I have been exploring a few options lately when it comes to my career. While I am not unhappy with my current role I realize that the potential elsewhere is greater.

This has led to some interesting thoughts as I look into different companies and teams. It is almost like a career day at school, you sit there to hear about different paths and imagine yourself in the role.

I read an article one time that stated its hard for a company to convey culture during the interview process, instead, they lead with salary and benefits.

This makes sense to a degree, but as a candidate, you end up dealing with asymmetric information. Sure there are sites that give job reviews but we all know that when you really dislike a job you will write a review. Lukewarm about the whole thing? Probably not writing a review one way or the other. So how can we overcome this information gap?

As I have matured a bit in my career (mature is loosely defined, by the way) I have started resorting to reaching out to a trusted friend or business acquaintance. I like to hear about their personal experiences and their viewpoints.

One way I do this is by reaching out to those I respect via LinkedIn or on the phone. I prefer hearing someone describe something and listen to their tone while they say it.

Why do I do this? If I trust someone then I feel that they will have my best interests in mind.

If I reach out to a random site online that have company reviews, then I really do not know if they have my best interests in mind. They could be bitter or they could just have an employer encouraging positive reviews.

How do you evaluate?

Image credit: Hiking Artist

To set the record straight I have been married for a number of years now and am very happy with my wife. I have not dated in any way since our courtship and am quite frankly a poor judge of what the current scene looks like. The closest I get to dating at this point are interviews for new jobs and roles.

A lot of people equate interviewing jobs to a sales cycle. You need to qualify the opportunity, determine next steps, and get to a close.

I actually agree that interviewing is very much like a sales cycle. However I also view it as trying out a new relationship.

Work/life balance is more of a blend. You need to know if that job you take will be flexible when needed or support you in your goals. Do you see yourself settling down with them? Have they mistreated others in a similar role before?

Essentially, when we read review sites, ask around and conduct an interview we are trying to determine if it’s a right fit.

I was taught a good lesson recently that we need to show a company what we can bring to the table, not just what the company can do for us. I liked that statement a lot and it reminded me a bit of when President Kennedy spoke about what you could do for your country.

So as a happily married man, interviewing is the closest thing to dating that I can think of in corporate America. (And I am not naive to think dating doesn’t happen in a traditional sense, just not going down that road here).

What are your thoughts on all of this? Am I on the right path with my system or can it be refined?

Image credit: scott.fuhrman

is not always sufficient.

In 2008, the psychiatrist Stephen Greenspan published The Annals of Gullibility, a summary of his decades of research into how to avoid being gullible. Two days later, he discovered his financial advisor Bernie Madoff was a fraud,…

Why would an expert in gullibility be so gullible?

The answer, according to David Dunning, a University of Michigan social psychologist, is simple —

We are always most gullible to ourselves. (…) “To fall prey to another person you have to fall prey to your belief that you’re a good judge of character, that you know the situation, that you’re on solid ground as opposed to shifty ground,”

I read about Dunning’s research on incompetency way back in 2000, when he was at Cornell, and wrote about it in 2007, so learning how closely gullibility was related to incompetency made a great deal of sense to me.

A body of research has also established what scientists call “egocentric discounting”: If participants are asked to give an estimate of a particular fact, such as unemployment rate or city population, and then shown someone else’s estimate and asked if they’d like to revise their own, they consistently give greater weight to their own view than others’, even when they’re not remotely knowledgeable in these areas.

There lies the greatest danger, as well as the greatest challenge, for every manager when hiring outside of their own expertise — which is most of the time.

The easy part of the solution is to have team members with specific expertise included in the interview process.

The truly difficult part is to put aside your “egocentric discounting” and give credence to those more knowledgeable than yourself.

Image credit: ArrrRT eDUarD

This is a short post, because you need time to read the links.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a CEO building an executive team or a newly promoted supervisor, interviewing is critical to success — the team’s, the company’s and, especially, yours.

The most important things to learn from your interviewing aren’t about hard or soft skills.

The truly critical factors are

• how they think; and
• their attitude.

That should be the “make or break” information you come away with.

There’s a lot of help to be found here; look in the hiring category and use the various interview* tags — and, of course, today’s links.

Asking slightly off-the-wall questions that candidates can’t prepare for is a good technique as long as you have a valid goal in mind — one that is well beyond just being discomforting.

The technique is used by CEOs from companies diverse companies, including Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Stormy Simon, president of Overstock and Ashley Morris, CEO of Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop.

Use them as a guide, because the same questions probably won’t work for you. First, they will become well-known as they are passed around the digital world, and second, because they won’t be relevant to your particular situation.

Now, a moment of interviewing levity, better know as “candidates say/do the strangest things” or  WTF?????

“It’s hard to say why a candidate would do some of these things,” Rosemary Haefner, chief human-resources officer for CareerBuilder, tells Business Insider. “Maybe he or she is nervous, thinks an employer would find it funny, or perhaps the candidate simply has no boundaries.”

More than 2,600 hiring managers and employers shared with CareerBuilder the most memorable job-interview mistakes candidates have made. Here are 25 of the most unusual things that happened:

I sent this link to several friends; here is the response of one who is a senior manager at a large industrial enterprise in the southeast.

I’ve been offered a blow job, been asked out, been introduced to the “cruising” area of my city, threatened with a sexual harassment suit and shouted at. Interviewing is no joke…

Managers are still sticking their respective feet in their respective mouths.

Don’t be one of them.

Image credit: Hiking Artist

When it comes to hiring, as Forrest Gump would say, “stupid is as stupid does.”

And stupid is using recruiters who think the only “right” answer to a technical question is the one written on a sheet of paper. (Note that “technical” can refer to the specifics of any field, although in this case it was software.)

No knowledge or understanding of the subject; just the blind focus on the written words — kind of like talking to customer service when the rep keeps repeating their script no matter how you phrase the question — and no recognition that they may wrong.

The call started off well but as the interview progressed, Guathier got an increasing number of questions wrong. His frustration grew as he tried to discuss the answers with the Google recruiter only to find that the recruiter wanted the exact answer in the test book even if alternative solutions were better.

The company is Google and it should be noted that they approached the candidate, as opposed to his applying.

Way back in 2007 Google announce that they had developed an algorithm to screen candidates.

It didn’t work.

Google was also famous for its brain-teaser questions.

Only, according to Lazlo Block, SVP of People Operations, they are a lousy predictor of success.

“Part of the reason is that those are tests of a finite skill, rather than flexible intelligence which is what you actually want to hire for.”

The value of elite colleges and high grades was publically debunked in a 2013 story about the prevalence of grade inflation.

Not all Google’s efforts fall in the stupid category; block’s efforts to educate both management and workers about bias is definitely a smart move.

But locking technically ignorant recruiters into accepting only set responses to tech question rates right up there with algorithms and brain-teasers. And I say this as someone who was a tech recruiter for more than 12 years.

Of course, managers’ interviewing skills won’t matter, since  the best, most knowledgeable, most creative candidates will be screened out before they ever see them.

Image credit: Chris Pond

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Back in the early 1980s when there were no cellphones, no email, no WWW and Apple was the hot young company with the great perks a friend of mine interviewed with them.

She was a very talented programmer and Apple wanted her badly.

When I asked her how it went she said it was the dumbest interview she had ever had.

All the manager talked about was how “cool it was to work there” and “the great perks, like the group’s own foosball table” and how much money she would make her and on and on about the stock.

While all that was true, what the manager didn’t spend much time on was the work itself, what she would do, what she could learn, what value she brought and what her career path might look like.

In other words, she was looking for substance and the manager spent almost the entire interview on fluff.

She said he was very surprised when she turned down the offer.

I know it wasn’t that she was female, because I knew many guys who had similar interviews.

And it wasn’t just that manager.

It happened over and over because the perks and stock were constantly spotlighted in the media, like Google and Facebook today, although Apple is the granddaddy of cool perks culture, and the people who worked there couldn’t believe anyone would turn down a chance to join.

The lesson here is that focusing an interview on what the media (real and social) finds noteworthy is not necessarily what attracts people and may cost you real talent.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

A young programming whiz called me after reading this post and requested some help.

“Jim” had job offers from two strong startups and wasn’t sure which to accept.

I discussed which technology he found most interesting, which position he thought would be the most challenging, where he thought he would learn the most, which people he felt most comfortable with, which company seemed to have values/culture that was most synergistic to his own.

I asked if there was anything about either one that bothered him and Jim said that was the problem, he wasn’t sure.

In both cases, his final interview had been with the respective founders. Both shared their vision and seemed open when responding to his questions. He left each feeling excited and enthralled with the opportunities.

Jim said the problem surfaced when he was telling his parents about the companies (call them A and B).

He said he was easily able to explain B’s vision, market, opportunity and even culture, but when he tried to describe A’s vision and the founder’s answers to his questions he couldn’t.

What seemed so clear when they were talking wasn’t when he used his own words to explain it to his folks.

When he replayed the founder’s actual sentences and even wrote them out and re-read it they didn’t make as much sense—worse, some didn’t make any sense at all.

What happened to Jim made me think of a recent post by Steve Roesler about keeping things simple.

Truth comes in sentences. B_ llS_it comes in paragraphs. If you can’t say it with a noun, verb, and object, you aren’t clear about your thought.

I suggested he read it and also yesterday’s post and apply the information to the problem.

Jim just emailed me to thank me for the time we spent and the links; he also said that he had accepted B’s offer.

Which do you remind your candidates of, A or B?

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I was reading a post from Mark Suster and I realized that something he said near the end really encompasses the way I try to live.

Life is an informational interview.

Informational interviews are how you learn; they entail talking to people in different walks of life, different positions and different ways of thinking.

Informational interviews require you to come with an open mind and your listening skills fully engaged.

It’s an approach that should flavor all parts of your MAP—reflect in your mindset, inform your attitude and permeate your philosophy.

Try it; you may be surprised, not only at how much you learn, but also how much fun it is.

Flickr image credit: Gangplank HQ

Do you pride yourself on your interviewing skills; on your ability to filter out your own prejudices, such as an ugly tie or the fact that you can’t stand blondes? Do you allow outside events to influence your interview evaluations?

If you answered ‘no’ a researcher in Canada has news for you.

Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier examined University of Toronto medical school admission interview reports from 2004 to 2009. After correlating the interview scores with weather archives, he determined that candidates who interviewed on foul-weather days received ratings lower than candidates who visited on sunny days. In many cases, the difference was significant enough to influence acceptance.

Wow. Bad weather just took on a whole new meaning.

These unconscious attitudes impact far more than interviewing; they color all our actions at work, at home and out in the world.

Being human means being vulnerable to unconscious and often illogic actions and reactions, but it also means finding a way to compensate for them.

How? By monitoring research, such as Redelmeier’s, and staying hyper-awareness of the foibles embedded in your MAP.

It doesn’t mean eliminating them, just being aware enough to offset their impact.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/

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