- Tell me about your ugliest weaknesses and how you’re working on them. And don’t tell me you work too hard or you’re a perfectionist, I won’t buy it.
- If I ended up firing you at some point, what would it be for?
- Tell me about a mistake you didn’t learn from until you made it again and again.
- What’s your greatest fear and how does it stop you from your own fulfillment?
It seems managers hate hiring more than they hate hiring mistakes.
Hiring is a deadly combination of mission-critical and poorly executed. People avoid it like crazy. It’s uncomfortable, time-consuming, and they just want to get it over with.
Many businesses create all of their problems through regular hiring mistakes.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret of my industry: the solutions to your problems are very simple–so simple you wouldn’t believe it. Literally. People refuse to believe it.
How do I know?
Because a lot of what I do is say the same thing in different ways until people act. Think about the last business book you read. How many different core ideas were in it? One, two? A complex one maybe has six. Yet the books go on for 400 pages. More on why this is later.
Hiring is a complex process. But hiring mistakes are simple. Hiring mistakes are usually caused by the unwillingness to make the candidate uncomfortable. The candidate wants you to think they’re perfect. They present an image, not reality. And most hiring managers participate in the trance by lobbing softball questions and wasting interview time selling the job to the candidate.
It’s the hiring manager’s job to ruthlessly discover the reality of the candidate, but to do that, you must shatter the image.
How do you do that? Break the interview trance. Here are some example interview tactics that do that: