‘Leading the Witness’ — Why Great Interviewers Avoid This Common Trap
Hiring mistakes are enormously costly. If you want to avoid them, you can’t afford to be less than an excellent interviewer (or at least have a few standout interviewers on your team). This means learning how to get past the spin and uncover the candidate’s truth.
I recently had an interview coaching session with the CFO of one of my clients. He did a marvelous job of building rapport and asking open-ended questions. But he also exhibited one of the common bad habits we see in “good but not great” interviewers.
We’ve given this mistake a name: “hypothesis-chasing.”
I was playing the role of the candidate, and he asked me about a proud accomplishment from my past. I was telling him a story about a client victory — specifically, a training program I rolled out at one of my largest clients.
At some point, he formed a hypothesis that there must have been some really complex, challenging stakeholder dynamics at play in this client. Interestingly, stakeholder management was not particularly challenging with this client — everyone tended to fall in line with the CEO. The real challenge was figuring out how to deliver our training at scale.
But I, as a savvy candidate, could tell that he really wanted to talk about stakeholder management. In fact, it sounded like it was a big part of the role he was interviewing me for. Had this been a real interview, I would have amped up the stakeholder drama in my story for sure.
Bottom line: If you want to get the truth from candidates, don’t lead the witness. Let their story emerge authentically.
Additional examples:
If a candidate talks about being first to market with a big product innovation, don’t start asking how they were able to move so fast. Ask them how they ended up first to market — you may find out it was because of a breakthrough idea, not speed of execution. If a candidate tells you about missing a key deadline, don’t assume the story is about procrastination or disorganization. Ask them what was the root cause of the miss. You may find out they agreed to a completely unreasonable deadline, because they struggle to say no or set boundaries. If a candidate tells you about landing a major Fortune 500 customer, don’t start asking how they outmaneuvered the competition. Just ask them how they made it happen — you may learn there wasn’t much competition but lots of complex custom service work required.
It’s only natural for humans to form hypotheses. But when you chase those hypotheses as an interviewer, smart candidates will know it, and they may skew the information they share thereafter. And that just might lead to a hiring mistake.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn.
Jordan Burton has 15 years of experience as an executive assessor and interviewing trainer, working with top VC/PE investors and high-growth startups to help them hire the best of the best. He has trained over 3,000 executives and investors on hiring and interviewing skills. He leads Talgo’s business development initiatives, managing relationships with Sequoia Capital, TH Lee, Palantir, Chainlink Labs, and over 50 venture-backed startups.
