Executive Search
William Discusses Questions to Avoid in Interviews in Forbes
CEO and Founder of Vanderbloemen, William Vanderbloemen, discusses questions that he thinks are best to avoid in interviews in recent Forbes article: 5 Questions to Avoid that Will Make Your Interviews Better.
As a young head of an organization with a few hundred employees, I thought I knew how to run an interview. Of course, back then, being young, I knew everything!
Not.
It turns out; I didn’t know much at all. Now that I’m a little older,
know a little less, and have worked in executive search for a decade, I’m learning some lessons that my young self should have known about interviewing.
It’s not that I was dumb - I was just ignorant. I lacked knowledge.
-1.png?width=250&name=250x150%20%20(11)-1.png)
Now that I have about 10,000 repetitions under my belt, I’m learning not only how to do an interview, but how NOT to do one.
These days, one of my favorite sayings about hiring comes from the Hebrew Scriptures:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but it is a way that ends in death."
What seemed right to me early on was counterproductive. And too many times, I see great managers unable to land great candidates by making the same interviewing mistakes.
Here are some of the boneheaded questions I used to ask, that I’ve since learned are counterproductive.
1. What would you do if you got this job?
Here’s a golden truth for interviewing: The best predictor of future performance is past performance. I’ve learned that the best way to spend time in an interview is to focus on what the candidate you are interviewing has done, not what they might do. It’s tempting to focus on the future and the job you need to get done. But I’ve learned that as the interviewer the burden is on me to think through the job I need done, and try to find ways to see if the candidate’s past performance means they could do the future job. What parts of the job you are trying to fill are crucial? For example: Is it change management? Ask candidates about change management in their previous roles.
