August 3, 2023
Years of helping organizations develop robust, humane and fair interviewing practices has to rub off on how we interview for our team so here are some of our learnings over the years. I rejoice in the team we’ve built over the years (including the people who’ve moved on to do their own things) so this is a post I’m very happy to write.
To start with, I want to clarify that we practice what we preach – we have a set of competencies we’re looking to assess and have STAR questions designed to elicit data on how the person has demonstrated these behaviours in the past. The best practices I’m talking about here are above and beyond those.
I like to start by asking “Tell me about yourself”.
I know, I know, this sounds like a total waste of precious interview real estate if the person doesn’t stop or launches into a rehearsed litany of their past. You could fine tune the question by saying “tell me about the last role you were in” or “tell me about who you are in a nutshell”
Asking the question can allow the person to ease into the conversation (remember you can always interrupt and say “can you give me an example of that” and move straight into your set of questions)
Most importantly, if you’re really listening, it can reveal a lot more about them than what’s on the resume.
When I ask this question, I’m watching for a host of things:
All the behaviours I’m paying attention to are core to success as a facilitator (and if you’ve encountered a Navgati workshop you would have seen these in action)
I’m reasonably sure that for most leadership roles, all these would be important as well and you would benefit from assessing them.
In Behavioral Event Interviewing, there is a lot of emphasis on data from the candidate’s past – the point I’m making here is that there is a lot of information that can also be collected from how the person is in the here and now. Provided the interviewer knows what they are looking for and pays close attention.
There is no substitute for being able to watch the person actually perform the skills you’re looking for. At Navgati we:
It’s important here to be very sharply focused on the competencies you want to assess and be clear about what level they need to be demonstrated at. For example, with our facilitators, we are not expecting someone to have a beautifully designed session, but we are looking to understand how they apply their understanding of facilitation.
I would strongly recommend having one component of your interviewing process be a demonstration of skill. These need some effort to design but once set up, can help you easily differentiate between candidates and reduce the potential bias that strong communication skills could create. Here are some examples:
If any of this sounds interesting to you, please ping us and we’d be happy to brainstorm with you on this.
Human beings are hard wired for honesty and consistency so how the person acts in all interactions can provide valuable data
Important here to note that we’re not looking for reasons to reject and this is certainly not a recommendation to plunge deeper into bias (“she wasn’t wearing formal clothes so she’s not taking the interview seriously”).
What I am saying here is that our patterns of thinking, feeling and acting tend to be remarkably consistent. Paying close attention, especially interactions where they are not feeling assessed, can yield a lot of data about how they are likely to be on the workplace. Take this information as one input along with all the other data you are collecting about the person.
Atleast four people from Navgati meet a facilitator before they come on board. The two questions we pay attention to are
Some of my favourite questions for this are
In all these, there’s a lot of probing that follows – there are no right or wrong answers; we’re trying to see if there is a match between what this individual needs to thrive and what we can provide them.
In our case, the culture we’re constantly trying to build is a warm, welcoming and psychologically safe one so our attempt is to make sure our interviewing process reflects that. The most important reason for this is that we want people to make a decision to join us with complete awareness of what they are getting into. A secondary benefit is that even people who have not been hired/have chosen not to join us have gone on to recommend us to friends/colleagues because the process has been a supportive one.
If you’d like to know more about our processes or how we can support you in strengthening your interviewing practices, I’d love to chat.
To know more about our Interviewing Skills program please click here – https://www.navgati.in/people-leadership-programs/