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2016-02-25 11:03:41
Tanya MenonLeigh Thompson
February 15, 2016
Dr. James is a leading ophthalmologist at a major medical clinic. Passionate
about medicine, he wanted to hire someone to run the business operations of his
practice. He carefully reviewed over 200 resumes and conducted background
checks, finally deciding to hire Mike, a highly credentialed MBA who seemed to
check off all the boxes Dr. James was looking for in the new hire.
But within weeks, Dr. James realized that he d made a big hiring mistake.
Despite a stellar performance in the interview, Mike disrupted the office
within his first month on the job. He communicated with the staff mostly by
email or spreadsheet assignments, and when he attended meetings he seemed
absorbed with his smartphone and would roll his eyes when the staff didn t
understand certain accounting or finance terms.
During the interview, I was wowed by Mike s credentials and financial
knowledge. He was supremely confident and came from a great school, Dr. James
told us after the fact. He then lamented, I saw only one side of Mike, and
completely missed the side we ended up seeing every day at the office.
It took Dr. James over a year to rid himself of the wrong hire. Worse, it made
him question his own judgment. In fact, almost all of the leaders we ve talked
to admit that they too have made a bad hire at some point during their careers.
And it has cost them dearly in time, money, and mental anguish.
First impressions can sometimes set dangerous traps that lead you straight to a
disastrous hire. How can you get beyond superficial impressions and discover
the substance in the 30 minutes or so you have with an interviewee?
Faced with hundreds of resumes and dozens of interviewees, sometimes you have
no choice but to scan quickly when narrowing down a pool of candidates. But
these gut reactions can often lead us astray because of how we subconsciously
picture the new hire. In the case of Dr. James, he was wowed by Mike s
credentials. However, he had lost focus on the more pertinent skills and
attributes that his new hire would need every day on the job. He failed to
rigorously evaluate Mike on his abilities to motivate and lead the staff.
The key is to distinguish between real and pseudo cues. A good example of a
pseudo cue is the halo effect that may surround candidates due to physical
attractiveness. People subconsciously feel attraction to a good-looking
interviewee, and this pseudo cue positively biases their evaluation of the
candidate s unrelated skills.
So in order to find the best candidates, you have to unsee the pseudo cues that
grab your attention but are irrelevant to the job. Fine-tune your vision to
pinpoint the real cues that matter for performance. Instead of going with your
gut, use analytics to hone in on the right type of candidate. Take all your
past data on who has succeeded and failed in the role (or similar roles, if
this is a new position) and analyze each person s characteristics in a
regression. Which independent variables (GPA, major, extracurriculars,
interview answers) predict success or failure? If you let the data speak, you
ll learn the hidden profile of success so you can distinguish the real cues
that matter from the pseudo cues that don t so you can cull through the pile
of resumes and the hours of interviews more efficiently.
In addition to learning from past hires, hire for the future. Our image of who
fits often comes from the past, from the types of people who ve successfully
filled the role (or similar roles) before. To avoid this trap, one executive
created current and future scenarios that the company was facing and asked
candidates how they would handle them. By requesting their answers in writing
in advance of the face-to-face interview, she could blind the responses and
analyze each candidate s thought process about these critical challenges
anonymously, so it was impossible to tell their gender, race, or age. This
helped her choose the right set of people to move on to the next round in the
hiring process.
In the interview itself, we also need to avoid the pseudo cues that we hear.
The first impressions we hear can mislead us because we overvalue what
Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton describe as smart talk.
According to Pfeffer and Sutton, while smart talkers are skilled at sounding
confident, articulate, and eloquent, having interesting information and ideas,
and possessing a good vocabulary, their talk often serves as a substitute for
action. Smart talkers can also be what psychologist Mark Snyder describes as
high self-monitors, adaptable chameleons who can carefully edit and change
themselves to fit different situations. When we re seduced by smart talkers, we
select people who are glib but not necessarily substantive. Worse, the person
who skillfully says what you want to hear in an interview may very well become
a two-faced manipulator in the office. To avoid this trap, listen for hidden
messages in the interview itself by considering these four tips:
Focus on behaviors instead of traits. The typical resume and cover letter is
filled with adjectives like team player, energetic, analytic, and
creative. They want to present themselves in the best possible light to appear
to be the most qualified candidate for the position. But if interviewees
describe themselves as team players, do they actually credit other people
when discussing their work? Ask the candidate, What are the three things you
are most proud of in the past six months? But don t just take note of the
accomplishments they list; listen to how they describe them. What did they do,
and how did they describe it? Do they emphasize personal or team achievement?
Listen for what s unsaid, particularly whether they credit their colleagues,
their subordinates, or anyone else. Better yet, do a behavioral interview. If
you re hiring for presentation skills or analytic skills, have them actually
prepare a presentation or conduct a relevant analysis. Adjectives may be pithy,
but behaviors are more specific, objective, and diagnostic.
Listen for learners. Tell me about a failure. Yes, this is a common interview
prompt, but it can reveal a lot about the person if you analyze their response
in the right way. What was the cause of their failure? Do they chalk the
failure up to their lack of fit in the area, bad luck, a hard task, or other
excuses? Each of these explanations acknowledges the failure but doesn t
acknowledge learning as part of the process. Listen for the candidate who
identifies factors that they could change and control in the future. This is
the candidate who s capable of self-reflection and learning.
Listen for conflict management skills. Organizational psychologist Fred Fiedler
and colleagues note the power of another critical question: Tell me about your
least preferred coworker. If you re hiring for a job that requires strong
interpersonal skills, listen for whether they reduce the person to a one-word
label (e.g., difficult or micromanager ) or reveal a more complex view of
the situation (e.g., we disagreed about how to get the job done because we
were trained in different ways ). Labels are quick but final, leaving people
with few solutions to work with the other person. The more complex
interpretation allows people ways to productively negotiate with each other.
Look for nonverbal cues. Finally, look beyond what the candidate is saying: how
are they saying it? While Mike exuded confidence, in retrospect Dr. James
realized that Mike s nonverbal cues also leaked feelings of power, egocentrism,
and low concern for others. Even though interviewees may be on their best
behavior, you might be able to detect certain nonverbal signals that are
signaling not confidence but contempt, superiority, and disrespect: eye contact
when speaking to another person but not when listening to them, invading
another s space, and sneering disguised as smiling.
The best interviewers avoid the traps from first impressions or gut feelings
because they recognize the subconscious factors at play during the interview.
You can use the techniques we ve described to see and hear more deeply, even if
you have only a short time to select and interview the candidate. By doing so,
you can better assess if the person is right or wrong for the position.
Tanya Menon (menon.53@osu.edu) is an associate professor of Management and
Human Resources at the Ohio State University s Fisher College of Business. Her
book with Leigh Thompson, Stop Spending, Start Managing: Strategies to
Transform Wasteful Habits (Harvard Business Review Press), is forthcoming this
year.
Leigh Thompson is the J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution and
Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. She is the author of
Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration (HBR Press,
2013) and coauthor of Stop Spending, Start Managing: Strategies to Transform
Wasteful Habits (forthcoming, HBR Press, 2016).