When it comes to recruiting and hiring people do you find the process a bit of a lottery? Do you feel like it is difficult, if not nearly impossible, to tell in advance whether a candidate is going to turn into a high performer?
Leadership and training provider Mark Murphy would like to help you improve your odds, and he has lots of good ideas in his book Hiring for Attitude. You can see my recent review of the book here.
While I was reading the book, I came across some “tricks” (for lack of a better term) that Murphy says recruiters often use during the interview process. Several of them were new to me, and so I wondered, just how common and they are? Read through the list and you can let me know.
1) The awkward pause just to get the candidate talking
Murphy says people in stressful situations, like job interviews, find silence uncomfortable. And to quell that discomfort, most of the time a candidate will start taking. Or rambling. He says those silences are worth suffering through because they can be quite revealing about a candidate.
2) Asking specific questions about a candidate’s last boss, including spelling their name, to get them into truth telling mode
Call this a little dose of truth serum. In Murphy’s book, he tells recruiters to ask the candidate for the spelling of their former supervisor’s name at the beginning of the interview. He says this will alert the candidate that they should be truthful about their responses from that point forward, in the assumption the former boss will be contacted for verification.
Ask the candidate for the spelling of their former supervisor’s name at the beginning of the interview. This will alert the candidate that they should be truthful about their responses from that point forward, in the assumption the former boss will be contacted for verification.
He says this tactic can work even if you never have any intention of actually contacting the supervisor.
3) Leave out parts of questions to see how a candidate will finish answering
When trying to determine if a candidate is a problem solver, do you ever ask them in an interview to describe a time when they faced a difficult situation, but don’t specifically actually inquire what they did to try to fix it?
Apparently the way a candidate answers this partial question says a lot about their problem solving abilities. I’m not totally clear about this one.
4) Rating a candidate on their use of pronouns
Murphy says the pronoun candidates use when answering interview questions does matter. Here’s what he says it says about them:
First person (I, me and we): According to Murphy’s research, high performers answer in the first person 60% more than low performers
Second person (you, your): Low performers answer in the second person 400% more often than high performers.
Third person (he, she, they): Low performers are 90% more likely to answer in the third person than high performers.
5) Rating a candidate on their use of adverbs
Why this one? Murphy says low performers use 40% more adverbs (words such as yesterday, now, soon, and suddenly that modify a verb) than high performers, and are 90% more likely to answer with negative emotions than higher performers.
6) Rating a candidate on their verb tense
High performers reportedly answer more frequently in the past tense.
Past tense: Past tense answers are used 40% more often from high performers than low ones.
Present tense: Low performers use the present tense 120% more often than high performers.
Future tense: Low performers are also 70% more likely to use future tense when answering questions than high performers.
7) Rate a candidate on their active voice
The passive voice isn’t necessarily “wrong,” but it is often a poor way to present thoughts. It’s vague and wordy and more difficult to understand than active voice.
Rate a candidate on how often they say always and never
Does your candidate make sweeping generalizations? Oversimplify? “You’ll never succeed doing that.” “I was always the one with the best ideas.” “My old boss never gave me any feedback.” And so on. These could reveal insecurities on the part of the candidate.
Some of these things I had heard of, others were completely new to me. What about you? Do you employ any of these things in your interviews and evaluations? Do you use all of them? None of them? Why? Why not? Do they resonate at all? We’d love to hear from you.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I have met very few recruiters who play these games and in my opinion they are MORONS. These kind of games are totally transparent and say volumes about the Recruiter and will also reflect very badly on the employer unless there are some other sensible interviewers in the process to dilute the overall impression.
If you want to hire honest, direct, intelligent and talented people please don’t give them the impression that you are spending your time trying to find a verb tense they misused. You may end up with some candidates who don’t walk away but those won’t be the cream of the crop I assure you.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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#3 Absolutely.
And as I read the other questions, i don’t intentionally do any of those, but I do pay attention to them situationally; such as #3.
The candidate starts telling me about the problem: I want to hear some “I’s” and “We’s” in there; not hear about a problem a customer caused and someone else had to fix.
By leaving out the invitation for presenting the solution, I eagerly wait to see if they also present the solution, If they don’t, best case, they are a literal thinker, only answering the asked question; worst case, they don’t know/care how it was solved.
Why this is important to me is because I have found that problem solvers, or solution oriented people have a difficult time leaving a problem on the table. Not only do they want to see the problem resolved, they want to share how they solved the problem they brought up.
This also speaks to how much preparation the candidate did for the interview. A well thought out problem/solution is a part of many interviews. It also speaks to their focus: the focus of the interview is to highlight your skills/experience/successes. It’s to sell yourself. To pass up such a huge opportunity to highlight a success seems frivolous or even lazy.
That said, there are very few times I’ve made a decision over one answer. I have to look at the big picture, because some folks simply don’t interview well. I would hate to miss out on a great candidate because I couldn’t differentiate between a poor interview and a poor candidate.
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I love #2, so simple and yet would be very successful (although i have never conducted a real interview) but seems like it would work. What sort of questions would you ask in terms of watching out for #3 Mark? as it says leave out part of the question, just curious. In the sense of looking out for pronouns and adverbs, I’m just not sure in theory it can make sense but also would be extremely harsh, “you cant have the job because you didn’t say we or I”, just doesn’t seem like a fair or good way of determining if the candidate is a good or not.
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