No BS Hiring Advice

I was listening to an HBR Ideacast this morning interview with Calvin Fussmann, who's someone who's interviewed, Mikhail Gorbachev and Jeff Bezos and Dr. Dre, among others. And there's a great story that he tells about his interview with Bill Buckley, the conservative theorist and talk show host, himself.
Fussman offer some advice for effective interviewing and the show is about job hunting and, more importantly, about hiring. I think his advice, in particular, is great if you're the final interview, the person who, ultimately, this is coming out of your budget. So, here's a couple of his points. There are many more interspersed, I thought these were highlights.
Number one is make the person feel comfortable and don't just go in for the kill right away. That's not the language he uses. I'm taking it into our own culture. As someone who's involved with hiring and making the final decision, he says, get the interview out of the place where there's the obvious power differential, you know, where you're sitting behind the desk, the position of authority, the chair is at a lower height than yours . . . get out of that environment, put them in a more comfortable setting. Even in the environment where there's the office that has the couch and chairs and the coffee table, I can see where that has the same kind of a problem because, even if you're trying to make them comfortable, your chair is higher than theirs is. So try and find the location where you can have some comfort and where you can encourage comfort because you don't want to be getting the same canned answers to the same questions over and over again.
So he says start off looser. Be casual in your initial conversation. Don't go in hard right away. Loosen them up. A little bit of talk about social stuff at the beginning . . . and he tells a great story about an interview that (I always miss pronounce his name. I'm not sure how it's pronounced) Jeff Bezos from Amazon. At that time everyone was asking him, "When is Amazon going to be profitable."
And he said, "I resolved not to ask that question because everyone else had done so. He's sitting there with his publicist in the room there about 20 minutes in and Cal can see the publicist getting nervous and uncomfortable and squirming in the seat, and, eventually, he blurts out, "When are you going to ask him already?"
The two of them laugh because he wasn't going to ask him that. He was going in for the soft approach and was learning more about the man than he was about this hard fact that he'd already answered a million times. So, you want to get people off the script.
He talks about preparing lots of questions in advance that you may not have time to do per person but you can have a standard type of question that you ask everyone and, based upon the feedback that you hear, the answer that you here, I want you to go in deeper.
For example, top applicants, at this point, are coached to talk about the problem that they faced, the action that they took, the result that occurred and some version of metric for defining the impact of what they do. So, given that, you want to go in a little bit deeper about the choices that they made and why they made choices to do it in a particular way. You want to see if there was some thought that went into it or were they instructed, right? You want to be in the position where they're talking more about themselves and what they did in their thought process than the mechanistic approach of what I nicknamed the Italian recipe0150 0150 "Parma." Problem. Actual results. Metric. You get it.
So, going a little bit deeper. He also relays a story that, well, he says, "the first answer to a question is something that's canned but,are where you know, it's an easy answer and that the follow up are where you learn the most. After all, as a journalist, it's rare that he says, "I use the first answer. It's the follow up questions where you really get the stuff that goes into the articles." Isn't that true for you, too? So, make sure you have good follow up questions.
He says he does prepare a list of questions in advance and then throws them out so he can be in conversation mode with people but it does give them a framework for the conversation. The same can apply to you, too.
Now, he's recording things in wherever it is. He says, "I put two recorders out in the room and digital recorders work very well to capture information as opposed to the old days where we had micro cassettes." Remember those days? So, he talks about recording things; that might be useful for your development. To see, as you listen to things later, whether there's something that should missed that could have been an opportunity for further exploration.
He says, "don't go in hard at the beginning. Warm them up a little bit and then go in for the harder questions later on. He tells us great story about interviewing George Steinbrenner, the former Yankee owner, and as they're leaving the interview, Steinbrenner's riding down with them in the elevator and says, "You asked the toughest questions in the nicest way." You want to be doing the same thing.
You don't want to make it seem like you're in aggressor mode because, instantly, what happens is they put up their defenses right and you're not getting the truth of what's going on. So, if you don't want to be adversarial, if you want to get great answers, what you want to be doing is asking tough questions in a very nice way. So, put a smile on your face and go into your . . . if you've never seen this TV show from the olden times called, "Colombo," you want to be a little self-effacing.
"So, I want to talk with you a little bit. I'm a little confused here. Explain to me why you made that decision the way you did. What was it that prompted that choice? What were the choices that you considered as part of the decision to go down that road?" See what I mean?
I was trying to do my Peter Falk voice from "Columbo." I'm sure there are episodes on YouTube that will give you an idea what "Columbo" we used to be like.
So, be kind of self-effacing and just try to get them to open up more. At the end of the day, the game plan for you as the ultimate decision maker is to make sure that your group hires the best people. This is pointed out Tony Hsieh from Zappos points out that his business itself has lost 100 million dollars in sales with bad hiring or hundred million dollars in costs as a result of bad hiring.
I'm sure your firm, in retrospect, can look at things and say, "we didn't hire the best person either." What are you missing out on? How can you improve things? Part of that is drawing better things out of people at the final interview. For you who's budget this is coming out of, this is gonna be the way that we're ultimately measured. How good a team that you have around you to make you look good so that your successor's in place and people are shining and work well with one another.