YOU HAD A DREAM. (Redefining the interview process to make it effective and fun)

HR director: “Nice to meet you... can you help me understand your career? Key steps, achievements... you have moved quite a bit, could you explain why you moved from one company to another?”

If you ask boring questions like these you cannot expect to have brilliant answers!

Candidate: “I have a degree in law, and I did a master at... I started as marketing intern in that large company and moved from one job to another. Three years later I decided to accept... 

By then, you are already feeling lethargic and your one desire is leaving, run away, going somewhere else and doing something more interesting.”

How many people have you interviewed in your career in HR? For me it is probably around 3000. Potentially even more. Looking in hindsight at these figures, these are quite a lot of people. Many people can claim they’re figures are much higher. The process that expert recruiters go through can be excruciating if you don’t try to do something new, something that helps you to make this fun and (more importantly) effective for both you and the candidate. This is why, more or less 10 years ago, I started to re-define the interview process. The starting point remains traditional, nothing new here. You need to thoroughly read the resume in order to prepare for the interview. After this, you meet Johanna.

“Nice to meet you Johanna. I had the chance to look at your cv, impressive career path. Well done. I don’t want you to repeat what I know. Can you outline for me a couple of passages in your career that help understand who are you as a leader and a professional?”

With this first step, in 15/20 minutes max you have the opportunity to assess presentation skills, relevance and importance of the experiences, a bit of personality... it is at this point that, bored by the past one hour mechanical description of career paths, I decided to change the game, and ask something that helps me (and that I hope will help you from now on) to assess potential, motivation, cultural fit...

“OK Johanna, now, can we go somewhere else? Can you please tell me what you were you doing when you were a teenager? Where were you living, how were you using your free time besides studying? Most importantly, what was your dream, your aspirations?”

Johanna and all the other candidates usually look at me quite perplexed; Johanna even said, “I was not expecting this.”

The reality is that the answers I get to this question are extremely insightful. The candidates express that they had big, small or no dreams at all. They had aspirations about themselves (I wanted to become CEO), or about actions they could take to build a better society (I wanted to help the fight against poverty).

This question about dreams and aspirations helps us as interviewers to hit the nail on the head and gives us what we are truly looking for, without needing to ask many redundant and relatively boring questions.

After this, I follow up with a second question. Now, fast forward to today. Think again about the dream you had when you were a teenager and tell me which portion of the dream you realised and which portion is still in your chest of drawers to be realised in the future.”

If the first question you ask is insightful, the second should flow straight after and is the right one to close the circle. The candidates are more at ease and play your game. They give you outstanding information regarding their personality, ambitions, vision, resilience in front of difficult objectives... and much more. And, moreover, it is fun! Fun to see how very serious professional talk about themselves, their dreams.. how open and transparent they are. How much passion they express or... all the opposite. One important aspect. The company you are recruiting for, the culture, values are extremely important to match all the info about the candidate and their fit with the company. This is to say that there are not right or wrong answers. It all depends on the position and company you are recruiting for. 

Sorry Johanna, we left you for a second. So what was your dream? “If you ask me... I wanted to become an astronaut and be the first woman landing on the moon.”

“Wow!!! This is quite cool and, I suppose you have not yet realised your dream.” 

“Not yet but, I still keep this in my chest of drawers, as you said. I’m hopeful that in the near future, I could become the first passenger of a vessel that will bring people in the space. Not exactly what I dreamt when I was a teenager but, still quite cool, what do you think?”

Johanna was a great professional and human being. Her experience was very relevant for the position I was looking for and, considering her dream, I definitively decided to hire her. She made a wonderful career and the chest of drawers containing her teenage dream is still sitting there waiting to be opened.

#recruiting #leadership #talentmanagement