Beware the Smooth-Talking Job Applicant!
Every manager who's been around the block has a story to tell about hiring someone who was utterly and painfully wrong for the job he or she was hired into. If the stars are aligned the right way, everybody notices the mismatch early on and the new hire is moved into a more suitable job. That's the happy ending.
This
column is about the earlier part of the story -- about the shock that
hits a manager when the manager realizes that the newest person on
board has no idea whatsoever how to do the job, and no idea how to
find out.
How
did these people get so badly miscast? They got jobs they were
altogether unsuited for by talking their way brilliantly through a
job interview.
There
are a lot of people who are tremendous communicators, and a lot of
other people who are dazzled by top-notch communication skills. I
enjoy listening to an articulate and persuasive speaker as much as
the next person.
When
someone is smart and can make a point convincingly, it's fun to talk
with him or her - you feel like you can share ideas for hours.
As
interviewers we can forget about what we really need in a new hire
when we're talking with a person who's a very strong communicator.
As
important as verbal communication abilities are in many jobs, a huge
vocabulary and skillful use of the language can sometimes disguise
so-so or worse judgment, interpersonal skills, or another essential
qualification for a job.
I'm
not saying that very articulate people are necessarily less strong in
other areas, but I am pointing out that when someone is well-spoken,
we can easily overlook or even fail to dig in and learn about other
qualities that are just as important.
Hiring
managers, of course, are fallible humans. They fall victim to the
same decision-making slip-ups that everyone does, sometimes with
disastrous results. We got a call from a CEO who had just gone
through a series of unfortunate hires in leadership jobs.
He
called us when three people in Director and VP roles each lasted less
than a year with the company, which was growing and couldn't deal
with that kind of turnover. These three new hires didn't work out.
They were great people, but they had each been very unsuited to the
roles they were hired for.
All
three of them had left the company through polite and professional
mutual agreements to part ways (each with a financial cushion to
soften the blow). The CEO was frustrated.
"We
must be doing something wrong in our interviewing," said the
CEO. "Will you come out here and work with me and our team?"
We went. We sat down together and looked at post-interview comment
forms. We looked at the comments from interviews where people were
hired into jobs, and other interviews where the candidates weren't
hired.
What
did we notice? You will not be surprised to hear! The candidates who
interviewed most skillfully and 'sold themselves' most articulately
got the job more often than not. In conversations about successful
and unsuccessful hiring situations, we heard the same thing.
The
better a communicator a job-seeker was as indicated on the
interviewer's rating sheet and in the interviewer's comments, the
more likely the candidate was to be hired. In the case of the three
people who hadn't worked out in their roles, most or all of the
interviewers' comments focused on the candidates' communication
skills.
"Articulate,
knowledgeable, very bright," said one reviewer's post-interview
evaluation sheet.
"We
are curious whether you talked with this candidate about how he would
approach the role," we asked.
"I
should have, but I didn't really go there," said the executive.
"He told me about speaking on panels and that sort of thing.
He's a great speaker. I didn't understand until later that his
subject-matter knowledge was very superficial."
We
can see why this might be. When we think about the 'halo effect' that
fools all of us at times into thinking that a person who's gifted in
one area must necessarily be an all-around prodigy, where does the
halo form? It's very likely that a person with a halo earned it
through intelligent conversation.
Hiring
managers need to get past the script to learn more about a person
than just his or her way with words. In the Interviewing
with a Human Voice protocol
we invented and teach at Human Workplace, we recommend that you
invite your job candidates to ask you all their questions before you
ask one of yours.
You
may never get to your questions at all in the interview, and that's
perfectly fine. You can learn much more about a person's thought
process by hearing his or her questions for you than by asking your
own questions, obviously. That's what an interview is for -- to see
another person's brain working. At an effective job interview, a
manager gets to see how a job-seeker thinks, and vice versa.
That's
why we discourage interviewers from using scripted questions in job
interviews. Anyone with two functioning brain cells can anticipate
the tired, traditional job-interview questions, and most job-seekers
do.
A
polished answer to the question "Where do you see yourself in
five years?," for instance, tells you almost nothing about the
makeup of the person you're meeting, and on top of that, the
five-year question is irrelevant unless you're planning to offer your
new hire a five-year employment contract.
People
gifted with excellent rhetorical skills may be able to sell ice cubes
to Santa's elves, but that doesn't mean that silky-tongued individual
is necessarily the best person for the job.
When
you open the vault just enough to talk frankly with every job
candidate about what you're up against -- the reason the job is
available, in other words - and then hear his or her reactions and
responses to your biggest challenges, that's the magical moment in a
job interview.
We
can drop all of the "Tell me about a time when..." nonsense
and simply lay out for our candidates what we're up against, and then
just the way we'd ask a plumber how s/he planned to get a sock out of
the tub drain, we can ask each applicant "What would you do to
solve our problem?"
The
answer to that question is the interview moment where the rubber
meets the road. A job-seeker either understands your movie and is
ready to jump in and start filming, or not. You will be able to tell
which in seconds once the candidate begins to speak.
When
our ships come all the way into the harbor, believe me, we will spend
our afternoons sipping tea and nibbling on little cakes and cucumber
sandwiches, talking about everything that interests us for hours at a
time. I can't wait.
That'll
be a blast. In the meantime, we can admire an artful turn of phrase
and appreciate good conversation, but when it comes to hiring we'll
go back to the basics, and hire not the most well-spoken job-seeker
in the bunch but the right person for the job.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beware-smooth-talking-job-applicant-liz-ryan?trk=pulse-det-nav_artLiz RyanInfluencer
CEO
and Founder, Human Workplace
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