The Working Girl Question
Oren Trask was CEO of media conglomerate, Trask industries. He was particularly gifted in choosing great people.
Behavioral interviews are useful to a point. It's essential to separate out people who know how to interview from people who know how to deliver. There are a lot of people who can figure out how things happened in retrospect. There's a smaller subset of people that can make things happen in the moment.
I've found it's essential to go beyond the initial behavioral examples someone gives me in an interview to probe idea ownership. I ask a variation of the five levels of why, I look at levels of "How did you come up with the idea?"
(Note: This is an excerpt from the book Onboarding. Oren Trask does not actually exist. He's a character in Working Girl, written by Kevin Wade. His thinking is too powerful to ignore just because he isn't real. By the way, the picture is from the same movie.
Thanks George!
Top Executive Recruitment
Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions
The only three true job interview questions are:
1. Can you do the job? 2. Will you love the job? 3. Can we tolerate working with you?
That’s it. Those three. Think back, every question you’ve ever posed to others or had asked of you in a job interview is a subset of a deeper in-depth follow-up to one of these three key questions. Each question potentially may be asked using different words, but every question, however it is phrased, is just a variation on one of these topics: Strengths, Motivation, and Fit.
Can you do the job? – Strengths
Executive Search firm Heidrick & Struggles CEO, Kevin Kelly explained to me that it’s not just about the technical skills, but also about leadership and interpersonal strengths. Technical skills help you climb the ladder. As you get there, managing up, down and across become more important.
You can’t tell by looking at a piece of paper what some of the strengths and weaknesses really are…We ask for specific examples of not only what’s been successful but what they’ve done that hasn’t gone well or a task they they’ve, quite frankly, failed at and how they learned from that experience and what they’d do different in a new scenario.
Not only is it important to look at the technical skill set they have…but also the strengths on what I call the EQ side of the equation in terms of getting along and dealing or interacting with people.