Let candidates know the bad stuff at interview

Much is written on the subject of delivering effective interviews. Millions are spent on tools, assessments, analytics, and consultants. Talent leaders bring hiring teams together to find precisely the right questions to identify "fit" for specific roles. Interview processes get longer and longer to bring as many eyes to bear on the decision as possible - as many judges of talent as possible. Guess what? Hiring still fails more often than not.

Despite all our intentions, the nature of assessing and understanding a whole human being in less than 6 hours of carefully designed interviewing is beyond us. Our goodness-of-fit ratio is very poor.

Perhaps it is time to take a look at what we as interviewers and organisations bring to the interview and reassess what it is we are saying.

In place of rigorous interrogation of a candidate, is it more effective for us to go belly-up from the start and lay all our troubles on the line?

Radical Candour in interviews

Imagine total honesty in interviews. In place of questions designed to determine a candidate’s worth, we could focus on what our need, problems and issues were: “This manager is vindictive”, “There is a lack of transparency from Leadership”, “this team is barely functional, and sales refuses to interface with production because neither can agree on terms”.

Would we scare people off? Come across as a nightmare, a lost cause, clingy, desperate, needy? Maybe. But who is it we're worried about scaring off? Good candidates want to be good employees, and they want agency to solve problems. If our honesty scares them away then the hire wasn't likely to work for us, and losing them to a competitor just gives our competitor the hiring problem.

The candidates' responses to this full candour method would certainly be telling. Do they immediately and confidently offer solutions without taking the time to get the full picture? Do they feel we need their brand of salvation? Do they find our approach unprofessional and refuse to participate? Does their fear of moving jobs escalate now that they know what we're really like? Do they express concern about our strategic direction as a cover for their real concern that we're not the perfect company? Does that matter? Do they not care? Is every workplace bad? Are they desperate enough to take the role no matter what we say? Do they see hard times everywhere? Are they insecure like that and lacking resilience? Would this help us avoid them? Does our candour inspire their own? Do they show empathy? Can they still see the bigger picture, the positives and the wood, not just the trees? Are they inspired by the mission and connected to the values? Does this indicate that they are truly our kind of hire?

Relationships of all kinds fail because of missing elements of honesty. Marriages can fail because a partner cheats despite promising they wouldn't but never revealing they’d secretly like to. Employees take days off "sick" to get dressed in their best clothes and put on a show for another employer, despite outwardly professing their loyalty to the firm and claiming to enjoy their work.

If we are at all serious about making interviews a good use of (expensive) time and the current format of interviewing is not producing a significant return on investment, then we need to look at new frameworks to achieve this. Candidates benefit from this candour, too, as it allows them to bring their whole selves to work and enables ideas and careers to thrive.

Little steps

I realise that it probably isn't realistic to walk into your next interview, change everything you have ever done in interviews, and jump into radical honesty, but there are small steps that can be taken in the right direction.

For example, how do you talk about the company and culture when you're describing it to a candidate? Do you simply recite the company values and the biggest hits? Do you really believe in what you are saying? If not, do you believe there is value in preparing a potential future team member for a future that doesn't exist?

Another way of putting this is, would you accept that amount of exaggeration from the candidate?

Remember, you're probably already signaling issues to candidates without even realising it. If you ask me in an interview, "How would you cope with a difficult colleague?" I figure you've picked that question - from amongst thousands of possible choices - for a reason: Not all of my future colleagues in your company are going to be easy to work with. More than that, if there were just one "bad apple", I suspect you would have dealt with it, or at least the problem wouldn't be worthy of an interview question. So, either I'm facing an environment with a number of bad actors or a leadership which turns a blind eye to behavioural failings in service of more revenue.

Possibly, you picked that question as little more than a good indicator of my diplomacy or resilience, but it goes to show how much our words can accidentally send signals, which is why I'm keen to pick them carefully at an interview.

In your next interview, consider discussing the gap between the mission or values and the current reality, as well as the efforts you and your team are making to create something that aligns with the values copy on your website. What problems, either competitively or operationally, are limiting success? How does this hire help solve or reduce some of those problems?

Your correspondent is not a fan of situational interviews in general. "How would you handle a difficult customer?" is a question without a normatively agreed-upon answer. The candidate would need to guess how you, the interviewer, like difficult customers to be handled. If we are interviewing with full candour however, such questions can suddenly become valuable means of gaining outside perspective; "Projects don't seem to run effectively here, much of the problem lies in the attitude the research teams have to the project experts, treating them more as administrators than project managers as an experienced PM how would you help fix this?" This is a tremendously relevant and honest question. The answer to which is something you are actually curious to hear. Not only might you solicit useful perspectives, but your next hire knows the situation they are stepping into.

Honesty in interviews does not mean downplaying success

Wins are there to be celebrated and are a big part of what brought the candidate to the interview in the first place. If yours is a highly impactful business with a string of well-deserved awards, big plans for the future and a high-achieving team galvanized around a meaningful mission, then definitely say that in the interview.

 In your correspondent's experience, however, even these companies are not perfect, and admitting as much in an interview goes a long way to bringing honesty back to the hiring process. "We're market leaders here and our customers rate us highly, our pipeline is strong but honestly the size we are now means that we are not as effective or dynamic as we were and a lot of people here miss that." This vulnerability is both effective and refreshing for the candidate because candidates also aren’t perfect or without doubt. In the statement above about “missing dynamism” if your interviewee truly knows how to energise teams and has had success with that in the past then their worries about their own limited planning or operational skills, for example, are less significant and they are more likely to admit to them during the interview.

Honesty gets rewarded

And here is the primary value: our honesty enables their honesty. To avoid mis-hiring, a significant increase in honesty on both sides of the table is a powerful tool. We are visibly seeking to help the candidate avoid a work environment which will be too challenging for them, and in return, they feel safe telling us at length about what their greatest needs (emotional, challenge, validation, monetary) are. Our transparency enables theirs. Our role as interviewers is to reach these insights.