Radically revising interviews

I often write about treating interviewees as though they were investors. What I usually mean by this is for hiring managers to prepare, commit, be informed, and sell themselves (and, by extension, the business) just as much as they question.

Recently, I've been thinking about how to revise interviews entirely, and it occurs to me that this investor metaphor has limited application beyond highlighting similar power-imbalanced meetings.

Investor meetings are like job interviews. There is an imbalance of information and agenda, a framing of the facts, an unequal distribution of power, and a lack of objective clarity in outcomes. Having pitched or presented, the executive team is subject to questions from different stakeholders with unclear agendas and an unknown scorecard. Feedback ranges from valuable to conflicting, leaving the team uncertain about how they performed. Because of this, it is difficult for an executive team to prepare adequately.  We may know the investors' broad agenda - realistic growth targets, proof of concept, pathway to market, etc. but we may not know the weighting of each factor in the investor’s model.

This creates tension that may be useful to investors, pushing an executive team to ever higher standards in all areas, but is not helpful for the executive team in terms of prioritisation for the coming quarter or reporting and highlighting challenges. Thus, the work of preparing for investors is enormous (so we cover every base), and specific clarity, objective truth, and real progress are hard for everyone to judge. 

Unclear agendas and informational imbalances help neither Investors nor Executive Teams nor help with interviews. Hiring knowledge workers by exploring a synopsis of their credentials against an ill-defined and hidden agenda does not serve our purposes. The situation is no better for candidates. By the nature of the process, they are compelled to accept jobs with little insight into the company, culture, colleagues, or the work.

So, if the investor metaphor doesn’t help us create better interviews, what would? May I propose we treat interviews like conversations with trusted advisors?

When we discuss problems with key advisors, we are honest about the issues and seek their expertise in solving them. Problem-solving is situational and relative and begins with an honest problem assessment.

Let’s start with some definitions.

A vacancy is the proposed solution to a problem the organisation is having. There is work to be done, tasks to be completed, or new markets to be researched or competed in. The organisation needs an individual to help solve this problem and sets out, via a job vacancy, to find the best match.

Companies attempt to define the solution to the problem (in terms of a description of responsibilities and character traits) and design a job title, advert, and interview process to find the closest match. The job description never openly admits to the problem but instead prescribes the solution.

A candidate is an individual in need of a new challenge. They bring a collection of skills, experience, motivations, idiosyncrasies and intangible human potential to the market, seeking a meaningful challenge that will stretch, develop, and reward them.

We typically match the two in asymmetric ways. The power dynamic is one-sided; the candidate petitions for the opportunity to work at the business. 

What if?

What if we were to audition for the solution instead? Based on an honest overview of our problem, we could invite likely suppliers (candidates looking for opportunity) into the business. We would let the candidates decide which people to speak with as part of their diagnostic and then ask them to present their solutions at a briefing session. 

This briefing session would replace the presentation aspect of a traditional interview but would be directly aimed at solving the problem we needed solved (rather than a theoretical problem). We might get three or four beneficial ideas from this and a hire who truly understood and wanted to deliver on the need.

The candidates' choice of interviews to discern the need would be revealing, and the conversations (led by the candidate) would show their thinking, working and problem-solving styles.

The job description and adverts would be more straightforward, too. How about something like, "At ABC Ltd., we struggle with engineering quality release at rapid timeframes. Our QA department is overstretched and understaffed relative to consumer demand for our products. We need at least two people to help us improve accuracy and testing at pace." List the tech stack, project methodologies, company values, and behaviours, and then the advert is done.

It's not perfect. It would require encouraging candidates to rethink their role in the hiring process, for one thing, but it would get to the heart of many of the problems of traditional interviews. Each solution proposed would necessarily be relevant to the actual work to be done. There would be no more theoretical questions with if/then answers. 

The judging process would be far more like a two-way street: an organisation gets to see how the applicant thinks, asks questions and pulls together a solution (how they would work in real life, in other words), and the applicant gets a good look at how the business works and can make a far more informed decision as to whether the environment, approach, and problem even appeals.

Would this solve all hiring issues overnight? No. We'd still make the wrong calls, fall for the better pitch rather than the better fit, and hire people only to find out they have issues outside the narrow context of the role, just as we always have. There's simply no way of coping with the levels of complexity brought about by humans working together. However, this idea of treating candidates like consultants and advisors is a way to start being more honest about the situation.

Treating candidates like advisors and letting them take the lead could be a small step toward a fairer process that benefits all sides. Getting hiring right is a problem as old as time, and perhaps it is time to rethink some of the underlying assumptions rather than trying to make tiny improvements to the flawed process itself.