Top 10 Hiring Mistakes - #8 - Unprepared - Part 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: Manager Tools

Episode: Top 10 Hiring Mistakes - #8 Unprepared (Part 2)
Release Date: January 26, 2026
Hosts: Sarah (A), Mark (B)

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Overview

This episode dives into the eighth most common hiring mistake: being unprepared as an interviewer. Expanding on Part 1, Sarah and Mark examine why preparation is crucial and how failing to define behavioral expectations, understand candidates, and determine your evaluation process leads to poor hiring. They provide actionable, real-world advice drawn from years of management experience, focusing on reproducible, professional processes for effective interviewing.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Why Liking a Candidate Isn’t Enough

• The Importance of Behavioral Specifics

  • Simply wanting to like someone is not enough; you must translate "liking" into specific, interviewable behaviors.
    • “It is completely reasonable to assess whether or not you would enjoy working with them when it comes to hiring them. But ... the idea of the criterion is wasted if it’s not turned into behavioral specifics that you and others can interview against.” (A, 01:04)
  • Relying on gut feeling or affinity is "cheap" and unprofessional. Professional managers use rigor and preparation.
    • “Professionals know better than to be satisfied with easy or cheap… for important behaviors… We reject easy and simple.” (B, 01:28)

• Mark's Example of Behavioral Definitions for "Liking"

  • When hiring his own assistant (Wendy), Mark looked for specific traits like:
    • Laughs at the absurdity of a question before answering
    • Makes candid, risky asides that reveal non-mainstream career ideas
    • Admits (not boasts about) working long hours
    • Shares pejorative opinions about mainstream corporate HR
    • Laughs at obscure historical or literary references
      • “Mind you, this person, it ended up being Wendy. But this person was going to be the single most important relationship professionally for me… I get to pick who I like.” (B, 05:37)
  • These are idiosyncratic, but justified because the role would require close daily work.
    • “If you plan to work with this person extensively for an extended period of time, why wouldn't you want that person to be in line with something that gave you joy?” (A, 10:01)

2. Defining the Behavioral Requirements for the Job

• The Core of Effective Interviewing

  • To be effective, interviewers must define the key behaviors indicative of success in the target role and create questions that elicit evidence of those behaviors from candidates.
    • “An interviewer becomes effective … when they've defined specific behaviors that are really indicative of success in the role and then have gone a step further, … creating questions that will give candidates the ability to communicate their success using those behaviors.” (A, 02:32)
  • Candidates who can’t demonstrate those behaviors "eliminate themselves from consideration."

• Avoiding False Positives

  • The purpose of behavioral questions is to “gatekeep” for needed behaviors, not just allow the candidate to tell stories unrelated to your needs.
    • “Candidates come in and they’re talking about stuff I’m not interested in… Well, that’s good for them. But guess what? I’m the gatekeeper…” (B, 03:35)

3. The Danger of Interviewing Without Preparation

• Preparation is Key

  • Preparation is not optional: “Too many managers conduct interviews without preparation. And folks, to be clear, we would only wish that on our own competitors.” (A, 33:53)
  • Preparation includes:
    • Fully understanding job requirements
    • Developing a process for deciding (not improvising once candidates are present)
    • Training your interviewers

• The Myth of the 'Gut Feel' Interviewer

  • The belief that experienced hirers can “just know” is thoroughly debunked.
    • “Don’t let that person interview. We have ample data... that person lagged everybody else in terms of their predictability, their ability to accurately predict performance.” (B, 13:18)

4. How to Prepare Effectively

a. Knowing the Job

• You must know exactly what the job requires—the “known”—so you can measure the “unknown” (the candidate) against it.
  • “Your role as an interviewer is to compare an unknown to a known. The job is the known…The unknown is the candidate...” (A, 16:14)

b. Knowing the Candidate

• Before the interview, thoroughly review:
  • The résumé (responsibilities vs. actual accomplishments)
  • LinkedIn profile
  • References (if they pass the interview)
  • “You need to spend time analyzing that resume. Please consider their LinkedIn profile. Be ready to call any references…” (A, 17:12)
• Don’t mistake job titles for evidence of skills—dig for how well they performed in ways relevant to your job.
  • “It’s not enough to have done, ‘done’ a similar job. The professional interviewer digs… at how well the candidate has performed…” (B, 18:14)

c. Developing Interview Questions

• Prepare at least five behavioral questions based on the candidate’s actual experience as described on their résumé.
  • “It would really, really shock us if a well prepared manager or interviewer had less than five behavioral interview questions for a candidate based upon the information they gleaned from the resume.” (A, 22:59)
• For each accomplishment, probe how relevant it is and how it was achieved.
  • “For every accomplishment… ask yourself two questions. First, how relevant is this accomplishment to the job I want them to do? Second, how did they accomplish it?” (B, 22:07)

d. Deciding How You’ll Decide

• Define ahead of time what your evaluation and decision process will be; don’t make it up under deadline pressure.
  • “Too many managers do not determine what their process for making the final decision is going to be until they have a candidate…” (B, 26:23)
• The Manager Tools recommendation:
  1. The purpose of an interview is to say no—have a bias toward caution.
  2. Have multiple interviewers, especially peers, to avoid one-dimensional impressions.
     • “Multiple people interview a candidate. Too many candidates will behave distinctly differently with a peer than they will with the boss…” (B, 30:54)
  3. Use the Interview Results Capture Meeting process (a keystone Manager Tools method) so that everyone involved follows the same process and standards.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I get to pick who I like. I’m not going to pick somebody with a wacko, absurd sense of humor… I would define them with some of these behaviors. Laughs at the absurdity of a question before answering…”
  — Mark, on elaborating job-specific behavioral criteria (05:37)

• “The purpose of interviewing questions is to reveal behavioral experiences of the candidate that align with the behavioral requirements of the job for which you are hiring.”
  — Sarah (08:43)

• “The purpose of an interview is to say no. And we urge you that your first thought on the hiring decision ought to be: if I have any doubts at all, I must say no.”
  — Sarah (29:31)

• “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
  — Mark, on the futility of hoping candidates are qualified without evidence (21:59)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Assessing ‘Liking’ and Behavioral Criteria:
  01:05–07:55
• Defining and Justifying Individual Criteria:
  07:55–10:00
• Why Not to Go with Your Gut:
  12:25–15:57
• Preparation: Knowing the Job vs. the Candidate:
  16:14–18:14
• Digging for Behavioral Detail:
  18:14–20:27
• How to Develop and Use Behavioral Questions:
  22:59–23:35
• Process: Deciding How to Decide:
  26:23–29:31
• Three Core Decision Recommendations:
  29:31–33:53
• Summary & Superpower of Repeatable Process:
  33:53–34:57

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Final Takeaways

• Effective hiring hinges on preparation: know the job, know the candidate, and know your process for deciding.
• Avoid taking shortcuts—defining specific, measurable behaviors is foundational.
• Use behavioral interviewing and dig for relevant, detailed evidence.
• Have a pre-defined, multi-person decision process, and always prefer to say "no" over a risky "yes."
• The discipline of preparation is the “superpower” that differentiates consistently successful interviewers—and makes hiring increasingly repeatable and reliable over time.

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For more resources, tools, and Manager Tools’ deep-dive episodes on hiring, visit manager-tools.com.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah and I'm Mark. Today's podcast, Top 10 Hiring Mistakes Number 8 Unprepared. Part 2 of 2.

[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?

[A]

If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Are you working toward your next role? If you're thinking about leadership, start building the skills that prepare you for advancement. Manager Tools Effective manager conferences teach you how to build trust, demonstrate professionalism, and communicate like someone ready for responsibility. Explore upcoming [e-mail] Training folks, it's completely okay for an interviewer to think during their preparation. I want to like working with this person.

[B]

I want to like them.

[A]

I want to like them. I want to enjoy them. I want to have fun with them. It is completely reasonable to assess whether or not you would enjoy working with them when it comes to hiring them. But the idea of the criterion is wasted if it's not turned into behavioral specifics that you and others can interview against.

[B]

Yeah, now look, the amateur manager or interviewer says to herself, well, I don't really have to come up with specifics for liking someone. All I have to do is sense whether or not I like them while I'm interviewing them. And look, guys, that's easy, but it's also cheap. Professionals know better than to be satisfied with easy or cheap. Sometimes. Yeah, it's totally true that easy, simply uncomplicated, works just fine and all the better for it. And less time spent on that, more time on something more important. Good to go. But for important behaviors. And what is not more important than choosing people who will run your company in its future? We reject easy and simple. And we take the time to do the preparation to make sure we're rigorous in our process. And so in the case of liking. Actually, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We're going to come back to liking here in just a minute.

[A]

Yeah, folks, an interviewer becomes effective and therefore a professional when they've defined specific behaviors that are really indicative of of success in the role and then have gone a step further, that is, and created questions that will give candidates the ability to communicate their success using those behaviors. A candidate who either doesn't agree with those gatekeeping behaviors or does not have the experience using those behaviors to positive outcomes, or simply doesn't answer the question regarding the use of those behaviors thereby eliminates themself from consideration.

[B]

And here's something you may not have heard in what Sarah just said. She started by saying, a candidate who doesn't agree with those gatekeeping behaviors, you might be thinking, well, I don't really have that many candidates arguing with me about my criteria.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

Yeah, right. You're missing the point. A candidate who hasn't prepared to persuade you of their behaviors in that level, in fact may very well be arguing in that job, may very well be arguing with you without arguing about whether or not that's a reasonable criterion. I see this all the time. Candidates come in and they're talking about stuff I'm not interested in. And you begin to realize, oh, they're talking about stuff they're interested in. Well, that's good for them. But guess what? I'm the gatekeeper and I'm interested in Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. They're interested in Delta, Echo and Foxtrot. Hey, good for them. I wish them well. Go to a company that honors Delta, Echo and Foxtrot, but you're not for me. And the only way you can do that is with preparation. And look, the problem with liking and as a criterion is that if the interviewer finds many of the candidates answers suitable and on point, remember now, this is just looking at other behaviors. You will begin to like them regardless of whether you're specifically looking for likable. Again, likable for the hiring manager in terms of behaviors. That's dangerous ground you don't want to assume in an interview.

[A]

Exactly. And folks, so let's talk a little bit about what behaviors might be identified that would justify a hiring manager liking to work with another interview or another individual, a candidate being interviewed. And it's obviously going to be different criteria for everyone. We're going to try and give you guys some examples of what to like someone might look like in a behavioral sense. And since we're talking about would be for us.

[B]

This is for us.

[A]

Yeah, for us.

[B]

And Wendy.

[A]

And Wendy, exactly. And Mark, Wendy worked for you for 15 years.

[B]

Yeah, I think so.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So why don't you let them know some of the behaviors that justify your liking of Wendy.

[B]

And mind you, this person, it ended up being Wendy. But this person was going to be the single most important person, most important relationship professionally for me. They were going to become my admin. They're going to go on to run career tools, obviously. And I have my own sense of humor. And so I get to pick who I like. I'm not going to pick somebody with a Wacko. Absurd sense of humor. Because I don't think I have a whacked out absurd sense of humor. But regardless. So I would define them with some of these behaviors. Laughs at the absurdity of a question before answering. I don't have any problem with that. If I ask a question of a candidate, if they're really smart, they'll know whether or not that's an intelligent question. And if they think it's off the reservation, they'll laugh at me. I'm okay with that. I have no problem. I want the person to know their own mind. Okay. Makes candid asides to questions, by the way, which are risky in many cases that reveal ideas about careers and hiring that are not mainstream. Admits to working long hours. Now listen carefully here. Admits to working long hours rather than trumpeting it. In other words, they're not bragging about long hours. Everybody says that, but they actually kind of apologize for, like, I can never turn off my brain, my work brain, which is kind of good for me because I didn't turn my brain off for 40 years. Still haven't. Those of you who are longtime listeners will appreciate this and maybe chuckle, but this is me again. This person's going to be my assistant. Shares pejorative opinions about mainstream corporate HR and career ideas. And this is probably a bonus round. But laughs at jokes with obscure historical, literary or Western canon references. Now, Wendy's British and I'm an Anglophile, and so she killed on all of those things. And here's. Here's what I think is important about that. People are probably thinking that seems a little idiosyncratic.

[A]

Yeah, that's very, very specific to you, Mark.

[B]

Yes. Because this person is going to report to me. And what was she? Our first hire? Our second hire ever.

[A]

Her and Maggie were like, within. Within a month? I think so.

[B]

And Maggie worked for Mike and Wendy worked for me. And I told Mike, we cannot be wrong about these first two people. We cannot. There's too much risk to the company to go from 2 to 4 to double in size. Imagine going from 100 to 200 and discovering that 50 of the second hundred are wrong. That absolutely. It just can't work. So here's what's funny about that last little bit we shared. Most of you managers would never dream of including those kinds of behaviors. That's too selfish. Too much about me, too narrow.

[A]

Exactly. And folks, if you're thinking that and you'd be normal to do so, those concerns reveal an underlying misunderstanding of the nature of interviewing. The purpose of interviewing questions is to reveal behavioral experiences of the candidate that align with the behavioral requirements of the job for which you are hiring. So going back to Mark's comment about Wendy being his assistant, if hiring Wendy as Mark's assistant meant that they would work hand in hand for almost 20 years, and that was absolutely the plan.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Then Mark determined that his sense of humor and drive and broad, literally, and canonical background would be best served by someone with similar tastes. And it worked.

[B]

Yeah, it did work.

[A]

You're the person hiring. These are your standards. If you plan to work with this person extensively for an extended period of time, why wouldn't you want that person to be in line with something that gave you joy?

[B]

And, you know, I said this. I mentioned this to somebody I don't know a couple days ago, and I was writing this, and they said, really? Yeah, I said I wanted to do a little bit of a tip of the hat to Wendy. I hope she hears about this podcast. I should probably send her the show notes. And they said, yeah, that's. I don't think people will do that. I said, yeah, they do it all the time. He says, yeah, I don't know about that. I said, oh, yeah, they do you. And you know about it. You're just not realizing it. And they said, what? New CEO gets hired, comes in, cleans house, brings all his own guy, brings all his own people in, or he gets promoted to become CEO internally, and he drags his people up and asks several of his senior vice presidents to go away? These are people I work with. I like them, they like me. They know my shorthand. It's going to save me a lot of time. It's a shame that the majority of managers think that what they personally want isn't a valid criterion for hiring. The fact is, it is valid as long as you take into consideration the ability of the candidate to develop and. And those behaviors are critical for the role and its success.

[A]

Yeah. And going back to the purpose of this entire podcast, folks, what all of this means in combination is if you're going to be an effective interviewer, you must understand the job for which you are hiring and develop behavioral requirements associated with. With doing that job well, and then evaluate the candidate against those behavioral standards by creating a series of exceptional interview questions that are going to highlight the behaviors that you are looking for.

[B]

Yeah. To save us time in this cast, we are not teaching you here how to create behavioral interviewing questions, because there are two ways to do that in the manager tools community, or one way is to listen to our Extensive guidance. I think it's called how to create behavioral interview questions. Right. And the other one is to use our interview creation tool to have our system create behavioral interview questions for you based on your analysis of a job.

[A]

Yep. All of our licensees, career tools, manager tools, executive tools have access to interview creation tool.

[B]

Okay, so next step, preparation. Bravo. Step two, knowing the candidate. Too many managers guys mistakenly believe that their colleagues who are great interviewers can simply walk into a room, ask a few questions and just know. Just know whether or not a candidate is right. And I'm going to take this a step further. I'm hiring interviewing partially because of my recruiter experience, but also because of my experience seeing it play out in both manager tools and enforcement and company before. I consider this to be a golden key. It's almost a silver bullet. The silver bullet of managing is 1 on ones, but the upstream silver bullet is hire well and you'll make managing, make managing easier. And I got to tell you, as an aside, if you've got somebody in your team who's old and he's experienced or she's experienced and you're like, yeah, I don't follow any of those systems or I just go with my gut. Don't let that person interview. We have ample data from 25, 30 years ago where we tested candidates who were doing a certain job at a very high level somewhere else and came in interview and the person who went with their gut, quote, unquote. We're recording this visually now for YouTube, but I'm doing Joey air quotes right now. That person lagged everybody else in terms of their predictability, their ability to accurately predict performance. It even goes a step further. We further found out, we asked around, how did that person get that reputation? You know what, it always, almost always boils down to one really good hire they made and suddenly now we can let them be an amateur, a luck seeking amateur for years and years and years hiring all kinds of people that don't do well. In fact, I've always wondered why HR hasn't ever done HR organizations haven't ever done what's the word after the fact review of who did these managers hire and which ones turned out good and.

[A]

Which ones didn't so they could identify the people hiring best in their organization and figure out what those people are doing.

[B]

Either teach the people who aren't or get rid of the managers who are hiring the people that don't turn out all that good. I'm amazed of it. So okay, it's silly and amateurish. To think that somebody can go with their gut. And you should not do that. And in the same way that you have the ability to insist on how your organization is run, you can insist on how your people, your subordinates, if you're a director or above how they interview. In fact, if you're a frontline manager, even you can insist on your direct reports. Whom we recommend should interview anybody who's going to join them. You should teach them how to interview. You could send them to our Effective Hiring Manager conference. You could listen to our podcast. You could read the book the Effective Hiring Manager. But regardless, you have to teach your people how to interview. So we don't have somebody who's been a passenger in a car suddenly think that that qualifies them to drive the car. Look, there are too many examples of experienced managers hiring people without a comprehensive evaluation and the candidate turns out to be highly effective as an employee. But folks, what you're talking about there is selection bias. That same grizzled veteran manager had missed plenty of candidates said no to, didn't like him, but they turned out great somewhere else. And this all comes back to preparation. And somebody who wants to interview without preparation, don't let them do it.

[A]

Yeah, folks, the only way. The only way to maximize your effectiveness as an interviewer is to study whatever you can about your candidate. Think about it. Your role as an interviewer is to compare an unknown to a known. The job.

[B]

That's a good way to say it. Yeah.

[A]

The job is the known. If you're doing your preparation work, you know the job and what it entails. The unknown is the candidate that's in front of you right now. So to figure out whether or not candidate whom you don't know could do the job which you know, you first, you must understand the job.

[B]

Yeah, but we only get a limited amount of time to know a candidate. So we have to do as much preparation as we can so that we can be maximize our effectiveness and get to know them during that very brief interviewing time. It is a really good sign of an experienced interviewer who is told a candidate is really good and then looks at their resume and critically and declines to interview them. That can only come from preparation. We're assuming that nobody's here is biased enough to say no to somebody because of where they went to school or whether they didn't.

[A]

Yeah, folks, frankly, sadly, a candidate's resume isn't enough, but it's all you have. So you've got to use that to go on. And you need to Spend time analyzing that resume. Please consider their LinkedIn profile. Be ready to call any references that they've got. If they pass the interviewer or, sorry, the, the interview itself. What have they done? How well did they do that thing? One of the top five, I would say, systemic errors manager tools sees occurring today in hiring is managers slash interviewers who simply look at the jobs a candidate has had, presumes and assumes what those jobs probably required, and then comes to a really quick conclusion that the candidate can probably do the job they've got. Because, I mean, they did this other job and that was a much harder job than the one that I've got for them to do. So of course they could do this one. You know what assumptions do?

[B]

That is total amateur hour. It's not enough to have done, quote, unquote, done a similar job. The professional interviewer digs it to get at how well the candidate has performed the job on the resume. And frankly, the only way you can do that is learn how to conduct behavioral interviews by asking behavioral interviewing questions and then be willing to probe because people don't talk in behaviors. So have them probe to dig into what they actually did. When somebody says, I talked to my team, you can interrupt and say, I'm sorry, I apologize, go back a little bit. You said you talked to your team. What form did the talk take? Did you talk to them individually, talk to them in a group? Did you talk to them on a teams call? Did you talk to them in a meeting? Did you exchange emails? Well, I asked, you know, and the candidate says, I asked one of my guys what he thought. And you say, okay, so that's what you're, you're saying is talking to your team. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, great. Somebody who says they talk to their team and you discover they only interviewed one person. They only emailed one person and got a very short response. It's okay. It may actually be an okay example. But you have to know that when they tell you if they come to work for you, when they say they talk to their team, it might just be one email to one person. This is one of the five biggest mistakes amateur interviewers make. They substitute they did the job. Check the box for what they really should be asking, which is how well did they do the job? And the only way you can do that is by probing in detail when you ask behavioral interviewing question.

[A]

Yeah, and in fact, folks, we don't technically care how well the candidate did in their previous jobs. A candidate who's excelled at every job they've Ever had in areas that require skills that are of complete disinterest to us altogether isn't of any value to us. I don't care if you excelled in a job that has nothing to do with the job that I'm doing or need you to do. It doesn't matter to me how excellent you were at doing something. That doesn't matter to me.

[B]

Yeah. When you review a candidate resume, we recommend you don't look for how well they did, but rather how well they did as it pertains to relevant skills necessary for your role. And by the way, when it comes to figuring out how to do that and digging in to figure out where you're going to dig even further in the interview, we highly recommend our guidance how to scan a resume, which, as luck would have it, was written by miss Wendy Lord herself.

[A]

Gosh, Wendy's all over this one. I like it. You'll have to send her the show notes.

[B]

I will, folks.

[A]

The effective hiring manager looks at every job a candidate has had on their resume. They look at the responsibilities and the accomplishments and. And be careful. Poor resumes, which is the Is the norm, frankly, in my experience, mix both responsibilities as well as accomplishments as bullets. Don't assume that bullets on one's resume are actually accomplishments.

[B]

They want you to assume that, but it's not true.

[A]

And they used to be. But today, the majority of bullets we see are really only responsibilities, which again, is a gross amateurish mistake. But we have to evaluate the resume that's in front of us. We can't gripe about whether or not this person did their resume. Right. So, yes, that's what we want to do. We want to look deeply at those responsibilities and accomplishments.

[B]

That reminds me of one of my mom's favorite sayings. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

For every accomplishment, you see not bullet, but accomplishment. Right, because some of the bullets are going to be responsibilities, which is hogwash, but they try to get away with it. In fact, I've said no to resumes just based on the fact that the bullets were all responsibilities. Because this person clearly didn't do anything very well. Because if they had, surely they know they would trumpet it on the resume. So the absence of any trumpeting says, no, this person's not any good. But for every accomplishment, for every bullet that actually is an accomplishment, ask yourself two questions. First, how relevant is this accomplishment to the job I want them to do? Second, how did they accomplishment? And it is the second question that leads to behavioral interviewing based accomplishment questions.

[A]

Yeah, folks, it would really, really shock us if a well prepared manager or interviewer had less than five behavioral interview questions for a candidate based upon the information they gleaned from the resume. Yes, and of course, we talked about our interview creation tool, which is available to all of our career tools, manager tools, and executive tools licensees. You don't need to create them from scratch. But again, if you do want to create your questions from scratch, we have a podcast, how to create a simple behavioral interview question that will help you create them all from scratch.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, look, if you're listening and you've never given a behavioral interview, just listen to those. Listen to that podcast. It will make you better than 90% of your colleagues of your peers. And by the way, if you're struggling and you want some help, if you're a licensee, write us and we'll be happy to help you craft a behavioral interviewing question that's specific to the role and the behaviors that you're looking for. Now, look, I'm going to say this again. I alluded to this earlier. I didn't quite say it on the nose. For the record, if there are no accomplishments, we would suggest to you that your candidate is not much of a candidate at all. The candidate who puts bullets in front of her responsibilities is no different than someone who got fired for failing to do their job. We would never. Here at Manager Tools. Now, admittedly we are, for millions of people in the world, we are the source of managerial and professional and career knowledge and resume knowledge and interviewing knowledge and so on. But we would never hire someone with a resume that was so poorly created that all they did was turn their responsibilities into bullets. It's true that some people do it mistakenly with no ill intent. But. But it's also true that a great many people are intentionally trying to cover up that they did not do well and so they don't have any actual accomplishment bullets. So they turn their responsibilities into bullets and attempt to mislead you, implying that they actually did those things well, when in fact, the way they're written, it's clear that they were responsible for those things, but they didn't actually deliver on them well.

[A]

Yeah, and especially in a market like a job market like we have right now, you're getting a.

[B]

Probably a hundred winter 2000.

[A]

Yeah, you're getting 100 resumes for every job you're putting out there. So trying to weed through and giving people the benefit of the doubt, it's not the time for that.

[B]

Not the time.

[A]

It's just not the time, exactly. Leadership influence starts with knowing your own behavioral tendencies. Our MT DISC assessment gives you actionable insights that you can use immediately, improving communication, alignment and decision making. Start your year with sharper self [e-mail] disc that's manager-tools.com d I s c. All right, so that takes us to our last bit of preparation guidance. Know how you'll decide. Now you have. At this point, you've developed a clear picture of what you're looking for. You've reviewed the candidate as best you can before the interview, using their resume and LinkedIn and all the other criteria you've got. Now we only have to ask, how am I going to evaluate the candidate? What's my process for deciding?

[B]

Yeah, and by the way, we're not suggesting that in the interview. We're talking about what's the process for deciding. And too many managers do not determine what their process for making the final decision is going to be until they have a candidate about which they have to make that very decision. But there are known systems, and we've put it out in podcast, there are known systems for how to do this. And all you have to do is follow our system. By the way, if you follow our system a couple times and you want to tweak it 10%, you're fine. That's totally fine. Make it your own. Okay. Imagine not knowing how you're going to decide whether to hire or not. The single biggest tactical decision that a manager makes, which has strategic implications for the company because somebody might stay 25 years. Right. And you don't know when you start the process because you have an opening. And I've got to hire. Oh, my gosh, I've got to hire. You have no idea how you're going to decide between one or two or three candidates who are actually going to potentially make it through the process. It sounds like amateur hour, because it is.

[A]

You're basically eating a sandwich. Okay, so now that is so good.

[B]

This is always going to be the eating the sandwich.

[A]

It's the Wendy cast. I'm sorry, Wendy.

[B]

Yes, Wendy. It is the Wendy Cat. We already have. Unfortunately, we. Well, we have the Wendy Curve.

[A]

We do.

[B]

Which is about behaviors across cultures and genders and so on. Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so, folks, again, we've said this multiple times. We have so many different podcasts about interviewing and hiring. So we're going to give you very distilled guidance right here. But again, there's many, many podcasts. By all means, go to [e-mail] and get more.

[B]

In fact, some of you may not know this. Sorry, Sarah, another brief aside here. You may not know this, but on our website, if you find a particular. If you go to the map of the universe on our website, there's a link to it on the homepage. It will take you to an organized list of all of our guidance. And some guidance is in multiple categories. And if you go into hiring and go into interviewing and so on, there's hundreds of podcasts there on the webpage itself. Every podcast we have has a webpage, and if you search for a title, it will take you to that page. On that page, you'll notice that on the side, on the margin, on the right margin, I think, of the page, there's a thing called related casts. Well, you may not know this, but all of our shows are written in advance. One of the reasons we don't just chat about things, even though we hope you feel like it's a conversation, is because we have written the guidance in advance. And if you're a licensee, you can download the show notes and read them. But at the bottom of our show notes is a section called mentioned. And in this particular cast, we have as mentioned, which will be links to these casts web pages. On this cast webpage, how to scan a resume, the Manager Tools interview creation tool, how to create a simple behavioral interview question, and the interview results capture meeting, which we're going to talk about now. Yeah, sorry, no, no, I wanted everybody. Because we're always having new people join.

[A]

The community, bring them in, help them understand. So, folks, generally at a very, very high level, we have three recommendations regarding your hiring decision process. Of course, our longtime manager Tools community members are going to know the first rule of interviewing. The purpose of an interview is to say no. And we urge you that your first thought on the hiring decision ought to be, if I have any doubts at all, I must say no. We've said this before. You've heard us say it today. Warm bodies are not what we're looking for. We often say every warm body has a halo. And the only thing worse than an open position is filling it with the wrong person.

[B]

And if we could do a show of hands right now. Anybody ever hired somebody and it didn't turn out good?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Would you ever do it again? No. Yeah, that's right.

[A]

While we simultaneously all say, oh, but you don't understand. It's so hard to fire people around here. Yeah, that's exactly it. Failed hires are so much harder because now you have to get rid of Them, which is almost impossible. Or worse yet, you have to manage them. And both of those outcomes are worse than an open position, which your team can manage.

[B]

Yeah. Second, as a general rule, we recommend you have multiple people interview any candidate. Do not try to be braggy and say, I'm going to do it all myself. You want multiple points of view, particularly from their peers. I'm trying to think of the recent. Oh, I know I was involved with a interview of a candidate for a senior position of a company I'm on the board of, and we asked one question twice. And I'm a very good interviewer if you ask me. Of all the things I'm good at in my professional life, nobody's better at interviewing than me. That's my one thing that I'm really, really good at. Well, this person, in the middle of the interview when I started asking questions, he says, finally, you're asking tough questions. He had been interviewed for probably 15 hours, and I actually had written some of the interview questions that he had been asked and he had basically been blowing them off. And I could not believe that he was dismissing other senior people in the company that I'm on the board of of their interviewing process. That's how arrogant and bad he was. So, okay, multiple people interview a candidate. Too many candidates will behave distinctly differently with a peer than they will with the boss, because I think the boss has the final authority. There's nothing almost so darkly satisfying is to have five no's from my directs and then to have a great interview with the candidate and realize, oh, the candidate was sucking up to me, but he wasn't to everybody else. This guy's going to be an ego problem. We better say no. So have multiple people interview. Now, look, we have tons of other guidance guys about who should be on the interviewing team, when they should interview, how they should interview. We have over a hundred podcasts on that and I'll just add a couple more things. We please recommend you follow our guidance for conducting an Interview Results Capture meeting. I would argue that that is one of horsemen and company or manager tool's 20 most important contributions to management. Rather than regaling you with the 45 minutes of the Interview Results Capture meeting podcast, we'll just tell you you cannot be a professional hiring manager and not follow the Interview Results Capture meeting process. And then lastly, from a preparation standpoint, all this matters because everybody, including your directs, who are probably being hopefully you're using to interview the candidate as well. Even if you don't count their vote, you can get them some reps interviewing before they become a manager. Everybody ought to know the process they're following before they start following it. They shouldn't say, oh, the boss is going to do what the bosses does. Boss does. That's not a good look.

[A]

Yeah, that's exactly it. All right, so I'm going to wrap it up for today's cast. Too many managers conduct interviews without preparation. And folks, to be clear, we would only wish that on our own competitors. The effective interviewer knows that she has to know what the standards are, who the candidate is, and what the process for deciding whether or not that candidate is suitable for the role is. And it sounds reasonable, it sounds easy, and yet we find almost no one does it. And, folks, the ultimate superpower of this entire process is that once it's known, once you've determined what those behavioral characteristics are, you have that measure, the work is done. And now it's repeatable. What that means is you and your team can get better at it with each interview you complete. And unfortunately for the unprepared manager, it's not repeatable. And they're never going to get better. But you will.

[B]

Yeah. And you know what? You start hiring for people. If you're a senior vice president and you're hiring a vice president who's going to make three quarters of a million dollars, you better not be wrong. That's when the stakes are high.

[A]

Yep. All right, well, thank you, Mark.

[B]

Thanks, Sarah. It was fun.

[A]

Thank you so much, folks. We hope that this podcast helped you. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please. Bye, everyone.

[B]

Sa.