This One Interview Question Expands the Talent Pool to Everyone Qualified
By Unknown - September 27, 2018
This One Interview Question Expands the Talent Pool to Everyone Qualified
As far as I’m concerned, the purpose of an interview is not to trick the candidate or determine if the person can handle a stress situation or is technically brilliant. The purpose of an interview is to determine if the person is competent and motivated to do the work that needs to be done, fits within the organization and has the potential to grow.
In fact, I suggest you tell the candidate what the question is ahead of time and what a good answer looks like. This way during the interview you don’t need to deal with lack of preparation, emotions, biases, falsehoods or trickery.
Here’s the question: The major challenge in this job is (describe it). What have you done that’s most comparable?
This is called the Most Significant Accomplishment (MSA) question. After the person gives a 1-2 minute overview of the project, get all of the details shown in the image. (This is one in a series of 15 cards in our new Performance-based Interviewing mobile application.)
The idea is to paint a word picture of the accomplishment from a scope, scale, team and complexity standpoint and compare it to your actual job requirements. It takes about 10-12 minutes to get a complete and accurate answer with specific evidence including names, dates, times and metrics.
If the candidate fits the requirements for the most critical project, ask the same question for the other critical KPOs (key performance objectives) for all of the finalists. Replacing skills-based job descriptions with these types of performance objectives opens the talent pool to everyone who has comparable accomplishments but a different mix of skills and difference.
While the same type of MSA question is asked by all of the interviewers, each one is assigned different KPOs to assess some focusing on technical accomplishments, others on team and organizational projects. When completed formally debrief using this Quality of Hire Talent Scorecard to collect the evidence. As part of the assessment observe the trend of the person’s accomplishments over time. It’s great if it’s upward and of concern if it’s downward. If it’s flat make sure the person is highly motivated to continue to do the same work.
Job seekers who have a track record of performance comparable to real job needs welcome this approach. As long as you ask for detailed evidence during the fact-finding, you’ll discover that candidates who are prone to exaggerate or mislead are quickly exposed. Not surprising, few interviewers will ask this type of MSA question since it takes knowledge about the job, inquisitiveness and great listening and fact-finding skills. In these cases, job seekers need to force the questions by asking the interviewer to describe some of the challenges in the job. Then they need to give examples of their most comparable team or individual accomplishment.
A few years ago I prepared a PowerPoint program to be used during the interview to guide the interviewer and candidate step-by-step through a complete Performance-based Interviewincluding the above MSA process. The deck is a bit outdated but the point was to ensure that the interviewer asked appropriate questions about real job needs and the candidate gave complete answers. This rarely happens so guiding the process along in a controlled manner seemed like a worthy idea to ensure a fair and accurate assessment. Despite the rarity, candidates can take matters into their own hands by asking questions that ensure they are fairly assessed. In this case it needs to start and end with the MSA question.
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