How to Get Past a Candidate’s ‘Canned’ Stories

Think about the last time you interviewed for a job.

If you are like more than 90% of candidates, you probably reflected on a set of key highlights from your past, perhaps when prepping your resume.

When you met with companies, you told those stories over and over. You rehearsed and refined them with every conversation. You repurposed them, emphasizing whatever skill or competency the interviewer asked about.

If you’re being honest with yourself, some of those stories probably took on a life of their own.

Those are your “canned” stories, and we all have them.

If you are a hiring manager, and you want to avoid a costly hiring mistake, it is critical to have a set of strategies for getting past these canned stories.

Here are my three favorites:

1. Team specialization

Give each interviewer on your team a specific role to play — certain aspects of the role to go deep on. When they are free to go deep, they will (by definition) get past the canned stories. They will have enough time to get multiple stories about a specific aspect of the role in question because they are not trying to cover everything.

2. Chronology

Rather than asking for a candidate to share their “best example” of a given skill or competency, engage in a chronological walk-through of, say, their past three roles. As you explore each role in order, ask about accomplishments or mistakes in domains that are likely to be relevant for the given skill or competency in question. 

For example, if you’re seeking stories about innovation or creativity from a product management candidate, ask about the most and least successful products they developed in each role. If you want to dig into a go-to-market leader’s selling skills, ask about the big wins and the “ones that got away” across each role, also proceeding chronologically.

Ask any detective or investigator — when people share information in chronological order, they are more likely to share the truth and they are more likely to recall nuances that they would have otherwise omitted.

3. The almighty “another”

One of my favorite words to use in an interview is “another.” If a candidate repurposes a story they’ve already told, I might say, “Yes, I love that example. What’s another one?” 

If you do this with enthusiasm and high rapport, candidates will appreciate your desire to learn even more about them.

Bottom line: Canned stories are noisy. It's your job to make sure you and your team prevent those stories from dominating your data set.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Jordan Burton has 18 years of experience as an executive assessor and interviewing trainer, working with top VC/PE investors and high-growth startups to help them hire the best of the best. He has trained thousands of founders, leaders, and investors on hiring and interviewing skills. He leads Talgo’s business development initiatives, managing relationships with TPG, Sequoia Capital, TH Lee, Palantir, Scale AI, and over 50 venture-backed startups.