Beware the Smooth-Talking Job Applicant!

Every manager who's been around the block has a story to tell about hiring someone who was utterly and painfully wrong for the job he or she was hired into. If the stars are aligned the right way, everybody notices the mismatch early on and the new hire is moved into a more suitable job. That's the happy ending.

This column is about the earlier part of the story -- about the shock that hits a manager when the manager realizes that the newest person on board has no idea whatsoever how to do the job, and no idea how to find out.

How did these people get so badly miscast? They got jobs they were altogether unsuited for by talking their way brilliantly through a job interview.

There are a lot of people who are tremendous communicators, and a lot of other people who are dazzled by top-notch communication skills. I enjoy listening to an articulate and persuasive speaker as much as the next person.

When someone is smart and can make a point convincingly, it's fun to talk with him or her - you feel like you can share ideas for hours.

As interviewers we can forget about what we really need in a new hire when we're talking with a person who's a very strong communicator.

As important as verbal communication abilities are in many jobs, a huge vocabulary and skillful use of the language can sometimes disguise so-so or worse judgment, interpersonal skills, or another essential qualification for a job.

I'm not saying that very articulate people are necessarily less strong in other areas, but I am pointing out that when someone is well-spoken, we can easily overlook or even fail to dig in and learn about other qualities that are just as important.

Hiring managers, of course, are fallible humans. They fall victim to the same decision-making slip-ups that everyone does, sometimes with disastrous results. We got a call from a CEO who had just gone through a series of unfortunate hires in leadership jobs.

He called us when three people in Director and VP roles each lasted less than a year with the company, which was growing and couldn't deal with that kind of turnover. These three new hires didn't work out. They were great people, but they had each been very unsuited to the roles they were hired for.

All three of them had left the company through polite and professional mutual agreements to part ways (each with a financial cushion to soften the blow). The CEO was frustrated.

"We must be doing something wrong in our interviewing," said the CEO. "Will you come out here and work with me and our team?" We went. We sat down together and looked at post-interview comment forms. We looked at the comments from interviews where people were hired into jobs, and other interviews where the candidates weren't hired.

What did we notice? You will not be surprised to hear! The candidates who interviewed most skillfully and 'sold themselves' most articulately got the job more often than not. In conversations about successful and unsuccessful hiring situations, we heard the same thing.

The better a communicator a job-seeker was as indicated on the interviewer's rating sheet and in the interviewer's comments, the more likely the candidate was to be hired. In the case of the three people who hadn't worked out in their roles, most or all of the interviewers' comments focused on the candidates' communication skills.

"Articulate, knowledgeable, very bright," said one reviewer's post-interview evaluation sheet.

"We are curious whether you talked with this candidate about how he would approach the role," we asked.

"I should have, but I didn't really go there," said the executive. "He told me about speaking on panels and that sort of thing. He's a great speaker. I didn't understand until later that his subject-matter knowledge was very superficial."

We can see why this might be. When we think about the 'halo effect' that fools all of us at times into thinking that a person who's gifted in one area must necessarily be an all-around prodigy, where does the halo form? It's very likely that a person with a halo earned it through intelligent conversation.

Hiring managers need to get past the script to learn more about a person than just his or her way with words. In the Interviewing with a Human Voice protocol we invented and teach at Human Workplace, we recommend that you invite your job candidates to ask you all their questions before you ask one of yours.

You may never get to your questions at all in the interview, and that's perfectly fine. You can learn much more about a person's thought process by hearing his or her questions for you than by asking your own questions, obviously. That's what an interview is for -- to see another person's brain working. At an effective job interview, a manager gets to see how a job-seeker thinks, and vice versa.

That's why we discourage interviewers from using scripted questions in job interviews. Anyone with two functioning brain cells can anticipate the tired, traditional job-interview questions, and most job-seekers do.

A polished answer to the question "Where do you see yourself in five years?," for instance, tells you almost nothing about the makeup of the person you're meeting, and on top of that, the five-year question is irrelevant unless you're planning to offer your new hire a five-year employment contract.

People gifted with excellent rhetorical skills may be able to sell ice cubes to Santa's elves, but that doesn't mean that silky-tongued individual is necessarily the best person for the job.

When you open the vault just enough to talk frankly with every job candidate about what you're up against -- the reason the job is available, in other words - and then hear his or her reactions and responses to your biggest challenges, that's the magical moment in a job interview.

We can drop all of the "Tell me about a time when..." nonsense and simply lay out for our candidates what we're up against, and then just the way we'd ask a plumber how s/he planned to get a sock out of the tub drain, we can ask each applicant "What would you do to solve our problem?"

The answer to that question is the interview moment where the rubber meets the road. A job-seeker either understands your movie and is ready to jump in and start filming, or not. You will be able to tell which in seconds once the candidate begins to speak.

When our ships come all the way into the harbor, believe me, we will spend our afternoons sipping tea and nibbling on little cakes and cucumber sandwiches, talking about everything that interests us for hours at a time. I can't wait.

That'll be a blast. In the meantime, we can admire an artful turn of phrase and appreciate good conversation, but when it comes to hiring we'll go back to the basics, and hire not the most well-spoken job-seeker in the bunch but the right person for the job.

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