Part 2: What are you even looking for? [Part 1] [3]
At a certain stage of your career you get asked to help out with interviews, probably sooner in small orgs than large ones (implicit tip there how to accelerate your experience). It’ll start with just sitting in, listening. Possibly asking some technical questions from your area of expertise. If you keep doing them you’ll start to get a natural sense of what good looks like: the characteristic traits you’re looking for, those things beyond the perfunctorily technical proofs they know the precise difference between a zorp and zarp. You start thinking about “soft skills”.
The level zero of this is the kind of stuff that pops up in LinkedIn clickbait sidebars. 17 Skills Hot Recruiters In Your Area Want NOW! Are they good under pressure, are they self-motivated, are they hard workers, can they attend a three day certification course, do they own a clock, etc, etc, blah.
We’re past the technical phase, but still none of this is especially useful because nobody will ever say “no, actually I’m terrible under pressure and also I hate people”. Or rather those who might will self-select out on any questioning at all quite quickly anyway. The point is standard questions condition candidates into standard answers. Asking these questions is revealing nothing.
But by now you notice the interviews you enjoy and/or the ones that work out favourably, well, they have something in common. What is it? So maybe after thinking about it for a bit (or maybe it just comes to you), inevitably, I think you end up thinking the secret ingredient is c̶r̶i̶m̶e̶ passion.
I did anyway. For ages I would ask questions designed to surface that sense that the candidate really cared. I got a bit abstract about it — didn’t even need to be passion for the tech, just show me you can really be motivated about something, anything, and then I reckon I can point you where I need you and you’ll dig in. After all, you can teach everything else: that technical stuff is just a levelling thing where we start you, but you can’t teach passion folks, amiright? Innate innit. This is Level One.
Reader, I was not right. If you’re on the passion train¹, then you need to get off².
A not-obvious-enough problem is that this really isn’t a neuro-inclusive way to qualify people at all, but a more basic problem is that passion skews good and bad. The dark side of passion has caused untold human misery and though I’m hardly equating genocides etc to a bad hire, the point is passion one day could be bullying the next. Or arguments, inflexibility, drama. If I can shamelessly zeitgeist, it’s a little bit Dune: passion is required to do great things, but those great things contain the possibility to be harmful just as much as beneficial. One must be careful with such people.
So, passion isn’t enough — it also needs positive direction, a passion for.
But for what?
Stop. Rethink. What matters?
Well what do you value? What are your stated values? Aren’t those by definition what matter?
Now many of you might feel pretty cynical about corporate values and mission statements and such like. Somewhere on a curve between Californian new-age hokum and vague and whitewashed corporate box-ticking lingo bingo right? Simon Wardley satirised the general area pretty soundly, and honestly, I get it³, because that is sadly kind of the norm. But let us set that aside for another conversation.
For an organisations values to mean anything they have to be acted on, root and branch. And if anything is the root of company culture it must be in who you hire. If we genuinely believe our values, and we construct interviews to identify those values (or lack thereof) in candidates, we naturally drive for more of that value i.e. more of what matters. Very XP.
So that’s what we did, and it was immediately effective.
Welcome to Level Two.
Next post, we’ll get practical and illustrate how to make a values-based approach to interviewing tangible for you.
[1] Sometimes you write what you write, y’know?
[2] I was going to rephrase but nah, roll with the lol.
[3] Although horrifically, plenty of people did not :O
