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There is one job, no CEO should delegate.
That job is interviewing.
Larry Bossidy, who turned around Allied Signal,
said that the most important role, of any manager, was interviewing.
Jack Welch spent over 50% of his time hiring.
Because getting the best athletes in your team is the thing that will lead your
company to success.
And yet, we are so bad at interviewing.
We've all been in those interviews where the person across the table looks like
a complete muppet, they lunge like cougars at biases at conclusions.
And yet, we could, by implementing a structured
well-thought-out interview process become great interviewers.
The best athletes don't just turn up on the day and race.
They spend months, months preparing and training.
Usain Bolt didn't end up like that by just turning up on the date.
So Scott's gonna tell us why interviewing's important.
Lauren is gonna tell us the biases that affect our judgement.
And Jorge is gonna tell us how we can become better interviewers.
>> So interviewing well is important because it allows you to select and
attract the best candidates, pure and simple.
If you interview well, you'll be able to better select and
attract the best candidates.
So just by a show of hands, who here actually interviewed in their
job before the business school, before you came to GSB?
Okay, me too.
Now keep your hands up if, as part of that process at your old company,
you were given rigorous training on what to look for, or
how to select the right candidates.
Okay, so we have two hands.
>> [LAUGH]
>> So even though companies and people like Jack Welch recognize that
interviewing is really important there's not a lot of training that goes on.
In fact, often times people report in surveys that interviewing is
an area that they feel really uncomfortable in.
And the bad news is for all of us that are leaving the GSB and
going to kind of middle management roles if,
if we go there, will be this discomfort isn't going away,
it's gonna get even worse as our jobs requires us to interview more frequently.
Now so, you know that it's easy, it's important to select the right candidates.
But attracting the right candidate is actually really important.
Because if you are like me you've probably been in
an interview where you face really silly surface questions that made you think,
gosh, this guy who is interviewing me, isn't that bright?
And maybe you even felt like this, this little comment.
Where do I see myself in five years?
Another dumb question, prison.
So these questions are silly, but
a lot of these, lot of times, these questions get asked.
And so, just to demonstrate, how bad some interview processes can go,
we'd like to demonstrate a quick interview of an interview process that's, all to o,
all to often actually happen.
So Andre will be playing the candidate, at Dropbox and
I'll be playing the interviewer.
And so, who do we have?
Andre [INAUDIBLE]
I'm really great at reading people so, I don't need to read his resume.
>> [LAUGH] >> Hi.
>> Hi.
>> Hi, hello.
Hey why don't you why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself.
It sees, it says here you, you went to the GSB.
Hey, I went to the GSB.
>> Oh. >> Class 2003.
>> Great. >> That's awesome.
So maybe the first question.
How's your golf game?
>> Oh, it's actually.
I mean it's, it's it's really come on.
I mean I skipped a lot of classes to go on the course.
So. >> [LAUGH]
>> Oh, that's.
>> Great.
>> Yeah, I mean I,
I like Dropbox.
But hey, you know, when I was GSB that was, that was an amazing place.
Man, I miss it.
You know, I, I, I've been asking the other folks about modeling skills,
that's important here.
But, based on your background, you have the GSB, I mean,
you can probably model pretty well right?
>> I mean, I, I haven't done,
done, actually, yeah I'm probably pretty good, yeah.
>> Yeah. Super.
Well you know, I got some more work to do.
So, I think you're a great fit.
I'd love to hire you.
>> Great. >> Great, well, hey, welcome aboard Andre.
>> Thanks.
[SOUND].
>> So, how does everyone think Scott did?
That was pretty terrible, right?
Scott, you're fired.
So, why are we such bad interviewers?
Given the social nature of interviews,
there's often significant room for interpretation.
But it is not just intentional favoritism or stereotyping.
It is instead more often, one of the many unconscious cognitive biases
that can influence our ability to judge talent and to hire effectively.
So for instance, when Scott said you graduated from the GSB,
nice me too, how's your golf game.
This is an example of similar to me bias in which we develop an affinity for
a candidate because he or she shares personal characteristics with us.
So instead of focusing on the qualifications of the job at hand,
we instead focus on shared background or shared schooling or
the fact that we root for the same sports team.
And similar me bias can also go hand in hand with first impression error.
As we heard from the first skit, first impressions matter.
So what happens here is our initial snap judgements in an interview can set
the tone and color the rest of the interview time.
So no matter what Andre said, in the next 29 minutes,
those first few instances can affect how Scott reads whatever he says thereafter.
And these two biases can go hand in hand with confirmation bias.
So confirmation bias can occur when we
seek information that reconfirms our preexisting notions about an individual.
And this can often lead to inconsistency in questioning.
When we treat different candidates differently and
ask them different questions.
So we see this very clearly when Scott said, I usually ask candidates about their
modeling abilities, but given your background, I think that's unnecessary.
So Andre get to pass whereas all of those other candidates get hammered on
question after question, after question on analysis and modeling.
This is unfair.
Yet despite all of these biases we don't realize our judgement is so bad.
Why is this?
Yet another bias, over confidence bias.
Over confidence bias occurs because we all think that we
have better than average judgement and better than average intuition and
that we're better than average interviewers.
So therefore, we don't even question what we think when we
make judgements about a candidate.
This we saw again in Scott's over confidence when
before entering interview room he said, well I'm really great at reading people so
I don't need to read this resume.
However, these biases really matter.
A couple of small examples.
One, it has been estimated that over 30% of the gain in female orchestra
members over a 20-year period has been attributed to the use of blind auditions,
in which candidates play behind a curtain.
And even further, some researchers ask that over 35% of
hiring choice variation can be explained by a candidate's obesity.
So we can see that these biases really matter.
So now I'm gonna turn it over to Jorge to explain how we
can become better interviewers, and
how we can use an interview process to overcome these unconscious biases.
[SOUND].
>> So how does anybody become a better interviewer?
As with all forms of strategic communication,
the answer lies in preparation.
I'm going to share with you today three steps which anybody can use to
outline a process that is far more efficient than a lot of the,
that what we've been talking about here today.
And actually selecting the right people for the job.
First step involves thinking carefully about the person you're gonna hire and
about their job profile.
Job profile, think about it as a picture, the ideal portrait of what this candidate
is going to look like, or must look like to fulfill the needs of the position.
And in this picture, I can switch.
You can then compare every one of your candidates, and
ensure that you have the best fit possible.
This portrait, should be built around both background factors and personal factors.
Both of these are intricately linked to the next steps of the process so
I will discuss them in more detail in just a second.
The second step is to select for resumes that meet these requirements.
Now the resume selecting, selection stage is the gate to the process, and
this is where you want to really focus on not letting commonalities or
your gut feeling get in the way to allow them through the door.
You, you, you have to focus on the education and the experience
requirements that are required of a person to get to get this job.
You need a rocket scientist, this is an extreme example, but
you of course need somebody, probably with a degree in fluid mechanics, or
mechanical engineering, and a PhD, for example.
Now, once you make your selection, you go into the last step before the interview,
which is to devise a personalized interview plan.
I call it personalized because you need to focus here on the personal
factors of the fir, of the candidates.
These include, intellectual ability.
It has to do with creative pow, creative prowess.
Analytical ability is your decision-making process.
You have to include personality.
How dominant is this person, are they extroverted?
Are they patient and detail-oriented?
These are [UNKNOWN] important things to think about.
Finally, motivation is incredibly important.
This might seem like common sense to you, guys, and
you don't need to be a fan of the show Silicon Valley
to understand the differences between hiring a CEO and a coder.
But you'd, you'd be surprised to see how many people don't really
think carefully about these poor engaging candidates and interviews.
Now it's very important that you actually are focusing on the positions throughout
these whole process and not your personal prod, preferences or ideas.
Now we're at the interview.
It's very easy once you get to the interview to, and you have a resume in
front of you, to let that sort of take control and be your agenda.
Do not let that happen.
You need to come into this interview with a set of topics that you're gonna use as
your agenda, and these topics, the, the details are not really that important.
Doesn't matter what the topic is.
What you wanna use this topic for is to open up the conversation.
These topic openers will then give you information about the candidate,
the specifics about where they work, who they work with,
what specific project they worked on, or where they were educated.
And here, that's where you launch the, the good questions.
This is what the real interview is about.
You wanna focus on getting in delving deep into the person that,
into this person and, and their personal factors
through probing questions either self-appraisal or situation-based.
As an example, you can ask a question such as,
tell me about a time when you had to make a decision in a difficult situation for
there was no, for which there was no policy.
Now these kinds of questions shed light into their analytical, or
their intellectual ability, and their personality.
And to avoid people falling back on pre-canned answers,
you have to delve deeper into those questions.
How did the people around you react?
How did you overcome those that were against whatever decision you made?
And from these you can make your own conclusions, and
you can repeat the process over and
over again until you you have all the information you need to ensure that you
have a fit of the candidates to the portrait.
Speaking of conclusions, I will get over to Andre now.
[SOUND].
>> There is nothing more important than getting the rock stars on
the rocketship that you want your company to be, the best athletes in your team.
Interviewing is the way to get those people into the fold.
And yet, so often we're bad at it.
We're bad at it because, as you've heard, we don't practice,
we don't lift the weights before the race, eat our proteins, practice on the track.
So we'd like to leave you with one message.
Do the practice, do the training, and
bring those, those star athletes into your team.
Thank you.
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