ScopeAT

If you’ve done even a modest amount of interviewing, you’ve certainly heard your share of long-winded (and sometimes aimless) stories about big, complex projects or engagements.

You ask a simple question about a key highlight in a candidate’s last role and, before you know it, you’re 15 minutes into a story with seemingly no way to “get to the point.”

While this can happen with just about anyone, there are certain kinds of candidates for whom this happens most frequently:

Consultants or project managers who lead massive projects with lots of steps and stakeholders.Enterprise salespeople, who face long, complex sales cycles (and may only land a few deals a year).Technical leaders overseeing a small number of large-scale product development efforts.CEOs or other leaders who have led complex organizational turnarounds.

In these situations, it is essential to be an active interviewer, guiding the candidate to the most important content.

It is also critical to get comfortable completely skipping unimportant details — that is, elements that don’t involve the candidate’s own skills, performance, and competencies.

Four tactics for helping candidates get to the point

Here are some specific techniques to get the essence of these stories without burning precious time:

If you are hearing a lot about other people, focus the candidate on their own contribution to the effort: “Sounds like there were a lot of people involved here. What was the biggest mark you made on this effort?”
If the candidate is talking about a wide variety of problems, challenges, or levers they pulled, cut to the one that mattered most: “What was the single hardest thing about making this [deal/project/turnaround] happen?”
If the candidate is walking you through a long series of chronological steps, amp up your enthusiasm — your I-just-can’t-help-myself energy — and ask: “What was the end result?” Get the conclusion first, and then decide what details, if any, make sense to pick up.
If the candidate seems mired in tactics, ask them to put on the hat of a very senior-level stakeholder. “If I asked the CTO for your biggest impact on that product launch, what would she tell me?” This approach can be very helpful in encouraging the person to give the 50,000-foot view.

There are rare occasions when you may want to spend five minutes or more on a single story. But the vast majority of the time, you hit diminishing returns much earlier (that is, the point where the value of getting the next story outweighs additional depth in the current story). 

So, it’s important to stay vigilant! Keep practicing these techniques to get the “juice” out of the story as quickly as possible.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Jordan Burton has 17 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 thousands of founders, leaders, and investors on hiring and interviewing skills. He leads Talgo’s business development initiatives, managing relationships with Sequoia Capital, TH Lee, Palantir, Scale AI, and over 50 venture-backed startups.

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