Strategy Interview MISTAKES

Hiring a bad strategist can have an impact on your department for years after that bad strategist has left the building.

This mistake can be avoided in the interview process with one simple question. There’s one type of question that lets you know what strategists are legitimate and what are just empty strategists.?

Impact of a bad strategist - Hire slow, fire fast

A bad strategist on your team will actually do more damage than having no one at all.?

In strategy, the idea is to hire slow and fire fast.?

There’s nothing worse than hiring a strategist who ticks all the boxes on paper, you have an amazing interview with them and they impress the whole team. However, 3 months in and you realize you have a strategist of no substance.

What has happened is that you’ve hired someone who has great interview skills, not great strategy skills.

This is damaging for your department because strategy is all about reputation.?

Strategy is a complement to a creative process, not an essential element. Every strategist needs to earn their way into the room, therefore if the team has a bad experience with a strategist they are reluctant to scope them onto future projects.?

All your hard work to build up a department can be removed with one wrong hire.?

If you don’t want to make this mistake then there is one question that you need to ask to ensure that doesn’t happen.?

However, let’s first understand the four key problems that exist within the interview process for strategists.?

1. The Strategy Dialect??

Strategy has no universal language. Strategy can sound like a foreign language depending on what company you’re working within.?

We often put too much emphasis on the language rather than the substance. The wrong candidate can talk the talk and use the right words however at the same time you overlook other candidates because the language they use is different to your company or industry.

Just think about how many different ways there are to define what is a strategy or an insight.?

It’s not words that matter but the meaning behind them and whether the candidate knows the difference.?

2. No Certification For Strategy Skills?

Strategy is more like a trade than a profession, you learn on the job there is no certification for strategy like there is for Accounting or Law.?

Therefore anyone can say on their resume that they have been a strategist for five years but in your own company you may call that experience a project manager. Without interviewing them you will have no idea what they’re skills are.?

3. Shiny Gold Lion Syndrome - Performance Over Strategy Skills?

We have an inherent bias to overvalue results over skills.?

I call it the shiny gold lion syndrome.

When you see a strategist who has been awarded working on iconic brands at well known companies then you will often hold them in higher regard than other candidates. The problem is you don’t know what role they had on the work.?

What’s more important is to look at what skills they had that got to that output. This gives us a clue to the question that helps melt strategists and sort the real strategist from the empty.?

4. Interview Skills over Strategy Skills?

One half of being a great strategist is having diplomacy skills and being able to be a good presenter. The interview is a chance for a strategist to show these skills off, however some great speakers know the lines to say but after the great show you end up finding they’re an empty strategist, who is just a good talking head.??

Structuring the interview?

In order to avoid these problems, it all comes down to the questions you ask in the interview. This requires a little bit of preparation around your questions you will be asking. There are three types of questions you want prepared; behavioral, hypothetical, and follow up questions. Let’s go into some detail on what these are.?

Behavioral Questions?

Behavioral questions ask the interviewee for an example of where they have solved a specific type of problem.?

They help to ensure that you miss the two common pitfalls of interviewing candidates, that is they speak in theory or they only speak about their performance without talking through their skills or process which is what you are really looking for.?

Your list of behavioral questions for your candidates should come from the skills listed in your job description.?

Here are some examples of behavioral questions based on skillset:

• Teamwork - Tell me about a time when you collaborated with others who were different than you?
• Conflict Resolution - Can you tell me how you communicate with someone who doesn’t like you?
• Analytical - Can you talk about a time when you used your analytical skills to find a problem? How did you discover the problem? What did you do after you discovered it?
• Decision Making - What’s the most difficult decision you’ve made at work? How did you come up with your decision?
• Initiative - Can you describe a time when you saw a problem at work and created a solution for it?
• Attention To Detail - Describe a time you made an error. Why did you miss the mistake? How did you handle the situation?

How to answer these questions?

What you are looking for from answers to these questions is how did they structure their answers and how consistent and clear their story is. So a simple structure that they should be following is PAR - problem, insight, result.??

You want to see that they address the core problem that you have asked.

Hypothetical Questions?

To get more in-depth thinking I usually like to add two types of hypothetical questions; Opening Moves and Strategy Critiques.?

Opening Moves?

You can use a real unsolved problem or a client brief you have just been given.?

Give the candidate a few minutes to think, and then ask them to walk you through the steps they would take to come up with the strategy or brief.?

For instance, imagine we just won the account for Ford, you were a pivotal role of the pitch team however the Marketing Director has asked that they don’t include strategy on the scope as they have strategists in house? What is your response??

Ask them what they would do with 24 hours, 3 days and 3 weeks to respond.?

What you are looking for here is their process, is this aligned with how you approach the problem, are they missing anything??

Strategy Critique?

A second exercise can be to review a strategic plan or brief and get the strategist to critique it and point out the significant flaws in the plan.?

For example, here is a hypothetical creative brief from Reebok that I found on the internet. Let me know what you think could be improved from this brief?

The reason this works well is that critiques are tougher because it requires a deeper level of thought.?

Door Opening Questions For Closing Questions

These three types of questions just open the door for you to really understand the candidate, however the follow up question is what really allows you to understand whether they’re a right or not.?

Good interview skills can prepare for the first line of questioning, when they are going off script is really telling on their depth of strategy skills.?

With behavioral questions, I will always follow up with some of the following questions;?

Follow Up Questions?

1. Did the rest of the team accept the first strategy??
2. What were the biggest conflicts during the development phase??
3. What was your role on the team??
4. What would you have done differently if you had time again??
5. Was there anything that the client did that made your job tough??
6. What mistakes did you or the team make??
7. How did you measure success for this campaign??
8. Who else was on the team??
9. Were there any decisions that you didn’t agree with??

Strategy Definition Follow Up?

The other thing that you want to do, is ask for clarification on the terms that they use, when they say the bigger conceptual words like ‘strategy’, ‘insight’, ‘idea’.?

You’re not looking for the right answers for your company, you’re actually looking for how well they do at defining the different terms. If they can clearly define the terms then they will be able to translate your strategy terms into their language.?

Scale for meeting

With the right follow up questions you should be able to get a good guide on the candidate. However, one last thing that can help remove any bias is having your key skill sets that you’re looking for on a scale.?

Rating each candidate from unsatisfactory to exceptional, will ensure that you weigh everything properly and don’t walk away being biased based on one skill.?

The best practice is to fill it out till the end of the meeting. This will help to mitigate first impressions too.?

Summary?

Having done all this you should be able to start finding great strategy candidates who add value back to your company.?

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