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Martin Moore (0:56)

There and welcome to episode 379 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode Interview Questions to Expose.

Martin Moore (Introduction) (1:05)

The Bullshitters welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a success, successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.

Martin Moore (1:30)

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract and retain the best people. Some companies conduct regular talent management reviews to assess the performance and potential of their leaders. Other companies don't have a formal process as such, but that doesn't stop them from spending an inordinate amount of time pondering the question, how can I attract and retain the best people? We all know how fickle the hiring process can be. Recruiting talent is an imprecise science, which is why you have to get really good at interviewing. This is where you get the chance to meet your potential employees face to face. The interview is your best opportunity to separate the most talented candidates from the ones who just talk a good game. In this episode, I I'm going to give you an interview technique that's guaranteed to identify the people who've actually done what they say they've done and expose those who are just full of shit. I'm going to start with a general recap on the job selection process. I'll have a look at an article from the Economist that revealed some of the best interview questions from their subscribers. And I'll reveal the interview technique that I used to find out exactly what a candidate has and hasn't done. So let's get into it. Hiring people is tricky. So tricky that many leaders freeze on their hiring decisions knowing that if they make a mistake, it can be incredibly costly. In extreme cases, it can be career limiting. Getting a hiring decision wrong pushes you into a hellish cycle. Performance management, exit planning and tiptoeing through a legal minefield. It means you'll be forced to spend a huge amount of time, money and energy that you didn't plan on spending. Not to mention the disruption to the team and the loss of personal credibility that you're going to suffer. And even after you get through all of that, you're back where you started months ago because you still have to replace the bad hire with a good hire. At the most senior levels, the cost of a bad hire increases exponentially because unwinding an executive contract can be prohibitively expensive. One example that's fresh in my mind is Louisiana State University football coach Brian Kelly. Now, even though this is not your typical corporate example, it illustrates the cost of a bad hiring decision beautifully. In US College football, LSU is a performance powerhouse, competing in the premier SEC conference. Over the years, LSU has won a bunch of conference championships and four national titles. Of the 130 plus teams in the FBS, LSU spends a disproportionate amount of time amongst the list of the top 25 ranked teams. So when they decided in 2021 to hire one of the top coaches in college football, Brian Kelly, LSU had great expectations of hitting a new purple patch. Kelly was able to negotiate an eye watering 10 year, $95 million contract. Now remember, this is college football, right? But Kelly's first three seasons were less than stellar. Not terrible, but underwhelming. Given his oversized contract, LSU never really looked like being in contention for an SEC title, let alone a national championship. So a few weeks ago, in the wake of a humiliating home loss to Texas A and M, the LSU front office decided enough was enough. Kelly was fired initially for cause. So in other words, under performance. But after a little bit of wrangling between their respective legal teams, LSU conceded that Kelly was fired without cause. Now what does this mean? Well, the implication of this decision is that Kelly will be owed the full contract buyout of $54 million. Not only did he get paid for the three and a half years he coached the team, but he'll get paid a fair whack of the six and a half years that he won't be coaching the team. This situation is a cautionary tale for corporate businesses. The first is the contract. Every executive contract should have a clause that enables you to terminate for convenience. Some people call it the face don't fit clause. I call it the love is gone clause. But what it means effectively is that either party should be able to terminate an employment agreement without punitive exit provisions. To me, a 10 year contract with such onerous buyout terms seems to have an intolerable level of risk. The second lesson is about alignment of expectations. I have no idea how acceptable performance was defined under the LSU Brian Kelly contract, but being sacked when your win loss record is 3414 indicates expectations of a leap performance on the part of the LSU administration. The confusion around the basis for termination seems to suggest that expectations may have been misaligned. The third lesson is the inevitable flow on effects of these hiring decisions, the media circus, the appointment of interim coaches, and a team that's halfway through the season. This is not going to help LSU to attract the top player talent in 2020. The reason I just told that cautionary tale is to impress upon you the need for diligence in the hiring process. You can't outsource the risk of a bad hire, you can't outsource it to hr, you can't outsource it to a recruiter, and you certainly can't outsource it to an executive search firm, no matter how much you pay them. Reducing the likelihood of a hiring mistake should be a key focus for every hiring manager, which is why we use a range of tools to give us the best chance possible of making the correct decision. Interviewing is just one of these tools. I released an episode earlier this year looking at the hiring process in more detail. It was episode 343, securing top talent. In that episode, I gave six practical tips for securing top talent. But it always starts with knowing your market. Who is going to turn up in your candidate pools? Well, that depends upon your location, your industry, your brand, and the mobility of your talent pool. And when competition for talent is fierce, as it was in the post Covid employment market, what does your company offer to any potential hire? What's your employee value proposition? I went through the six tools of successful hiring in a little bit of depth Advertising and brand awareness Resume filtering interviews, which of course is the focus of today's episode. Aptitude and psych testing, Reference checking and setting up a robust contract. I'd really encourage you to go back to this episode before you embark on your next hiring campaign. Let's face it, you don't want to have to unwind an employment contract, even if it has a couple less zeros than Brian Kelly's LSU contract. The Economist can always be relied upon for excellent business insights, and this article was no exception. Titled what questions would you ask a candidate in a job interview? The article captured some of the best interview questions submitted by Economist readers. I think there's enormous power in asking great questions in any area of business, or in life for that matter. I just want to give you a feel for some of these questions because they typically tend to go to culture fit, lateral thinking and personal expression. Now the brief to the subscribers was what's the one question you ask in an interview that reliably says the most about a candidate? It didn't ask which questions were the most predictive of performance in the role, so I suspect that may have elicited a slightly different response. In any case, one reader offered a useful question for new graduates hoping to join the company at entry level. The question was in two parts. Part one what was your favourite subject at university? And Part two what did you learn in that subject? I can see how this might be a searching question to ask a newly minted graduate, and this particular reader shared the best answer with us. One applicant said, apparently that was nine months ago. I don't remember well, I think that might have just told you everything you needed to know about that individual. One interesting question that might uncover someone's personal focus was if we gave you a blank cheque and a free weekend.