Interviewing
Interviewing is a critical skill and is covered in most all the Operating Discipline sections of InsideSpin. The CEO needs to be the best at it as choosing the right team members, especially leadership team members, is one of the top two or three critical decisions the CEO needs to do right (ideally all the time).
Some CEO's choose to interview all candidates for employment (at least in the final stages of an interview cycle), some prefer only to be involved during senior hires, some only handle direct reports. CEO involvement in interviewing takes time away from other tasks. It can also be seen as interfering by other managers (too bad). In the end, the CEO is responsible for building a successful company and should be able to be as involved as needed in choosing team members committed to achieving success.
This section explores how the CEO can perfect relevant interviewing skills. How the CEO makes decisions on when and when not to be involved in choosing team members. It also explores how the Human Resource function works with the CEO to establish success planning, a critical factor that should be explored during the interview process.
When the CEO Should Be Involved
When first starting a business, it is almost universally understood that the CEO will spend time interviewing all team candidates. Although there is a mode of thinking that says a leader should empower people to make decisions, being involved in exploring the viability of a new team member is not taking away from that empowerment. By interviewing a candidate, you are not making the decision but are able to have a knowledgeable discussion about how that candidate would or would not fit in to the desired role. When all is said and done, the CEO is responsible for the results of all decisions, so you can both support your leadership team to make new hire choices but at the same time reserve the right to overrule anyone you feel is not the right fit. Everyone should keep in mind the CEO has an overall Company perspective in mind while any one leadership team member (or manager) is hiring for the sphere of influence and responsibility they have.
It is natural for the team to look for your endorsement if you are involved through interviewing. This can create the perspective that you are making the decision. This really talks to your leadership style and whether you express yourself in a dominating way or not. Make sure it is ok for people to disagree with your feedback, hear them out and if needed, stop a bad hire from happening. It would be unusual to force a hire the managers do not want.
Key Things the CEO Should Look For
Interviewing is a complex skill to master as you typically only have a short time to assess someone. What you do with that time is what is important. Some key things for a CEO to look for include:
- Measuring ambition. The CEO should be looking for people who intend to grow their level of contribution over time. One of the hardest aspects of managing a growing Company is when the growth starts to outpace the ability of the team to manage it properly. Although this will inevitably happen in some roles, if widespread, the staff turnover can cripple the pace of growth. You are looking to introduce people with potential into the Company, but also people that will NOT use politics as a way to get ahead. Examining career progression is a good angle to approach this from, as well as probe about career goals and whether or not they understand the types of challenges the Company in its current state might be experiencing.
- Level of curiosity. Candidates presented with the opportunity to meet the CEO should have some decent questions to ask. They should be probing the Company strategy, perhaps the career progression that led to your current role, what plans you have for the Company, etc. They should also be prepared for a CEO interview -- candidates that have not run through the web site or who do not understand what role they are interviewing for are not likely the right material for success. Sometimes candidates are initially nervous, measuring how long it takes them to overcome the jitters so that they can present themselves as strong candidates is effective to observe.
- Impression of Company. The CEO should always be looking for critical input about the Company. Candidates at this stage of an interview process should be forming some opinions about the people they have met, the Company they are exploring, etc. You should ask questions to get an open dialogue going about the Company. Great candidates will be frank about what they have seen, present feedback in a professional manner and hope to get a positive and involving reaction from the CEO (e.g. show them you run a Company where opinions count). Poor candidates say everything is fantastic, best they have ever seen, nothing is wrong, their proposed manager is the greatest, etc.
Excellence in recruiting normally says everyone plays a role in the interview cycle. The CEO is responsible for making sure the team is building strongly, other people would interview for technical skills for the job, team fit, etc. You can overlap so that you can share opinions later -- perhaps meet with the interviewing team to establish some questions that will be focused on. Comparing answers is sometimes a good way to develop a feel for how real the candidate is presenting (sometimes people loosen up over a day and start giving different answers to similar questions -- an alarm bell for sure).
Approaches to Interviewing
In some sense, the first goal of interviewing is to expose the real candidate. Some candidates are good at hiding their real styles and personalities underneath practiced presentation skills. This can be a problem if they reveal themselves a few days or weeks after starting and it turns out they are not the type of person you want. As such, there are a variety of ways to approach interviewing from a CEO perspective to reveal the real person underneath:
- Be Challenging. Push the person on resume details, look for specifics where they seem to be lacking. A good example is the classic reference on a sales resume "achieved 105% of quota" but no mention of the target itself. Was the person challenged with a high target or was the target easy to achieve? If you can get under the skin a bit, you often see what the person is really like. They will already be on edge when meeting the CEO, so be professional of course, if they are a good candidate you don't want them to turn away because of meeting you!
- Avoid standard interview questions. Let others on the interviewing team probe for strengths and weaknesses, talk through the career summary, ask why they want the job, etc. Focus on some out-of-the-box questions so that the candidate has to think more versus respond with prepared answers. Ask them about the Company strategy, what they would do if they do NOT get the job, what's the best or worst characteristics in a CEO.
- Have a long discussion. Wear them out -- over time, people forget any prepared materials and start responding with their true self. This is hard to do regularly given how much time could be involved. An alternative approach is to put them to a test during the interview -- challenge them with real situations and see how they would respond.
Given the goal is to form a thoughtful opinion about the candidate, you should take whatever time is needed to get to know the person your team is hiring. Even if they are far from being a direct report, knowing high quality people in the organization is valuable. As the level of role increases, the nature of how you approach the interview changes, until you reach a point of hiring a direct report, in which case, the hiring plan is yours instead of one of your team members.
Interviewing Leadership Team Candidates
Choosing a direct report, especially a leadership team candidate, is an important decision for the CEO. The choice has wide spread impact on the Company for which bad choices can be significantly damaging. It's not uncommon for a settling period to be needed where the new team member adjusts to new colleagues while everyone retests the political waters around them. They can bring new energies to an operational area and often have the preferred ear (for a while) of the CEO as the newest senior hire.
It's natural for the CEO to want to choose someone they have prior working experience with. The communication bandwidth tends to start high, the work habits are understood and often the problems that need to be solved are known from past experiences. These types of hires can go astray if the CEO appears to be passing over internal candidates or is hiring friends and family for the comfort factor. Clearly, hiring for experience is important so someone you have worked with who is a known quantity appeals to most CEO's. How they fit into the team and respect that this new team might be different than their current team, even if led by the same CEO, is important for this kind of hire to be accepted.
When hiring someone new, the need to find someone who can be entrusted with significant responsibilities despite no prior working relationship with the CEO becomes the challenge. You often only spend in aggregate a few hours with the person before choosing, You rely on references, the opinions of others involved in the interviewing, your gut feel as to their overall capabilities, etc. Ideally the person is willing to spend some time on the job as part of the interviewing cycle, although this is not always practical. If you can afford the time, extending the interview cycle tends to reveal more about the candidate. If time is a factor, you may need to move faster and take some chances..
A few things to consider for a leadership team hire includes:
- having them prepare a 90-day work plan for what they would do once taking over the operational responsibilities. The plan should be presented, perhaps to the whole management team, so everyone can see how the candidate fits in and deals with challenging issues.
- allowing a few team members to be involved in the interviewing process, not specifically to be involved in the final choice, but to test compatibility. This is a two-edged issue though, if the team does not like the candidate, it's hard to go ahead and hire them anyway because of their qualifications alone.
- checking references outside of the list provided by the candidate. As with most management roles, ideally you check a direct report, a manager and a colleague to get a variety of perspectives.
- measuring their ambition. You want to hire people who want to expand their scope and skills in a growing company. You don't want to hire someone where advancement is the main objective -- high performance should be the main objective. If advancement is all someone wants, they will often bring a political approach to how they work which is often disruptive.
- allow the Board to interview and get to know the candidate (if appropriate). It's likely that each leadership team member will spend some time meeting with the Board, involving the Board is a good thing. They can also act as the bad guy asking the tough questions.
Once hired, make sure the job description is well defined, they are well socialized with the team (versus hiding in an office) and that they get a chance to demonstrate their value early on.