Part 1: Inspect What You Expect...in the Interview

As a hiring manager, you can't afford to make mistakes.

If you've hired more than a few people, it's likely you've shared that queasy feeling of realizing, "I've hired a dud. Likely, one I'm gonna have to fire soon." Then, there's the chat with your boss...

 “But they had such a great background." "They gave all the right answers." "Their references checked out." "Even you liked them!"

Somehow, they even passed the drug test.

 Then the real Jack shows up for work…and within weeks or months we're getting the message loud and clear: "You fix it or I will.”

 I’ve known some folks that never even made it out of new-hire training. You too?

What can we do about it? Should we get the FBI?

Due to jurisdictional issues, that won't be possible. But, you can learn from the FBI and start using one of their favorite interviewing techniques.

Especially when you are hiring salespeople, it's critical to use the right process. A process proven to work.

If you or members or your organization are hiring sales reps who interview well but underperform on the job, you’ll want to develop one of the FBI's key interviewing skills: behavioral assessment. In a nutshell:

Transfer focus from a candidate's words to their actions.

Stop focusing so much on asking questions and assessing someone's answers. Instead, set up your interviews as behavioral assessments. Sure, you're still going to ask questions, just not the same ones at the same times.

Get the candidate to show you their sales behaviors now, before you hire them. Using simple techniques, candidates will open up to you and be more authentic. In that kind of environment, you can assess their habituated behaviors. These are deep-rooted, driven largely by emotion. It's harder to hide behaviors during an interview than a rehearsed story. 

Salespeople are notoriously good interviewers. It makes sense. They talk to people for a living, and some of the last salespeople you want knocking on your door can sure tell a good story.

Don't fall victim to it.

Challenge yourself: Are the candidate’s words and behaviors consistent with each other? Tom, from Office Space, says he’s a people-person, but his behavior tells a different story. In Sales, demonstrating sound behaviors in front of customers is paramount to success. I've interviewed dozens of reps with years of "relevant experience" who also had awful sales behaviors. Working with them in the field, there's only one word for it: cringey.

Start asking yourself: Is the candidate’s behavior aligned with the type of behavior you expect on the job? Example: Your sales candidate tells you he has strong listening skills while proceeding to talk uninterrupted for five minutes.

These are extreme examples. In real life, the “professional interviewee” will be harder to spot. Developing an FBI agent's Spidey Sense requires knowledge, practice, and a well-designed interview plan.

With practice, seeing inconsistencies between words and actions becomes clearer. Here's one that happened to me today: A guy just spent three minutes explaining his new “storytelling” program that will help companies sell more stuff. My colleague thought the guy seemed professional and that we might want to check out the program. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “If this guy is arguing that storytelling is the best sales technique, and he’s claiming to be an expert at it, shouldn’t he be demonstrating this by telling us a three-minute story that gets us to buy his program?”

His actions and words didn't match up. I'm not buying. My colleague didn't see it, though. He got swept up in the moment. If this were a job interview, my friend could be chasing himself down a rabbit hole.

 Note: If you’ve been trained on “behavioral questioning,” there is value in this approach, but it’s not the same thing. Behavioral questioning still focuses on answers to questions. They may be better questions, but they don’t help you assess a candidate’s actual behavior in real time. Again, a quick search and the rep can prepare for just about any interview question you can lob their way.

Again, it’s much harder for someone to hide habitual behaviors, especially with a little help from a skilled interviewer, and observing those behaviors is more likely to result in successful hiring outcomes.

Of course, using behavioral assessments in interviews isn't new or unproven. Not just the FBI, but virtually all law enforcement use similar techniques when questioning a suspect.

While it's not a crime to pretend your way through a job interview, the stakes are too high for hiring managers to ignore such important tools.

Follow along with Part 2 of the series to see how this plays out in real life.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can transform your hiring outcomes and build your dream team, reach out to Matt today: [email protected].