Top 10 Hiring Mistakes - #8 - Unprepared - Part 2
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Relationships, Investing
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Behavioral Criteria Definition: Transform vague preferences like wanting to like a coworker into specific behavioral indicators. For an assistant role, this might include laughs at absurd questions before answering, makes candid asides revealing non-mainstream career ideas, admits rather than brags about working long hours, and shares critical opinions about corporate norms. Personal compatibility matters when hiring for close working relationships.
- ✓Resume Analysis Depth: Distinguish between responsibility bullets and actual accomplishments on resumes. Many candidates list only responsibilities disguised as achievements. Professional interviewers examine every job, asking two questions per accomplishment: how relevant is this to my role, and how well did they achieve it. Resumes with zero accomplishments signal either poor performance or intentional deception warranting immediate rejection.
- ✓Behavioral Interview Questions: Prepare minimum five behavioral interview questions derived from resume accomplishments before any interview. Probe deeply when candidates provide vague answers. If someone says they talked to their team, clarify whether that meant individual conversations, group meetings, Teams calls, or single emails. Surface-level responses reveal how candidates will actually communicate and operate in your organization.
- ✓Multiple Interviewer Requirement: Never conduct solo interviews for important positions. Candidates behave differently with peers versus bosses, often showing arrogance or dismissiveness to perceived equals while performing for authority figures. Peer interviewers catch red flags senior managers miss. Five no votes from direct reports outweigh one positive impression from the hiring manager, revealing ego problems before they become performance issues.
- ✓Interview Results Capture Meeting: Establish your decision-making process before starting interviews, not after meeting candidates. Use the Interview Results Capture Meeting framework to systematically evaluate candidates against predetermined behavioral standards. This repeatable process allows teams to improve interviewing effectiveness over time. Without defined methodology, managers default to gut feelings that research shows lag significantly behind structured evaluation in predicting performance.
What It Covers
Manager Tools addresses hiring mistake number eight: being unprepared for interviews. The episode covers how to define behavioral criteria for roles, properly analyze candidate resumes, create behavioral interview questions, and establish a decision-making process before interviewing begins. Multiple interviewers and structured evaluation methods prevent costly hiring mistakes.
Key Questions Answered
- •Behavioral Criteria Definition: Transform vague preferences like wanting to like a coworker into specific behavioral indicators. For an assistant role, this might include laughs at absurd questions before answering, makes candid asides revealing non-mainstream career ideas, admits rather than brags about working long hours, and shares critical opinions about corporate norms. Personal compatibility matters when hiring for close working relationships.
- •Resume Analysis Depth: Distinguish between responsibility bullets and actual accomplishments on resumes. Many candidates list only responsibilities disguised as achievements. Professional interviewers examine every job, asking two questions per accomplishment: how relevant is this to my role, and how well did they achieve it. Resumes with zero accomplishments signal either poor performance or intentional deception warranting immediate rejection.
- •Behavioral Interview Questions: Prepare minimum five behavioral interview questions derived from resume accomplishments before any interview. Probe deeply when candidates provide vague answers. If someone says they talked to their team, clarify whether that meant individual conversations, group meetings, Teams calls, or single emails. Surface-level responses reveal how candidates will actually communicate and operate in your organization.
- •Multiple Interviewer Requirement: Never conduct solo interviews for important positions. Candidates behave differently with peers versus bosses, often showing arrogance or dismissiveness to perceived equals while performing for authority figures. Peer interviewers catch red flags senior managers miss. Five no votes from direct reports outweigh one positive impression from the hiring manager, revealing ego problems before they become performance issues.
- •Interview Results Capture Meeting: Establish your decision-making process before starting interviews, not after meeting candidates. Use the Interview Results Capture Meeting framework to systematically evaluate candidates against predetermined behavioral standards. This repeatable process allows teams to improve interviewing effectiveness over time. Without defined methodology, managers default to gut feelings that research shows lag significantly behind structured evaluation in predicting performance.
Notable Moment
Mark describes interviewing a senior candidate who had undergone fifteen hours of interviews. When Mark began asking behavioral questions, the candidate dismissed the previous interviewers by saying finally someone was asking tough questions. This arrogance toward peers while attempting to impress the board member revealed an ego problem that led to immediate rejection despite strong credentials.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah. And I'm Mark. Today's podcast, top 10 hiring mistakes. Number eight, unprepared part two of two. This guidance answers these questions. What are the most common mistakes in hiring? By the way, there are a billion of them. What preparation should I do before an interview? And why is being unprepared dangerous for an interview? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Are you working toward your next role? If you're thinking about leadership, start building the skills that prepare you for advancement. Manager tools, effective manager conferences, teach you how to build trust, demonstrate professionalism, and communicate like someone ready for responsibility. Explore upcoming training at manager-tools.com/training. Folks, it's completely okay for an interviewer to think during their preparation. I want to like working with this person. I like them. I wanna like them. I I wanna enjoy them. I wanna have fun with them. It is completely reasonable to assess whether or not you would enjoy working with them when it comes to hiring them. But the idea of the criterion is wasted if it's not turned into behavioral specifics that you and others can interview against. Yeah. Now, look, the amateur manager or interviewer says to herself, well, I don't really have to come up with specifics for liking someone. All I have to do is sense whether or not I like them while I'm interviewing them. And look, guys, that's easy, but it's also cheap. Professionals know better than to be satisfied with easy or cheap. Sometimes, yeah, it's totally true that easy simply uncomplicated works just fine and all the better for it and less time spent on that more time on something more important, good to go. But for important behaviors and what is not more important than choosing people who will run your company in its future, We reject easy and simple, and we take the time to do the preparation to make sure we're rigorous in our process. And so in in the case of liking actually, I don't wanna get ahead of ourselves. We're gonna come back to liking here in just a minute. Mhmm. Yeah, folks. An interviewer becomes effective and therefore a professional when they've defined specific behaviors that are really indicative of success in the role, and then have gone a step further, that is, and created questions that will give candidates the ability to communicate their success using those behaviors. A candidate who either doesn't agree with those gatekeeping behaviors or Sure. Who does not have the experience using those behaviors to positive outcomes or simply doesn't answer the question regarding the use of those behaviors, thereby eliminates themself from consideration. And here's something you may not have heard in what Sarah just said. She started by saying a candidate who doesn't agree with those gatekeeping behaviors. You might be thinking, well, I don't really have that many candidates arguing with me about my criteria. That's …
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Tools
- MT DISC AssessmentBy guest
by Manager Tools
“MT DISC Assessment listed as sponsor resource at manager-tools.com/disc”
by Manager Tools
“Use the Interview Results Capture Meeting framework to systematically evaluate candidates against predetermined behavioral standards. This repeatable process allows teams to improve interviewing effectiveness over time.”
course
by Manager Tools
“Manager Tools Effective Manager Conferences listed as sponsor resource at manager-tools.com/training”
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