Why Interviews Alone Won’t Ensure Good Fit

Clients often ask me for the key interview questions that will reveal which candidates are most likely to succeed in a particular job. But there’s no standard set of questions, because it’s all about the fit. And it’s not magic: you just have to understand both the job and the organization fully.

For instance, is this a job assignment where the work norms are already well established, or one where the employee has the license and standing to shape the nature of the job and the work? The level of the job and its interdepartmental aspects should also trigger significant differences in interview structure and specifics.

So I start by explaining the underlying fundamentals of matching the candidate and the job:

• Clarity and details about the desired outcomes for job performance
• The roles and approaches of people who are peers, subordinates, and executives in the organization
• Whether there are expectations that this person will continue with business as usual, or act specifically as an agent for change.

Function Isn’t Everything

There are always trade-offs between hiring people with significant prior experience vs. choosing candidates who have less experience but take on the role with an open mind and learn to do their work “the way we do it here.”

But functional experience alone is not enough. As employees advance up the organizational hierarchy, the more responsibility they’ll have for results, and the more potential variability there will be in how the job can be done. So the style and approach of the individual is key: Their behaviors and communication will have real impact on the job, their relationships with colleagues, and what the actual work turns out to be.

What You Really Want

Do you want to hire someone with the ability to navigate the organization, read the culture and adapt to it, interact comfortably with incumbents, and bring in something extra and fresh? Then you want someone with solid emotional intelligence, or you’ll lose much of the value of their expertise and smarts. Does the new hire care about what happens to, with, and for everyone they work with? Even individual contributors need to work well with others to be effective in their own roles.

Candidates should be open-minded and curious about how things have worked — and have not worked — at the organization to this point. It’s a serious risk when new hires operate out of a kind of patterned thinking, merely applying “the way I did it at my old company.” You need them to be able to combine the benefits of their new ways with the effectiveness of the legacy way and to assess what’s best to do now, in this very particular situation.

Reference Points

Even if everyone likes the candidate, checking references is absolutely essential. How people operated in previous workplaces is an indicator of how they work generally: when things are easy, when they’re under pressure or in unmarked territory, and when they’re receiving feedback.

Skipping or shortchanging the reference check means you may not learn facts that would protect you from making a harmful hire. You might not find out that in a candidate’s prior position, he was entirely accommodating until he hit a first roadblock and then it became all about him. Or that an applicant didn’t know how to proceed as soon as she found herself in circumstances in which she had no personal experience. Or maybe a job-seeker’s team loved him, but no one else in the organization wanted to work with him at all.

And then sometimes you’ll hear the best thing possible: “We’re so very sorry to see her go, but we know what a good opportunity this will be for her, and she knows that if she ever wants to come back, we’d love to have her.”

Liz Kislik is a management consultant and business coach. She helps organizations from family-run businesses and national nonprofits to the Fortune 500 solve their thorniest problems while strengthening their top and bottom lines in the process. She is a frequent contributor for Harvard Business Review, and spoke at TEDxBaylorSchool on Why There’s So Much Conflict at Work and How to Fix It. She has served as adjunct faculty at Hofstra University and NYU. You can receive her free guide How to Resolve Interpersonal Conflicts in the Workplace on her website.

An earlier version of this post appeared on Workplace Wisdom.