How to interview a top candidate

Why should you tie your shoelaces tight when a bear is approaching? How can you make an impression in an interview and not leave experienced candidates to your competition? Both of these questions are surprisingly related. Marián Kováč, a consultant to leaders and companies in the area of ​​negotiations and effective recruitment, spoke to us about his experience with hiring candidates for important positions. ‘Every IT technician is a person first and foremost with his own desires and needs that he brings to the interview,’ says Marián, and he likes to give examples of why rational data and advanced technologies alone are not enough to attract talented technically-oriented people.

If you could give a hiring manager one piece of advice that would make sure he doesn’t miss out on a top IT candidate, what would it be? 

Don’t just try to overwhelm him with information and technology. That’s what the other five companies that interview him will do. Set yourself apart by looking for a person who wants, needs and longs for something underneath it all.  

But few people are good at this; many technical managers advance because of their knowledge and they learn leadership skills as they go along. 

That’s true. But you don’t have to be perfect, you just need to be a little better than the others that your candidate meets with. I’ll tell you joke about a bear, okay? 

Of course I wanna hear a joke about bear. 

Two friends meet a bear while hiking in the mountains. One of them bends down and starts tying his shoelaces. His friend asks him: ‘What are you doing? You can’t outrun him even with your shoelaces tied!’ And he replies: ‘I can’t outrun him, but I can outrun you.’  

And the same applies to hiring: sometimes you just have to be a little bit better than your competition to make the candidate pick you. Of course, I’m not saying you shouldn’t constantly try to improve your people skills.  

So let’s take a look at the specifics. What impresses a senior candidate more than technical data and information about the position that is similar to others? 

Interest. It could be something as small as the head of IT or someone very high-ranking coming to shake the candidate’s hand (or say hello online) before the interview, wishing him good luck in the interviews and saying he would like to see him again at the final interview, when the last details of the future cooperation will be discussed. 90 seconds of a top manager’s time will make a world of difference in how wanted the candidate feels right at the beginning of the process. 

Can you think of another example? 

We often also overlook how sensitive people are to dissonance. For example, if your behaviour in the interview isn’t in line with how you describe the corporate culture, or if the negotiated job conditions differ from what was listed in the job ad. Candidates may react much more sensitively to details that we don’t perceive in our everyday routine. I recommend not saying anything that isn’t true, not making assumptions and hypotheses, and avoiding vague answers. This isn’t smart, it’s very short-sighted. 

What three questions would you be sure to ask candidates for a very important position? 

• When you recall a situation where you got the best out of yourself, what made it happen? 
• If we meet in one year, how will you know you made the right decision to work for us? 

• What should I have asked that I haven’t yet? 

These are all behavioural questions that I believe definitely belong in an interview. They focus on experiences, not skills, and they allow us to get to know a person better. And asking these questions also shows that we care about the candidate’s personality and who he really is. Not everyone will give you this room to express yourself. I’m sure we all know the feeling when someone takes a personal interest in us. You can tell the difference between a person who is interested and someone who is just being held back by the ‘soft skill crap‘. So who will you go work for when you want a little bit of respect?  

I like to say that we are all wearing the same tag around our necks and we long for others to read it. The tag reads: ‘Allow me to be important.’ People who do so will gain your trust. And there are many more simple things you can do. 

It may seem that the most important aspect to candidates is the offered pay. Senior IT experts receive pretty high wages. How do you see it? 

This may seem to be the case at first and even second glance, but behind every request is a hidden need or desire. If we can find out what the person really needs, we can often find a solution that wasn’t initially clear. 

For example, let’s take a specialist who comes to the interview requesting 90,000 korunas, but we currently have a limit of 80,000 korunas. Rather than lose him by arguing why we think 80,000 is fair, we can ask him more and perhaps we’ll find out he has a mortgage to pay. Or perhaps he wants to continue his education or travel, or he just doesn’t want to look like a ‘loser’ in front of his friends… then we can offer him a job at another branch in Europe, a mortgage guarantee programme, a sophisticated company education system, a better car… What I want to say is that we should always look for ways to fill a person’s needs that are better than money. If there is no other way, I very rarely see companies offer ‘conditional pay’: ‘We’ll give you eighty thousand, and if you meet XY conditions within three months, then we’ll automatically pay you a signing bonus (3 months’ salary).’

Those who are slightly better negotiators than others get the best candidates. And knowing how to respond to a candidate’s true inner driver is one of the most effective ways to get the best ones.  

With a bit of exaggeration, the relationship to money can be summed up in one sentence:

‘If you can’t give me what I really need, give me money.’

What is the biggest mistake hiring managers make? 

They often don’t adapt their communication to the candidate. They try to communicate as much as possible, but they show no interest in finding out who the person sitting in front of them is. This is a double loss. First of all, they lose the motivation of an experienced candidate to stay, and second of all, they lose the opportunity to find out what other position in the company this candidate could be good for. This is called ‘adaptability’, and I don’t think there are any good leaders without it.  

How many interviews have you conducted in your lifetime and what have you learned about people over the years?  

I’ve conducted many interviews. Everyone is nervous, they just show it differently. I get the best out of them by ‘de-stressing’ them. For example, I may express my understanding for their feelings and add a humourous story about my own experience, or I reassure them that I don’t expect them to answer everything, and if they think of something later they can send it in an email. 

But the most valuable thing that my years of experience have shown me is that we are all human beings with our own desires. We just mask them or name them differently, and we don’t share them with people we don’t trust. 

Are IT candidates different from candidates in other fields? What are they allergic to and what do they need? 

I don’t believe that IT technicians are a priori strange or fundamentally different from people in other professions. In terms of the desires we just talked about, they have the same ones as everyone else: recognition, growth, independence, security. They want to fulfil their dreams and have their own worth. They just communicate them differently, so it’s great if someone who understands their ‘tribal language’ speaks with them. 

I’d say there are greater differences between different generations of candidates. I would perhaps recommend one of the hiring people to be the applicant’s age, and then the team can confront each other about who heard what. This will help avoid many misunderstandings and eliminate prejudice. 

You speak a lot about prejudice. Why is that? 

Yes, you’re right. In interviews, prejudices influence our decisions more than we like to admit, on many levels. This is why I almost dogmatically tell hiring managers. ‘Do you want to be successful? Then stop thinking that your intuition will tell you who the right candidate is. Instead, define exact criteria according to which you will make your decisions, and adhere to them strictly. You can also add the criterion of ‘the feeling you got’, but it should only be one of many that carry the same weight.’ 

And there’s one more thing that helps: ‘You’re not choosing the best candidate in the world, you’re just choosing the best one available to you.’ This takes away lots of pressure and unrealistic expectations. 

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