Questioning Skills For Recruiters

Most people think that they understand questions, at least they have had some training in questions. But did you know that the single least important thing about asking a question of a client or candidate is the actual question itself??

What really matters about questions is what comes immediately before the question and what comes immediately after the answer. Because once you've actually mastered those things, you'll get far better responses from every question you ask. Whether it's to clients, candidates, prospects, whoever.?

And you'll be able to stop the conversations that you have from being the typical recruitment interrogation where you've got this checklist of questions you want to get through, and you can actually turn it into a conversation. A conversation that leads to you making deals and bringing in revenue.?

The framework is that there are four parts to a question. There's the Setup, which is what comes immediately before the question. There's the Question itself - typically open questions; how, what, why, where, when, who? There's the Answer or the Response, and then there's the Follow-Up.?

Of all those pieces, most training is about the question. And we kind of assume that we'll get the answer that we want, but normally we don't. And when we do get an answer, we normally just ignore the answer and go off and ask another question. So the two really important bits, which are the Setup and the Follow Up, they never really get taught and I don't understand why.?

The easiest way, I think, to explain this is to give you a slightly silly example. If we’d been on holiday together ten years ago or something, and I said to you, "what was the name of the guy that ran the bar down on the beach?" If I I just asked that question. Boom. No preface, no context, no nothing. I just ask you that question... You'd probably go - even if you could remember vaguely - you'd kind of go, oh, what guy? What bar? What beach? What??

Because it's just BANG a question out of nowhere. There's no context, there's no previous situational stuff, and it's just completely random.?

And yet, odd as that would sound, that's how most people ask questions in a sales or an interview context. So let me give you an example of how you'd probably do it in real life. You'd probably say,?

“Do you remember when we went on holiday to Crete? And when you came out of the Hotel and go down to the beach, there was that bar on the right, the one where we went most nights... There's that guy behind the bar… What was he called?”

That Setup is the equivalent of asking somebody to read a book before you ask them a question about the book. Or, in this case, to read a chapter of a book before you ask them what was the name of the lead character. Because that Setup allows you to access the information before I ask you about the information. You wouldn't ask somebody to sit down and do an essay about a book without them reading the book first. It just wouldn't make any sense.?

Our brains are full of life experiences and dreams and desires and dislikes, and in order to access the right memory or the right information you've got to give somebody the clues to access the right bits of information. Then that's what the Setup is about.?

You can think of a Setup as having three potential parts. The first is what I just demonstrated, the Focus Phrase where you get somebody to focus on a particular memory or a particular goal, or set of desires, or a particular set of problems that they have.?

In an interview context, if I'm talking with a potential candidate, I might say “Okay, well, if you think about day-to-day or the average week in your current role, there'll be stuff that goes really well. There'll be stuff that it's all right, and then stuff that's just awful, the stuff that you have to put up with and you sort of tear your hair out. What would you say is the most sort of difficult part of the role at the moment?”

Of course, I could just have asked “What would you say is the most sort of difficult part of the role at the moment?” out the blue, without the Setup. Would I get an answer? Possibly. Would it be rich and involved and in-depth and engaged? No chance. None whatsoever.?

The setup gets me into a conversation so that I can ask an open question about what's in their head and they'll answer. I'm not going to say that you're going to get this massively involved, perfect answer that immediately gives you all the information you need and you can ask this negative framing question and get them to think about their pains and you can ask a positive question and get them to think about what excites them. You're rarely going to get that just from one question.?

But there's another part of a Setup that is hugely useful for those of us in the influence business. It's what I call an inoculation. After COVID we are all massively familiar with immunisation, inoculation all that stuff. So I'm not going to explain it too much, but basically, the way an inoculation works is you give somebody a slightly changed or inert version of a virus. They develop antibodies and then when they're confronted with the infection, they may get some symptoms, but they're massively less than they would be normally. You might get a sniffle or a sore throat, as opposed to ending up in hospital.?

So what we could give somebody is a psychological inoculation. If you think about the potential objections to a question. Things that might prevent somebody from engaging and answering.

For example, if I ask somebody what's the most difficult part of their job at the moment, they come back and go, “Absolutely nothing. My job is wonderful. If I wasn't happy would already have applied for roles, and I haven't. So never darken my towels again!”

But to inoculate against that, alongside the Focus Phrases, I might add "I'm just making assumptions here. It could be that there's nothing in your role that you aren't really thrilled with. But let me just ask you, if there was stuff in your current role that you wouldn't be happy with, what would it be?" So that inoculation is “it could be that you're perfectly happy.” That's unlikely because they wouldn't be having a conversation with you!

Or you could say to a prospect “It might be that everything in your recruitment process is perfect. But if there was something you could change to make it a bit quicker or smoother, what would it be?”

You can also use an inoculation to set up the slightly awkward parts of the conversation. So you could say to somebody, “This might sound like a slightly strange question…”, and then no matter what you ask, the worst response you're going to get is, yeah, that does actually sound like a strange question, but... and then they'll answer.?

The third potential piece to the Setup is the Signpost. It's where you could say to somebody, "the reason I'm asking this is... or "where I'm going with this is..." and you tell them that direction of travel. You explicitly tell them where the conversation is going.?

We've talked about the Setup. What comes next, obviously, is the Question. I'm sure you've probably been trained previously to use open questions; how, what, why, where, when, who??

Personally, I tend to try and frame my questions.?

So I'll tend to either ask positive framing questions - what's the best, what's the easiest, what's the quickest, what's the most simple, what's the most effective, what's the easiest??

Or negative framing questions? - what's the worst, hardest - slowest, most difficult??

I'll tend to ask positive framing questions about making a change, about working with me, about taking on a new role, about whatever. And I'll tend to ask negative framing questions about their current situation, their current supplier, their current role.?

Because if you can create tension between a positive outcome that they want - a gain that they want to have - and a negative situation that they're trying to avoid and get away from - a pain - you give them something to move towards and something to move away from, and it creates a tension.?

It's like stretching a rubber band, and it creates a kind of propulsion machine. And that tension - gain, pain - toward & away-from that creates that motivation in people.?

So Setup with Focus Phrase, Inoculations, possibly aSsignpost, open question, positive or negative and then you get the Answer and - well that's it, the heavens open, the angels sing, you know exactly what to do, they're ready for a pitch and they're obviously going to do whatever you ask them to... No. No, I wish that were the case. I know that's how a lot of people present training in questions. But that's really not the reality. You know it, I know it, they know it, that's just not the way it works.?

The reality is you get an answer and depending on how engaged somebody in the conversation is, depending on how much rapport you've built with them, it might be a bit limp, a bit soggy, a bit vague. So now comes the Follow Up.?

The Follow Up is where you ask additional questions to turn their initial answer into something more meaningful, and more motivational. Or if not that, at least clearer, at least more comprehensible.?

The Follow-Up is where you get more information, get more meaning, get more significance, get more detail, and get more facts from what somebody's talking about. That's the importance of the Follow-Up. It doesn't just turn an interrogation into a conversation, though it does that beautifully. But it also gets you to the real detail. It gets you what they're really thinking, what they mean, why it's important, and why they're saying that, as opposed to something else.?

The Follow-Up is just a series of simple questions. I would repeat back what the other person just said and then ask one of my favourite Follow–Pp questions.

• "What do you mean?"
• "In what way?"
• "What's your definition?"
• "Could you give me an example?"?

As they expand, you can do different things with it. It can either be a factual response, which gets you more detail, more facts, and more information. Happy days.?

Or it could be that they talk in more and more detail about what they're unhappy with, why they're unhappy with it, what a terrible situation it is, how much money it's costing them, how much stress it's creating for them. You could get them to talk more about all the negatives. And the more they talk about the negatives, the more negative they feel.?

Or you could talk about what they're excited about, why they're excited about it, what it will mean for them, and how it will help. And they'll get more and more excited and more and more motivated when they're talking about what they could have, be, or do if they do this thing.?

So it's either giving you more information or it's making somebody more negative or more positive. Or all three at the same time.?

At the end of that process, what you have is a natural-seeming conversion, at the end of which you have more information and then have more motivation or desire to change.

If you're not sure whether I'm talking out the wrong end of my torso, just listen to your colleagues. Listen to people on the tube or on the train or on the bus. Listen to people in Starbucks or whatever. Listen to other people's conversations. Do it discreetly, for god's sake! But listen to what other people are saying and you'll realise that it always goes through that four-step process. Setup, Question, Answer, Follow-Up. Always.?

A lot of conversations are just follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up to one original question. That's how conversation works. That's how we start talking about one thing and then five minutes later we're often a completely different subject. Ever wondered how that happens? Now you know.

More importantly, you know how to use that to help your clients, candidates, and yourself!