The Art of the Interview

Like Barbara Walters questioning a celebrity, managers can elicit valuable information from job candidates by artfully conducting an interview. Here's how to sharpen your technique.

If you were a tree, what kind would you be? Why did you decide to go into accounting? Why are you the best candidate for this job? Are you married? These types of questions are routinely asked in job interviews. The first question is silly, the second is trite, the third is too broad and the fourth is illegal. None of them will elicit the kind of information needed to evaluate a candidate for a particular job.

When Controllers conduct job interviews, they not only ask questions to assess a candidate's job skills but also to try to gauge a host of other important factors like honesty, manageability, resourcefulness and judgment. It's a tough job, yet many managers conduct an interview like a social conversation. According to Arnold Kanter, a legal consultant on hiring issues and the author of The Essential Book of Interviewing, “Being able to talk to someone doesn't make you an accomplished interviewer anymore than being able to jog a bit makes you a champion sprinter, or being able to slop a little paint on a canvas makes you a Picasso. ... Assumed expertise perpetuates interviewing mistakes.”

Financial managers, like most executives, may need to sharpen their interview techniques, but their analytical and organizational abilities should be an enormous asset because a good interview needs to be well-planned and executed in a deliberate manner.

Preparing for the Interview

On the surface the interview should be relaxed, informal and friendly, but underneath it should be calculated, comprehensive and razor sharp. And that means taking the time to be well-prepared. By taking the following steps at the onset, you'll get quality information from job candidates.

Define the job by taking a careful look at the actual tasks involved. Don't rely on an old job description that may be outdated or never worked in the first place.

After reviewing the job tasks, make a list of the skills needed to perform the tasks. For example, if a new hire will have to make formal presentations before an audit committee or board of directors, the applicant should have good communications skills. The list of skills will fall out into a number of categories such as technical (e.g., ability to use computer software), performance (e.g., can manage others, can diagnose and solve problems), and personal (e.g., is flexible, dependable).

Scrutinize the applicant's résumé. Martin Yate, author of Hiring the Best, claims that résumés are like “mirrors in a fun house,” because they offer a distorted view of reality. He says that achievements listed on a résumé are often “exaggerations of a modest truth.” Yate calls these exaggerations “the Apollo Syndrome” after a low-level functionary at The Kennedy Space Center who claimed to be a vital part of the first Apollo mission (the functionary's résumé read, “provided key support to top scientists”). In reality, Yate laughs, the functionary served coffee to the scientists “who otherwise would not have stayed awake long enough to get the ship launched successfully.”

Using the applicant's résumé and the job skills list, prepare the questions, sticking with questions based on past job performance, since it is the best predictor of future behavior. In addition, past performance questions keep an interviewer from wading into illegal waters.  Constructing questions for recent college graduates, who lack a proven track record, is harder, but Yate says that any work experience, even summer or part-time jobs, is grist for the mill. According to Yate, “Even the level of the job is not as important as what and how much the student learned from that experience, and this is where your questions should lead.”

Good Questions/Bad Questions

Kanter maintains that a good interview question is specific to the candidate, based on the candidate's past experience, open-ended, nondiscriminatory, job-related and nonleading. In general, questions tend to fall into the following categories:

Open-ended. They can't be answered in a few words and usually start with “what,” “how,” “why,” “tell me about” or “give me an example of.” They are effective because they get the candidate to talk and the interviewer to listen.

Close-ended. These questions can usually be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” and begin with words like “are,” “did” and “have.” While some are unavoidable, a string of them will provide little information.

Leading. You are asking one when you inadvertently give the answer to a question — in the question. For example, you say, “Our company is very team oriented. Are you a team player?” Only a brain-dead candidate will deny being a team player. Instead, ask, “Do you prefer to work independently or as part of a team?”

Self-evaluation. “What is your greatest strength?” “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself in terms of problem solving?” Not necessarily bad questions, they are overused and prepared interviewees will have stock answers. A better way to ask about problem solving: “Give me an example of one of the toughest problems you ever tackled and how you solved it.”

Hypothetical. The interviewer says, “You are about to leave on a dream vacation, but a crisis at work demands your attention. What would you do?” Hypothetical questions may seem very clever, but they have no link to past job performance, and applicants know what an interviewer wants to hear. However, Yate, who worked as a personnel director in the Silicon Valley in the 1970s, says that the use of hypothetical questions, injected with a dose of reality, was instrumental in the growth of the computer industry. Computer engineers simply took real problems they were facing and posed them as hypothetical questions in interviews with potential hires (“What would you do if ...?”). Says Yate, “If you interviewed 20 people, you got 20 good ideas.”

Another way to use a hypothetical question, suggests Yate, is to take a problem you have faced and solved, and pose it as a hypothetical. Then, he explains, “You have some idea, some frame of reference of whether or not the candidate's approach would have worked in the real world.”

Standard questions like “What were your responsibilities at that job?” or “Tell me about your management style” are useful but not hard for candidates to answer. An interviewer should try to have a handful of probing questions like: “Tell me about a time when you had to persuade your boss to adopt your point of view”; “What kind of decisions are the most difficult for you?”; “What was the worst fiscal mistake of your career?”; “What was the most complex project you ever handled and how did you accomplish it?”

Conducting the Interview

Questioning a complete stranger can be awkward and uncomfortable. Remembering some of the traditional social graces that you would use in a social setting can help as you artfully guide the conversation in the right direction.

Put the interviewee at ease. Meet the candidate at the door, extend a friendly handshake, make eye contact and act genuinely pleased to be interviewing the person.

Listen. Not listening is one of the biggest mistakes an interviewer makes. The rule of thumb: The candidate talks 80 percent of the time, and the interviewer talks 20 percent of the time. According to Yate, “God gave us one mouth and two ears. In an interview we should use them in an appropriate way. We tend to sell our companies too soon, too hard.”

Maintain control of the interview. Kanter recommends that interviewers not allow candidates to ask questions for at least the first two-thirds of the interview. To cut off the questions, you can say, “I know you have a number of questions, and I am going to leave some time for them toward the end of the interview. But first I'd like to take some time to learn about you.”

Use silence to your advantage. Uncomfortable with silence, most interviewers will jump in and fill the void. Kanter says, “As a general rule, when you ask a question, you shouldn't be the next person to speak. Give the person an opportunity to formulate an answer and to respond.” Also, states Kanter, “Another time when silence is useful is right after the candidate has answered a question. If you pause just a second or two before asking another question, you're sending a signal to the candidate that you would welcome additional information, and sometimes what the candidate adds after that brief pause is more interesting and less rehearsed than the initial answer.”

Hiring Decisions and the “Halo Effect”

When you like an applicant because you share common interests and viewpoints, you can fall victim to the “halo effect.” It occurs when the personal rapport is so overwhelmingly good that a halo descends upon the applicant and the interviewer automatically endows the person with all kinds of positive traits and abilities. If this happens, the validity of the interview is in serious jeopardy. A good interviewer needs to remain objective and stay on course with tough, challenging questions.

Studies have shown that most interviewers make a decision about a candidate in the first five minutes of an interview and spend the remaining time listening for facts that will substantiate that decision. In addition, too many managers judge candidates solely on their communications and presentation skills, or how they “perform” in the interview — not on how they will perform on the job. The goal of the Controller is to break through the interview persona and carefully assess each candidate. Or, as one pundit said, “Hiring should be a painstaking process since new employees don't come with a warranty.”

Originally printed in the April 1996 issue of Controller Magazine

Carol Orsag Madigan is a freelance writer and communications consultant. She is a former communications specialist with McKinsey & Co., an international management consulting firm, and a former director of public relations with Times Mirror, a Fortune 500 company. Prior to employment with Times Mirror, Madigan worked for novelist Irving Wallace, as executive editor of eight popular reference books (including the bestseller The People's Almanac), and as executive editor of a weekly column in Parade magazine. A graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Madigan lives in Los Angeles. She is the co-author of seven books, including When They Were Kids (Random House, 1998) and Life's Big Instruction Book (Warner Books, 1995). As a communications consultant, she has worked with a variety of clients, including KCET-TV (the public broadcasting station in Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Public Library, Financial Psychology Inc., Stonesong Press, and Simon & Schuster Publishing Co. She is a Business Finance contributing editor.