the interview is. It's an evaluation. Okay. And then its resolution of the evaluation in the interview results capture process. Okay, actually I keep saying process. It's interview results capture meeting, irc, M, India, Romeo, Charlie, Mike. You can expose your directs to the rest of the process gradually and organically over time and again. If you're a licensee, we encourage you in terms of if you're going to be thinking about teaching your directs how to interview. If you're a licensee, you can share this written guidance, the show notes. And by the way, if you don't know it, if you haven't heard yet, folks, we now have emailed show notes for every podcast that comes out. If you're a licensee, you can go to the website, you can log in, you can click on your account, and you can go to Communications Preferences.
- [20:48]
A
I think it's mailing list subscriptions or mailing list preferences.
- [20:51]
B
And you can choose to have the show notes from our Manager Tools and Executive Tools and Career Tools podcast emailed to you when the podcast comes out. That's particularly good. I have a feeling this is going to be a two part cast after all, because I'm excited about hiring processes and so I go off on tangents at times. But if you have a two parter like this one, you don't have to wait a week for the second part to come out. You can read the show notes. And because you have the show notes, you could forward this to your directs and say, hey guys, I. I want to let you know something I just learned about how I'm going to bring you all up to speed on interviewing because I'm going to ask many of you to interview candidates because they're going to be your peers. Not just because I want your voice involved, but also because I want you to learn how to interview. For those of you who become managers, heaven forbid you become a manager. And that's when you learn how to
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A
interview, which I think is the case for many, many of us.
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It is. It's the standard. We don't have to teach him or her in interviewing. She's an individual contributor. Well, let me tell you, if I have an individual contributor, who's my number two, the idea that I wouldn't have her conduct an interview on a candidate that's going to be a peer of hers. We won't be a number two. Right. It's crazy. You'd be crazy not to do that. So we encourage you to share this written guidance with your direct and for the record, in case you're wondering that kind, remember, are the license you have with us the intellectual property you have to protect our intellectual property. But that kind of sharing doesn't violate the terms of our intellectual property. That binds us and you together. And the license.
- [22:27]
A
Yeah, absolutely. A wrong hire costs your team months of momentum and your organization real money. And when everyone on your hiring panel uses a different process or no process at all, you're not just evaluating candidates, you're comparing impressions. The Effective Hiring Manager conference gives every manager on your team a structured behavioral interviewing process proven to predict what a candidate will actually do, not just what they say. Consistent, repeatable, and it works. Bring it to your team or register individually by visiting us at manager-tools.com forward/ehmc. Okay, so now that we've covered what, what amounts to recap stuff, we're going to go into the new content, starting with teaching your directs the process. And folks, we highly recommend that you have your directs read Effective Hiring Manager book. It lays out the entire process in our very usual manager tools, detailed, specific, behavioral way. Just buy them the book. I mean, it's available on Kindle. Assign the reading of the book a chapter by chapter and make sure that everyone reads as a group or as individuals, one chapter a week and they're going to learn the entire process and be prepared to be then a valuable part of the hiring process. Plus, it's going to save you the hiring manager in this case in terms of your, your training them. It's gonna save you so much time and energy. I mean, just.
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B
We'll train for you.
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A
Yeah, exactly. So much easier. Just have them read the book. Read a chapter by chapter book club essentially, and talk about it as a team.
- [24:13]
B
Yeah. How to eat an elephant one bite at a time. And you know what? Tell them you don't have to go home and read this. You can read it at work. If you're eating lunch at your desk, put your feet up, eat your lunch and read the book. Yeah, and I would argue there are a lot of people who like audiobooks. I do not. And some of you have been with us for a long time. Remember that when the first book came out, Effective Manager book came out before effective. Effective Manager second edition came out. I decided I was not going to narrate the audiobook. And the reason I said was I thought it was a good reason. I was wrong. The good reason that I had was because you'd already heard all this stuff in podcasts we had put out. If you want to get the gist of Effective Hiring Manager, we had already covered all those topics, almost all of them anyway, in previous podcasts over the previous 15 years before the book came out. So I didn't record Effective Manager Book one. And man, did our community not like it. And even though the publisher said, oh, the person who's going to read it is going to be quite knowledgeable about business and so on, well, they mispronounced a whole bunch of famous people's names and they they clearly didn't know how to emphasize certain words that were particularly important. So on. But in the Effective Hiring Manager book, I relented and I'm the voice for the Effective Hiring Manager. Now. If you don't like my voice, then don't. Don't have your people listen to it by audiobook. We also recommend, and Sarah mentioned this earlier, sending your directs to an Effective Hiring Manager conference before they're a manager. Okay. They're conducted through various cities across the USA and they're often overseas as well. They get to practice interview, creating questions, listening to answers, and drawing conclusions. They also get to practice probing. They have to actually interrupt us as we're giving an answer or as a recorded answer, all of which are key skills and never taught in the standard interviewing process training. That's the best way to teach the process, the book, and the conference, no question.
- [26:21]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for joining us folks. Join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only.
- [26:35]
B
Five stars only. Please leave.