Stop rejecting excellent applicants with your wrong questions.

From the tone of voice it was immediately clear that the vice-president of technology was unhappy. He practically growled at me. He had just finished talking to an applicant named Anand, whom I sent him, and called me to report his refusal.

Just a few minutes before that, Anand called me and enthusiastically told me how wonderful the interview was. He was interviewed almost all day, he met with various leaders from different parts of the organization, including, finally, the vice-president (VP) for technology. I helped this company create a new “platform” strategy, so I tried to identify suitable candidates for work in it, and decided that Anand would fit in perfectly there.
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However, the EaP with Anand had surprisingly different opinions about their meeting. Anand said that he asked many more questions than usual, clarified detailed information on the strategy, which helped him to understand the complexity of the task facing the company. All conversations with employees seemed to him enticing and full of ideas. VP told me that the questions Anand asked seemed “too annoying” to him.

Not for the first time, I hear the boss say that an excellent candidate seems to them "unfit." Too often, candidates are rejected because they do not fit into a specific scheme - in one survey they found that 75% of resumes do not pass through an automated system for sorting candidates (ATS). Discussing this problem with the VP, I discovered that he decided that Anand had all the necessary skills and experience, but found his questions annoying. He said: "He asked us a bunch of questions that the team could not answer." His statement about the "unsuitability" of Anand actually meant "I do not like to feel uncomfortable."

For innovation and learning, you first need to know something long enough. How can you create something new if you cannot reconcile with the fact that you do not know all the answers? The future is not created by itself, it is created by joint efforts. Leaders need to assemble teams that can both ask the right questions and find new answers.

Instead of getting annoyed because of the questions asked by Anand, the GP had to meet them with open arms and ask him counter questions. This is the value of the interview. The employer wants to know what skills and experience the candidate has. The candidate uses questions to learn more about his position, boss and company, and to assess whether this job is suitable for him. These are the questions that the VP could ask - and which questions should be asked to you - so as not to deny an appropriate candidate for the position on the basis of incorrect criteria.

Issues that reveal opportunities, not just experience. You ask questions to find out what a person is capable of, or are you looking for evidence that a person actually did what is written in a resume? A few years ago, my colleague asked me to evaluate the correctness of their vacancy for an expert on social networks. At that time, Twitter existed for no more than a year, and when I looked at their job description, I started laughing. In the first line was written: "10 years of experience." Often we use useless metrics to evaluate what has already been done. If we ask questions about the duration of the experience, we can find someone who has done what we need. The disadvantage of this approach is that we risk limiting our ability to create something new, by doing what has already worked. Instead of asking “Have you done A or B?”, You need to ask “How would you approach Problem C or D?”. By changing the question, you will be able to assess the capabilities of the candidate.

Unfortunately, approximately 77% of all vacancies (60% in the United States and 80% in the world) do not require creative approach, decision-making or independent judgment. But if you are working on innovation, you need someone who can think along with you. By concentrating not on experience, but on ability, you increase the chance of finding such a person.

Questions assessing the ability of the candidate to work together. When I asked the teams that I worked with for the last ten years, why their last strategic project failed, it’s rare that anyone said that the team didn’t work well. But they say that there were cracks in the team — roles that were not filled by anyone — and none of them could fill them. Work, like the world, is changing rapidly, and team members cannot always remain in predetermined roles. The team should focus on new territories together. You can ask the candidate a question: “How would you act in a situation when you discover tasks that none of the team members are performing?”. Interviewees are usually recommended to use the word “I”, emphasizing their role in the performance of the work, but I think that the word “we” describes the workflow more realistically. Find out how they would feel if such a situation arises. Would you be proud to close this situation? Would you be worried about her appearance? This will help you understand whether you are dealing with a team player, or a know-it-all. You need to find people who can work as a team, closing gaps that appear between predefined roles to do the necessary work.

Questions that reveal what they like to work on. If you hire people to work on innovations, you need to find out what a person can bring with them to work. Ideas do not appear in a vacuum, they develop by combining unrelated elements. Knowing that dear to people, you can unite people with different approaches capable of achieving the same goal. When building such relationships, innovations are born. However, people need to unite around a common goal and concentrate on what makes sense to them. Ask the candidates: “Why did this project seem sensible to you? What does this success say about important things for you? ”People want their mission to fit into the framework of the organization for which they work. And your job as a leader is to combine this mission in the necessary way, so that the seemingly incompatible "I" unite into a single team "we", heading in one direction.

Too often, leaders reject quite suitable candidates, not knowing how to hire people to work together to solve problems in a creative way. It is easy to forget that the leader’s job is not to know the answers to all the questions, but to create conditions in which the team can learn and invent something new.

As a result, the EaP hired Anand, and together they realized their intended goals.