The Next Big Thing in Management Interviews

These days interviews are more of a strategy for companies to find what is the latest thing in the market. If you have given any recent interview you will agree that interviews these days are more of a take the best strategy from the candidate possible and vanish away without a trace.

THE TROUBLE:

Though there is no direct impact on the brand due to the above act as no one can really blame them for taking a strategy and vanishing but here is the catch even when they find that irresistible candidate who will give them their best sound strategy there is no guarantee that they will also be able to implement the same. The biggest trouble here is that the strategy does not also ensure that the character & attitude of the candidate in question will be right or not and no level of interviews unfortunately can help you understand if the candidate has the right attitude or the needed understanding to deliver for you.

The next big thing:

I have a very simple way of telling if the candidate has the right attitude or the right character for the job role or not and this strategy or team building plan I have built after working for several startups where I was directly responsible for building my teams from the ground up which has helped me with this.

Introduce a junior:

I always introduce myself in the interview as a person who makes a lot of mistakes and too jovial to contain. The other side of the coin is that my anger and attitude are unbearable if I do come to that but this change of attitude makes the candidate relaxed and they slip in the information or make mistakes which they would otherwise not have made. My intention for making them relaxed or assisting in committing a mistake is not to reject them but to understand if they would be a good fit for the company persona & team persona which I am trying to build in. So I generally tend to be relaxed and request for excuses for each and everything to see how they would react to the same.

Give a task:

The next one is a very simple one. My tasks are generally really simple and are introduced to see if they would need help or they can by themselves find all the raw materials one would need to deliver the task given.

What I do is give the candidate two of my colleagues and give him a days social media posts to deliver, he has my two colleagues 1 designer and 1 would be a social media specialist who will appraise him on what we usually post and what is our general plan for the day & week. This task though simple in activity checks majorly for two aspects in the candidate. 1. it checks to see the style of leadership or attitude that the person has 2. it tells me if the candidate can make full use of the given resources to deliver what I have asked of him or he would fail and become bossy blaming my colleagues for his failure.

This task helps me to gain a clear understanding on ways or places to utilize the candidate if he is fit or if I intend to reject him/her/them then I know what I could give to them as a feedback which can help to improve them in the long run. In this way my interview style is more face to face as it lets me check the candidate beforehand but gives them a fair chance and rates them on factors which matter to the company rather than giving them to give strategies or calendar activities which differ from person to person and have no base for judgement which are just tasks given for personal or professional gain rather than understanding the true capability of the candidate which could give the interviewer a sense of whether the candidate would be a good fit for the company or not.

One other way to judge if the candidate is a good person or the right fit for the company would be to assign him a junior and give him 1 hour to create a simple task which he would need to do daily. As the candidate could fake the telephonic call with someone else but when he is put to test in front of live audience then this task would necessarily tell the interviewer if he can utilize the junior efficiently also if he is a person who will delegate the task or do it him/her or themselves. This task will also give a clear picture or how he treats his juniors so how he will behave while he is in the office dealing with both juniors and seniors at the same time.

Honestly I am against giving or asking for strategies as the person who is sharing the strategy could be an absolute failure when it comes to implement them or all may be good but he may be looking for something better and may run off at the very sight of trouble or error which may have been caused due to any mistake which is not what you want from your top management team candidates at all. The biggest error in this strategy is also the simple fact that the person who creates the best sound strategy could or could not be able to support authority or support the managements plans for growth.

All the above factors which I have mentioned are something that the company or recruiter has to think of but the biggest problem in the company’s failure to find the right candidate is happening as they are failing to take the additional care and concern to go above and beyond the traditional interview cycles which is causing this failure as these rules no longer apply in this world or to the candidates who are presenting to them in the current time. Why till there take the story of the best leaders today, name any one you will still find that they had a failure story in their past which has enabled them to start asking the right question which led them to the right answer and then made them the leader they are today. So the person you are interviewing today needs more than just your task or a test to check their attitude more than just their ability to pen strategies which they may or may not be able to implement. There needs to be a check to see if they leadership and team building capabilities actually exists rather than just their ability to present some data.