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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah and I'm Mark. Today's podcast, Top 10 Hiring Mistakes, Number 8, Unprepared. Part 1 of 2.
- [00:12]
B
This guidance answers these questions. What are the most common mistakes in hiring? By the way, there are a billion of them. What preparation should I do before an interview? And why is being unprepared dangerous for an interview?
- [00:27]
A
If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Great leaders never stop sharpening their skills. With the executive Tools license, you'll get unlimited access to our full library of podcasts, show notes, videos, and tools designed for real life leadership challenges. Stay ahead at manager-tools.com licenses. Hey, Mark.
- [00:56]
B
Hey, Sarah.
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A
All right, today we are talking about interviewing. Yes, we are continuing. Is that right? Continuing a series.
- [01:03]
B
This is number eight. We started with number ten. And number nine. And we will get. We're going to do eight. We're going to go all the way to number one, top ten hire mistakes.
- [01:11]
A
Nice. And today we're talking about unpreparedness on both sides. Really. And folks, a highly effective interviewer knows that the interview's results are predetermined. I mean, before the interview even begins. And you might be thinking, how is that even possible? I don't understand how you could know. Well, if you have to ask, it's a pretty good sign that you've not been fully prepared for the interviews you've conducted. So one thing we know for sure is preparation, both for the candidate and for the interviewer is what interviewing is really all about.
- [01:46]
B
And what's funny about this, Sarah, I'm sorry, I gotta interrupt here because of course, I've spent a lot of my life interviewing as a recruiter and as a hire, as an owner and so on. And to me, that sentence is one of the most important things we're going to say in this cast. Preparation, both for the candidate and for the interviewer, is what interviewing is all about. But the point is with that sentence is that everyone assumes that the candidate prepares because they had to prepare for their interviews. The analogy to interviewing, being an interviewee versus an interviewer, is I like being a passenger in a car. Well, I've been a passenger in a car, so I should have no problem driving the car. And the big problem, one of the top 10 most things, that's why it's number eight, is candidates are prepared usually, and managers, hirers, interviewers are not. And it's too important to not be prepared.
- [02:45]
A
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Everyone assumes that the candidates ought to be at least attempting to be Prepared. Why would we then interviewers, if unprepared, expect a high level of success interviewing when we're unprepared. Yeah, exactly. We're unprepared and we're interviewing someone who is prepared. And yet we're expecting excellent results of this interaction.
- [03:12]
B
And there's another piece here that's really important. You cannot be good at hiring if you're not good at preparation for interviewing. Now, what most people do, and this is another one of those classic mistakes, is they equate hiring with interviewing. No, that's wrong. Interviewing is a big part of hiring, but it is not all of hiring. And so you have to ask yourself, okay, when I think of hiring, most managers do. When I think about hiring, I think about speed. Right. I need a body. But when it comes to preparation, it's just the opposite. You should be slowing down, you should be getting ready. If you can spend a half an hour preparing, you will have saved hours in interviewing. Not only that, you'll increase the chances that you'll feel confident about your decision, yes or no, moving forward or making off or whatever.
- [04:03]
A
So today we're going to talk about how you prepare.
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B
Yeah. So we've got four major points. First, we're going to talk about a version of Horseman's two by two hiring matrix, which is comparing the prepared candidate to the unprepared interviewer. And then we're going to have three key points. Alpha, bravo and Charlie. The first preparation is know what you want to hire for. Behaviorally. Okay, not just an idea in your head, but behaviorally. Preparation, bravo. Know the candidate. You have to understand, you have to look at what the candidate has told you about themselves. And then preparation, Charlie, you need to know how you're going to decide. And there's a process for that.
- [04:48]
A
Yeah. So we're going to start with the two by two hiring matrix where we can do some comparisons between prepared and. Or unprepared interviewers and prepared and or unprepared candidates. Really? Because if you think about it using a two by two matrix, there are four possible scenarios when it comes to the interview itself. If you imagine on each axis of the two by two box is a person, it's either the interviewer or the candidate. And one of those two states, prepared or unprepared. That means the scenarios are prepared candidate versus prepared interviewer, prepared candidate versus unprepared interviewer, unprepared candidate versus prepared interviewer, and unprepared interviewer versus unprepared candidate.
- [05:42]
B
Yes. Which is literally.
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A
Yeah, I Just, yeah, shake my head.
- [05:46]
B
Chaos.
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A
Chaos.
- [05:48]
B
Look, we know you guys are smart. If you're listening, we don't have to go through all four combinations to realize that one of them from the interviewer's perspective. Now we're talking to mostly interviewers here, although I hope interviewees listen to this as well. The tragic combination is an unprepared interviewer interviewing a prepared candidate. That's the tragic one, right? Because the candidate's prepared, but the interviewer is not prepared enough to make a really good distinction and ends up saying no more often than he should. And then there's one of them that's dangerous and that's an unprepared interviewer with an unprepared candidate. And so the simple lesson from looking at the two by two matrix, if you think about those possible outcomes, is that interviewer preparation really, really matters. I'm not going to say that if you've totally prepared, it's a foregone conclusion. But what I can say is if you're totally prepared, when you reach your conclusion, you will be completely convinced of it. If you're an interviewer who comes out of interviews and has doubts or concerns, or I think, but maybe not, or there was this good or that bad, by the way, you're interviewing a human being, there's no perfection. If you're doubting, if you're wondering, if you're pondering, that's because you were unprepared.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And if you prepare, you won't have that problem anymore.
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A
That's exactly it. Because an unprepared interviewer decreases the chances that they will even be able to hire a competent and prepared candidate. To your point, Mark, they might completely pass them by due to the fact that that unprepared interviewer is completely incapable of distinguishing the difference between good and bad, they don't know what they don't know.
- [07:38]
B
And even if you've gotten lucky, if the candidate is prepared and they perceive that you were unprepared, you may want to hire them and they don't accept your offer. And that's the mistake that managers make. There's two parts to the hiring process. Getting offers and taking offers. The moment you make an offer, the the power passes, the control passes to the candidate. And managers like, well, I'm pretty sure that if I offer somebody a job, they'll take it. No, that's not true. Particularly not true in hot hiring markets or tight hiring markets. Look, the absolute minimum standard that any interviewer must meet to faithfully carry out their responsibilities in making what we have said for years now, two decades now, hiring is the most important strategic decision that managers make. And the minimum standard in order for you to meet that level of significance of a decision is you've got to be prepared. And you know what failure to do so. If some executives, you know, we talk often about Jamie Dimon, whom I coached 30 years ago, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase. If Jamie Dimon saw a manager in his organization, I certainly could say this about Elon Musk, I suspect I could say it about Tim Cook. I could certainly say it about a couple of the CEOs of Walmart that I worked with. If they saw a manager interviewing a young person, or maybe not a young person, but a new potential hire, and the candidate was well prepared, they were sharp, they were smart, they were doing their best and they saw an unprepared, to your point, phoning it in, manager, distracted, hasn't read the resume, doesn't understand what this person's background is, just doing it on a treadmill of four or five interviews.
- [09:30]
A
Eating a sandwich. I've heard that one before. Oh my God, my interviewer was eating a sandwich.
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B
Yeah, if they saw you, the minimum you would get is a butt chewing. The maximum you'd get is they might tell you directly, they don't, may not fire you directly, they don't want to throw their power around that way. But they'll go to your boss and say, get rid of that guy. I'm not going to have that. I'm not going to have our company, a public company, well known interview somebody. And by the way, if you're a well known public company, people are desperate to interview for you. One of the mistakes that candidates make and with it today is not about candidate preparation, it's about interviewer preparation. But one of the mistakes that candidates make is they're only interested in B2C companies, business to consumer. And the reason why is because they consume your products.
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A
Yeah, they know who you are.
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B
Right? And I say Walmart, everybody's like, oh no, Walmart's not on my list. Well, let me tell you something. Walmart is the best managed company in America for the last 50 years. And I'm sure there are some overseas as well too. But even so, what do Walmart, Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Meta and Google and Amazon all have in common? You can buy their products. If I said Applied Materials, one of the most storied companies in the history of Silicon Valley, necessary for every chip made in the world. Be like, what's Applied Materials?
- [11:03]
A
Yeah.
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B
And so imagine that this kid, this young person, is interviewing and she is jazzed, she's excited. And then they meet a manager. And by the way, if they're in school, if they're in college or an MBA program, they may not have been exposed to that many managers. And they meet you, and you're eating a sandwich. I'm so glad you meet that example, Sarah, because I'm going to ride that horse all the way to the end of this cab.
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A
You should.
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B
Are you eating a sandwich or are you showing the due diligence to really say, I understand this is my contribution to my organization because the decision I make about a process or a system or whether we're going to spend money on this or that in the next month or two, those will not be remembered by anybody ever. But the people you hire are going to be running your company someday. So the manager who does not prepare for an interview is not meeting the minimum standard for her most important responsibility and probably ought to be sanctioned for it.
- [12:07]
A
Yeah, agreed. All right, so I feel like we hit that pretty hard. Now we're going to go into the preparation steps.
- [12:14]
B
If there are listeners who didn't think that I hit that pretty hard, I don't. You know, I'm implying something that no one has probably ever heard before. You mean if I'm not prepared, I might get fired? No, I don't think you'll likely get fired, but there are places that if that happened, you would get fired.
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A
Yeah. All right, preparation steps we're going to start with first. That is, know what you want behaviorally. This is the first layer of preparation for an interviewer. It's total clarity on what the role that you're hiring for is and what's expected of it, what you want out of that candidate. Since the ultimate outcome of a successful interview is a hired candidate meeting and ideally exceeding the responsibility to the role, what that means is we must start with a clear understanding of what the role is and what behaviors we would expect from a person who was doing that role.
- [13:17]
B
Yeah, you know, it's funny about this. There's. You just said something that's really profound that I bet 90% of the people listen to this didn't hear. The ultimate outcome of a successful interview is a hired candidate meeting and ideally exceeding the responsibilities of the role. I'd be willing to bet you that 80 to 90% of the managers listening to this right now thought you were going to stop with the line. Since the ultimate outcome of a successful interview is a hired candidate, that's what they think.
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A
Yeah.
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B
People think that the purpose of hiring is to get a hire. That's not the purpose. It's not to fill the role. It's to have the role be filled by somebody who's excellent at it. And too many people think of interviewing as a tactical thing. I just got to fill this position. I just got to fill this position. In fact, I don't have my list in front of me right now, but I think the number one out of the 10, and I'm not going to say that they're guaranteed to be in rank order, but the number one mistake for interviewers is the warm body.
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A
Yeah. Oh, my gosh. When people say, I just want a warm body, I'm like, yeah, congratulations. You get to work with a warm body.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Awful.
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B
Yeah. You might have to kick them to make sure they're weird, but they might be warm still.
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A
I'm doing all your work for you. Are you around?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Yeah. You don't want a warm body, folks.
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B
And, you know, it's interesting. I'm not sure we've done a good job with this in our interviewer podcasts and guidance. Of course, we have the effective hiring manager book.
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A
And conference.
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B
Yeah, and conference. And we also have plenty of podcasts about how to be a good interviewer. But, you know, I don't know that we make enough of the statement. We have said many times that what an effective interviewer does. We said this to candidates a thousand times, but not to managers, to hiring people, interviewers. What an effective interviewer, not manager, but what an effective interviewer does is try to imagine the candidate doing the job they have open while they're interviewing them. Okay. And for interviewees, what we teach is something called the general store analogy. Make a database. That's overstatement, but make a spreadsheet, if you will. Create a record of all the things you've done and then analyze them for skills and abilities and traits and characteristics, and then apply those to each one of the interviews. I would argue that in the last 50 years, that may be my most important contribution to the concept of interviewing. The idea of candidates doing a general store analogy and figuring out have done these 15 things. What skills and abilities and traits and characteristics of those various things teach about me. What is this company hiring me for? And therefore, which of these response, which of these accomplishments should I be highlighting in my interview to show that my skills and abilities align with what I believe the skills and abilities of job are? But, Sarah, I honestly will tell you I'm not Sure. We've ever said. And now I realize we need to build out some of our guidance here to make it more clear. We've never said that on the side of the interviewer. What you're trying to do is imagine the candidate doing the job that you have open. Obviously, that means you having great clarity on what the role entails. And when I say role entails, what I mean is what behaviors do we want them to engage in?
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A
Yes, exactly.
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B
And if you're not a regular manager tools listener, you probably underestimate the level of detail we're talking about in terms of behaviors. And usually what it means is figuring out what behaviors the role requires from an incumbent, from somebody who's already in the role. You shouldn't be comparing it to the job description. You should be comparing it to Amanda Chase, who just got promoted and she was good in that job. What did Amanda do? Maybe you can't find that person, but that ought to be your standard in the interview. You can soften it for somebody you believe could grow into Amanda. But this is a fundamental problem. Managers think they can just go in and chat with people. To me, I don't know. You could argue with me if you want, Sarah. But to me, this is a corruption of power. And it is a response to so many managers, the fear they had being interviewed and seeing the manager, the interviewer who was interviewing them, sort of being disconnected and sort of like, well, I'll make my decision and maybe I like you, maybe I don't. But that then implies that it's all about power. It's not. It's about preparation. It's about knowing the job. Heaven forbid you find a great candidate and you don't know it because you haven't matched their behaviors, their skills, their traits, their abilities, their characteristics to the job that Amanda Chase is doing or did before she got promoted.
- [18:12]
A
Yeah. And if people are new to listening to manager tools, they probably don't understand. And we're going to go into it in a second here, folks. The level of granularity with which you're talking about identifying the behavioral characteristics of a role. I think some of us think that we know what those behaviors are. But I also think. Yeah, and they don't. I also think that the hesitancy surrounding having multiple individual interviews done of a candidate is born of this lack of clarity. I know what I'm looking for. I'll know it when I see it's insurance. But I can't possibly communicate to Mark what I'm looking for here.
- [19:00]
B
Sure.
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A
So I'm going to be the measurer. It's too vague. Exactly. It's more of a feeling. It's something that only I could identify. And folks, we're talking about the opposite of that, right? We're talking about clarity, specificity. Specificity. Clarity that allows any person to objectively compare what we're looking for to whether or not this individual possesses.
- [19:24]
B
Yeah, I'll even go a step further and I'll. If you'll allow me a couple minutes of a discursion here. And aside, there is a company called ddi Development Dimensions International. They're an hr, not services, but products provider and probably what they're most famous for. Now, let me say that differently, what I know them for and what the vast majority of my conversations with people in the professional world in the last 40 years around DDI has been around something called competencies. I'm not sure that they invented it, but DDI's core, one of its core offerings is this idea of competencies where DDI has determined these are the competencies you need for these jobs. Now, just for the record, guys, we're not recommending you go and become a big fan of ddi. Nothing against them, they're nice people, they work hard, I respect them. We don't agree with competencies, but the point is DDI has dug into jobs and looked for the behaviors. Now, often when they describe competencies, they're not in behavioral language and that creates a problem. There's a lot of leeway in the interpretation of what DDI's competencies actually mean. And I will tell you the ultimate downside of competencies. And by the way, if you're a DDI person, if you work for DDI and you're listening to us, we mean what we say, we respect you, we disagree with you. The problem with DDI's competency model is that HR wants to jump onto the bandwagon of competencies and then apply competencies to everything in the organization. And that tends to break down very, very quickly. In fact, TDI is probably the most common thing I see on the shelves of managers that are gathering dust and thus the term shelfware. Like, I have a deck, I have a book, I have a this, I have a that, and I never look at it. It's in my office. People, people can see that I'm a competent manager because I have all these leather bound books in my office. But, but competencies is an attempt to do that. It's not, in my opinion, a successful attempt. But there are people who believe as we do that just aren't willing to drill down all the way to behavior. So. Okay, sorry about that discursion there.
- [21:38]
A
No, I like that. Are you still struggling to find the right hires? Our effective Hiring manager conference gives you a step by step process to writing better job descriptions, screening candidates and running interviews that actually lead to better on the job performance. Make better hiring decisions this year. Sign up@manager-tools.com training. Okay, so folks, we're going to use a little analogy here to kind of give you a sense of what we're talking about. It's not enough to think I want someone just like Wende. That is what we would consider to be a lack of preparation. Disguised as preparation.
- [22:24]
B
Yeah.
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A
Instead the effective interviewer goes further and says we. Well, if Wendy is my assistant, what did she do to make her exceptional at that role? And what behaviors? Yeah, literally the best. Yeah, exactly. And what behaviors then would I look for in a candidate to make me believe that they could approach that same level of competence?
- [22:52]
B
Yes, the effective interviewer knows that from an organizational effectiveness perspective, humans, and it's going to sound weird, guys, but this is the sign, this is the theory that humans are only devices that transport behaviors and behaviors are what create greatness in organizations. In fact, I would argue in the next hundred years companies will stop saying, as companies become more and more technologically advanced and so on, they will stop saying that humans are our most important asset. They only say that as a marketing term anyway. What they'll realize is their most important asset is behaviors from those humans. And we don't want to hire humans, we want to hire behaviors. Unfortunately, behaviors are not for sale. You have to buy the human and you get the behaviors with them. Effective interviewers know that they oughtn't want another Wendy because there's only one Wendy. But rather what they should want is someone who behaves the way Wendy does. Now look, I get it, guys. It sounds terrible what I just said, that human beings are transporters of behavior. We regret the clumsy analogy. That's a little too, I don't know, it's a little too inhumane to talk of it that way. We hope you understand the meeting and take it with the good heartedness that we intended. Our point is what you want is behaviors, right? And so when you interview people, you have to know what behaviors you want.
- [24:26]
A
And what I would say is those of you that are familiar with disc, you'll probably know that we don't recommend that you use someone's disc assessment to make a hiring decision because of Things like this. Right. You're blinded by the, oh, well, they kind of act the same. They kind of seem to be similar. Maybe this person will have those same skills. And it's until you get to the behaviors that you have more information. And that's essentially what you need to know, is what behaviors you believe the person in your open position must engage in to be effective. The effective interviewer thinks through their open position and goes far beyond what is written in a simple job description.
- [25:15]
B
To be clear, you still need to know the job description.
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A
Yes.
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B
Right. That's a baseline thing.
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A
Yeah. And we're not trying to demean the job description here, folks. What we're trying to do is suggest to you that the job description is oftentimes based upon, written for marketing rather than containing behavioral specifics that will help you make a decision about whether or not to hire that individual.
- [25:42]
B
Yeah. A different way of thinking about this that doesn't involve job descriptions is to just use plain language with yourself and say, if you want to help your preparation, ask yourself two questions. What do I want this person to do? And believe it or not, folks, most of you can't answer that immediately for people. If you have some people working for you that you're not going to have to fill their roles, you probably couldn't right now, say off the top of your head, this is what I would want someone replacing Wendy to do.
- [26:14]
A
Yeah. And the answer can't be, well, what Wendy did.
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B
That's.
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A
That's not the answer.
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B
Because you're focusing on the person and not on the behaviors.
- [26:22]
A
Not the behaviors. Exactly.
- [26:24]
B
And the second thing is, how do I want them to do it? Look, yes, absolutely. Start with the statements in the job description and then build them into behavioral standards. The answers to these questions we're talking about should be behavioral. And, gosh, why wouldn't you? If you have four analysts. I'm going to use a silly sort of generic term. If you have four analysts working for you, why wouldn't you, as boss, where role power can help you? Ask them five questions. Don't ask them what their favorite part of the job is. And their least favorite part of the job is. What behaviors do you engage in that makes you successful? What behaviors would you like to get better at? What behaviors do you think it takes to make a person in this job be really, really good? Ask the people whose jobs you're filling what it is, and they'll probably come up with a couple that you haven't thought of. Yeah.
- [27:21]
A
So a more concrete, specific example here. It's not enough to say the candidate replacing Wendy must be smart.
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B
Yeah, that's funny.
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A
That's not enough.
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B
Yeah, no, not at all.
- [27:33]
A
We don't doubt that you want that. We don't doubt that you want someone who is smart. But smart is far too subjective, and it's not teachable to anybody else who might be interviewing and assessing whether or not Wendy's replacement or whether or not this candidate could make a good replacement for Wendy.
- [27:55]
B
Exactly.
- [27:56]
A
You can't communicate in a subjective way and expect a good result.
- [28:01]
B
Objective result.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So, okay, but now let's take that and let's. Let's tease it out a little bit and give them. This is how I thought of it when I was hiring Wendy. I'd say, okay, what can we do to make smart behavioral? To turn it into a criterion that we could use? So we would argue that smart becomes behavioral. With examples like this candidate, she or he can talk specifically, at length and accurately about the state of current hiring practices at large organizations. For those of you who don't know, Wendy's no longer with the firm. She's decided to move on to something new and better. But after 18 years with us, I hired her first as my assistant, and then she ran our career tools business for what, 10, 15 years? Yeah, I think.
- [28:50]
A
Yeah.
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B
And she's the smartest person I've ever known about careers. So obviously, I don't want Wendy. I want someone who can talk specifically, at length and accurately about the state of current hiring practice at large organizations. And even if I think my candidate is smart, if they can't do that, and I need that behavior, all the smarts in the world, even though everybody wants to hire smart people, is not useful. Or here's another example of behavioral can state specific examples where he or she was able to persuade someone to change their behavior by sharing specific knowledge of techniques that improve interview outcomes. If you're hiring somebody to do the job that Wendy used to do for us, and they don't have specific examples of teaching people, persuading people, inspiring people to change their preparation or whatever, and getting ready for an interview, that person's not going to be successful, even if they are quote, unquote, smart. Now, look, you might be thinking, wait, hold on a second. I couldn't judge that. I don't. You know, you're talking about Wendy's role here. I couldn't judge that. Okay, fine. But if Sarah or I were trying to replace the irreplaceable Wendy, and we never will, either one of us could evaluate the candidate's knowledge level and behavioral abilities around these hiring practices. That's part of our job. The fact that you can't. Please don't denigrate the example simply because, oh, I. I couldn't do that. By the same token, neither Sarah, nor I, nor Mike, nor Amanda, nor other people in this company could evaluate some of the behaviors that you can.
- [30:33]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [30:33]
B
So it's just an analogy for us.
- [30:35]
A
Yeah. The way I kind of think about that, that whole concept there, Mark, is you ought to be able to communicate with clarity the role in such a way that a complete stranger who has never, ever met Wendy in their life could assess whether or not this candidate could do that job. They don't need to know who Wendy is or what Wendy did, because you're able to communicate with that kind of clarity. Thank you so much, folks. Join us again next week as we continue today's Talk Topic. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only. Please.