Here’s Why You Should Be Using Aspirational Management In Job Interviews

Interviews are stressful on both sides.

The potential employee wants to impress you, you want to find someone to help your team, and both of you want things to go smoothly. It’s enough to make coffee cups shake and palms sweat. But there’s a simple way for you to ease the situation:

Ask the person about what they aspire to be.

In my experience interviewing candidates for positions with my company, Codex Protocol, asking an interviewee about their aspirations will give you a full picture of who they are as a person. You’ll see what lights them up and gets them moving.

Obviously, discussing aspirations has to be done in tandem with other critical parts of the interview process. But asking an employee what they want to grow into will help lay the early groundwork for a partnership that could benefit everyone involved.

Low Risk, High Reward

Asking a job candidate what they aspire to be in life is the most useful question you’ll ask in an interview.

Reason being, you’ll learn a few things about the candidate immediately — like what they actually want to be doing, what they don’t want to be doing, and how that does (or doesn’t) fit within your company. And people will happily volunteer a lot of information on the subject. After all, they want to talk about their goals because they’re excited about them.

But you can’t stop there. You have to dig in and ask, “Why?”

Maybe someone says they want to work in sales. Asking them “Why?” will give you an idea of their strengths and areas for potential growth. If they like the thrill of selling huge deals themselves, they will focus on being the best salesperson they can. If they dream of becoming a VP of Sales, you’ll know they will want to rise through the ranks. If it’s something else, then their aspirations may be better suited for a different role.

Whatever you do, don’t hire someone who doesn’t have aspirations, or if their aspirations don’t align with the role. If they don’t know what they want, then you can’t motivate them. And they won’t work hard because they won’t know why they’re working.

Aspirations Lead to a Partnership

Once you know what someone truly wants out of a job, you can set them up for success by framing the opportunity as a partnership.

I say partnership because that’s the key to aspirational management. You want to know your employees’ goals, because you want to build an organization where your business benefits when your employees reach for their goals. You want everyone pulling in the same direction, with mutual benefit.

Knowing someone’s aspirations, and knowing how you can best help to accomplish them together, will also lead to better performance. Someone whose aspirations align with their role is going to work harder, and with a greater joy, than someone without them. And that joyous hard worker is who you want on your team — even if their goals and role change over time.

Be Flexible, Because Employee Aspirations Will Change

You can’t expect anything about humans to stay the same forever — especially their goals and aspirations.

One woman, who worked at my previous company, Lofty, started as an appraiser. She was clear about her goals in that role and what she wanted. But, while working in appraisals, she helped us design a crowdsourcing platform for virtually appraising different products. After that experience, she wanted to work in product management, so we moved her into product management and she eventually became our VP of Product. We made room for her aspirations to shift, because when she felt like she was working toward a goal she cared about, she worked hard and accomplished a lot for herself and for the business.

We grew together as a result, creating a symbiotic win over the long term.

You can’t really get all the information you need about a person in one interview. But knowing what they aspire to is a wonderful place to start. You’ll immediately set out together with the understanding that what you’re creating in the workplace is a partnership because their goals align with the company’s.

And that can be the start of something beautiful.