How To Interview An Innovator

Clients often engage us to help them find an innovator for a strategically significant project. They need people who have taken something entirely new and gotten it off the ground, which is all too rare.

So that means we need to help them find a way to interview innovators and distinguish the poseurs and pretenders from the Real Deal Innovators. The world is full of one-hit wonders who, like Forest Gump, happened to be present once at a successful time in history. Their false confidence and hubris will stand in the way of your innovation as surely as their inflated salary requirements will impoverish your new initiative.

As it turns out, it’s not that hard to separate the pretenders from the doers. I consider you the Real Deal if:

• You spend more time innovating and putting your ideas into practice than almost anyone in your peer group (which accelerates your expertise far beyond everyone in your field).  You have earned the respect of a few industry  insiders, but you are probably not famous or widely known. (This is widely misunderstood. Being famous is a reverse predictor … it takes time and effort to build fame. Time that could be better spent on innovation.)
• Unlike the famous people who speak at all the cool conferences, you have the tyranny of daily results driving your innovation. You measure yourself against hard metrics. You don’t come up with ideas and then spend time giving speeches about it. Trying to look smart. Leading to the inevitable decline of your actual skills as you progressively lose touch with reality and spend more time with sycophants.
• And you probably don’t work in a place where your ideas have to be approved by a committee. You don’t spend all day in meetings. And you certainly don’t spend all day reporting on your results instead of producing them

No, when you are the Real Deal, you spend the vast majority of your time in the trenches. You know that most ideas don’t survive contact with reality. But parts of them do. So you try things, fail, learn, refine, and improve. Constantly experimenting, and constantly challenged by the imperative of producing results. Genius physicist Neils Bohr said “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

It’s bloody hard to be on the bleeding edge of innovation. Creating the future is always uncomfortable and from day to day it usually feels like failing … until you look back from time to time and see how far you’ve come. (I am collecting a series of the most useful articles on this topic here: http://www.scoop.it/t/driving-innovation. Scott Berkun’s classic book The Myths of Innovation is also a must-read for innovators.)

So how do you interview an innovator?

• Listen for the daily grind of it.
• Listen for the experimentation, the risk, the failure and the grit and resilience to try again.
• Run from people who describe it as a big success with no moments of uncertainty.
• And then ask yourself, “Am I really ready to put up with a Real Deal Innovator?”

Questions Great Candidates Ask in Interviews

Be honest. Do you feel that the part of the job interview where you ask the candidate, “Do you have any questions for me” is almost always a waste of time?  Chances are good your answer is “yes.”

The problem is most candidates don’t actually care about your answers; they just hope to make themselves look good by asking “smart” questions, says Jeff Haden, writing for Inc magazine.

But great candidates handle that portion of the interview differently, writes Haden, They ask questions they want answered because they’re evaluating you, your company–and whether they really want to work for you. Here are five questions great candidates ask:

1.    What do you expect me to accomplish in the first 60 to 90 days?

          Great candidates want to hit the ground running. They want to make a difference–right away.

2.    What are the common attributes of your top performers?

Great candidates also want to be great long-term employees. Every organization is different, and so are the key qualities of top performers in those organizations. Great candidates want to know because 1) they want to know if they fit, and 2) if they do fit, they want to be a top performer.

3.     What are a few things that really drive results for the company?

Employees are investments, notes Haden, and every employee should generate a positive return on his or her salary. In every job some activities make a bigger difference than others. You need your HR folks to fill job openings… but what you really want is for HR to find the right candidates because that results in higher retention rates, lower training costs, and better overall productivity. Similarly, you need your service techs to perform effective repairs… but what you really want is for those techs to identify ways to solve problems and provide other benefits–in short, to generate additional sales.

Great candidates want to know what makes a difference. They know helping the company succeed means they succeed as well.

4.    How do you plan to deal with…?

Every business faces a major challenge: technological changes, competitors entering the market, shifting economic trends… there’s rarely a Warren Buffett moat protecting a small business.

So while a candidate may see your company as a stepping-stone, they still hope for growth and advancement… and if they do eventually leave, they want it to be on their terms and not because you were forced out of business.

Say I’m interviewing for a position at your bike shop. Another shop is opening less than a mile away: How do you plan to deal with the new competitor?

Bottom line, Haden says: A great candidate doesn’t just want to know what you think; they want to know what you plan to do–and how they will fit into those plans.

Catching Lying Job Seekers

Every few weeks some headline blares, “How to Catch Lying Job Seekers.” In the article, some self-proclaimed expert reveals the shocking statistics about how often job seekers lie on their resume. And the solution is usually to hire that very same expert to ferret out the truth for you. Otherwise you are a rube, a patsy … a stooge.

The whole “lying job seeker” meme makes my skin crawl.

We conduct over a 100 executive searches every year, interviewing thousands of people, and looking at over 50,000 candidate resumes and online profiles.  I cannot imagine anything more exhausting or counterproductive than reflexively distrusting all of them.

Call me naïve, but I just don’t think most people lie to deceive you–they just want to look good. It’s not malicious … it’s just what some people do. And you need not wrap yourself in some body armor of distrust just to to protect yourself.

Job seekers generally divide themselves into three groups.

• Some folks are pretty darn selective about their accomplishments, they shade their stories to look good, and they brag about stuff they were perhaps only tangentially involved with….but they don’t just do this on their resumes–they also do it at dinner parties. Some people are just braggarts, and you can easily interview them to suss out the truth. Problem solved.
• The second group is WYSIATI–what you see is all there is. They are plain spoken and tell it like it is. They make great employees. These people are sometimes called stalwart workers, but their resumes are pretty dull and easy to miss.
• The third group are folks are raised to be humble about their achievements, to give credit to others, to downplay their role in successes. These are the people who score a 96 on a test and obsess over the 4 points they missed. I call them the “A students.” And you probably didn’t even select them for an interview because their resume was less impressive than the braggarts. That’s why I think the Perfect (Resume) is the Enemy of the Good (Hiring Process). If you are not careful, you might end up selecting only braggart resumes to interview.  (Click the link and find out how one HR manager protects herself from that mistake.)

The risk of listening to the distrust fear mongers is that you will start to only see the bad in people and not the good. Going down this slippery slope, you begin to telegraph your distrust–and inject poison into what might have become a blossoming new relationship with a Stalwart, or an “A Student.” You just might find yourself  instilling doubt where there was none.  And then you really would be a rube.

Pre-Employment Testing and Human Sacrifice

If you think the era of human sacrifice is over, think again. Humans are sacrificed every day on the altar of pre-employment testing. Hey, I’m not saying that all pre-employment tests are uniformly bad, I’m making the far more reasonable argument that most small organizations who rely on testing are worshiping a false god. (There, see? Wasn’t that less incendiary?)

To know me is to know that I am a recruiting process geek. We track dozens of metrics on every stage of our search process. We track the retention rate of our placements for three full years. And we focus intently on doing everything we can to improve the results we get for our clients (i.e. faster searches, with more qualified candidates who will drive business results, and stick around long enough to make a meaningful impact).

So naturally, people assume I’m a fan of pre-employment testing because it just sounds so scientific and process oriented. Except in my experience, most small organizations are actually harmed by their pre-employment assessments. Rather than improving hiring results, the testing actually gets in the way.

It’s not always the tests themselves that cause the problem (well, OK, sometimes they do). The issue is how managers behave around the tests:

• Some managers overtly surrender to the test. “Well I liked Candidate A, but the test won’t let me hire him.” (Managers idolize the test, Like “The Claw” in Toy Story, it alone determines “who will stay and who will go.”)

• Some managers covertly surrender to the test using the politically correct language. “Well, after the interview I preferred Candidate A, and admittedly the test is only one component of our assessment, but after seeing his score, I’ve now decided that Candidate B is my preference.” (Managers generally don’t want to stick their neck out and take full responsibility for the hire. So when they pick the candidate who scored well, at least they have political cover if the person later fails.)
• Some managers abdicate completely and just let the test select who they even interview. These managers cut short their own interview process, figuring they should not waste time interviewing if they are only going to hire people who pass the test. I’ve heard of first interviews as short as 15 minutes and then going straight to testing. (See “The Claw” above).

If you want to undercut your managers, and make them doubt their own interviewing ability … introduce a pre-employment assessment. If you want to make managers feel less responsible for who they hire … introduce a pre-employment assessment. But if you want to discover factors about a candidate that will cause them to become top performers in your culture, tread carefully. Personality traits that are correlated with high performance do not necessarily cause it.

“Anyone can compare two sets of numbers and tell you whether they correlate, but, it takes careful study to know whether A actually leads to B. For example, skirts and stock markets tend to move up and down together, beach ice cream sales and shark attacks tend to move together, and watermelon sales and temperature move together. But, skirts do not cause the market to change, sharks do not buy ice cream, and selling watermelon does not cause it to be hot.”  Dr. Wendell Williams on ERE

********************************************

Note to people (and trolls) who want to comment:

This is not my first rodeo in social media.

• I know some testing vendors will want to hawk their products here. Let me stipulate for the record that of course you are the exception. I’m talking about everyone else, of course … and please don’t call me, this post was not an RFP.
• I know some big organizations are saying that you’ve validated your test and trained your managers. Congratulations, I’m not talking about what GE can afford to do, I’m talking about small organizations.
• But hey, if you work in a small organization and have a different experience, then please comment and teach me something. As long as I get to learn something, I really don’t mind being proven wrong.
• Oh, and if you agree, please comment, I’m always happy to take a big slice of that.

Interviewing: Are They an Effective Executive or an Empty Suit?

The executive strides confidently into the conference room, smiles broadly and greets the interview panel. You observe that he has some presence, and some polish. So far so good.

You start the interview with an easy question, just to warm him up. “So tell me about yourself.” He nails it. Short, sweet, interesting, and to the point, he ‘s playing the room nicely so far.

Then you enter the dangerous part of the interview. The part where you might let your guard down and start asking him his philosophy on managing, or where the industry is going, or ask him what he thinks of your company’s strategy. Empty Suits can ace those kinds of questions–they really know how to work a conference room (because that’s all they do for a living). Their first sentence is always smooth and polished. They built their entire career by knowing exactly the right kinds of words to inspire confidence (and taking credit for the work of others). But like a con man, that’s all they have. With an Empty Suit, there is nothing behind the rhetoric. Quite often, they don’t even know they are incompetent.

The Effective Executive is different. They pay less attention to appearances. They have not spent much time polishing their answers to philosophical questions. Some of their interview answers can sound a bit less confident than the Empty Suit because they include more precision and nuance to their answers. They built their career driving results and being accountable for outcomes–meaning they have made lots of mistakes and learned some hard lessons along the way.

The least competent people (the Empty Suits) spend their energy avoiding accountability, and therefore can’t learn from mistakes they don’t admit to. But Effective Executives feel responsible for outcomes, including mistakes they did not even personally make. So their learning curve is dramatically accelerated. Consequently they realize how much there is to learn, and they underestimate how talented they are.  As Bertrand Russel observed:

 ”One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

So how can you tell whether you are interviewing an Empty Suit or an Effective Executive?

The real value in behavioral interviewing is in the follow up question–that’s where the magic happens. Anyone can answer “Tell me about your greatest achievement.” But the gold is how you follow up on their answer.  ”How did you achieve that? What roadblocks did you overcome? Who else was on your team? What was your role on the team? What decisions did you make in the face of uncertainty? What mistakes did you make? What did you learn from your mistakes? How did you measure your success?”  That’s where the juice is. You will immediately see that the Effective Executive is much more concrete and tangible in their answers. More thoughtful. Their heads are full of metrics that they use to measure their own progress. They give ample credit to other people on their team, and often sound quite humble about their own role.

But when the buzz saw of follow-up questions arrive, the Empty Suits lose all their false confidence. It’s almost painful to watch a succession of admissions that they do not really know how any of the results were achieved in their organization.

Interviews are 80% Performance Art

Imagine you are hiring for a key position.

A good looking, well dressed candidate confidently walks in on time, smiles, looks you in the eye and warmly shakes your hand. You exchange pleasantries for a few moments and you can feel yourself beginning to relax.

You think “Oh good, they seem like a great candidate!” So you might be tempted to begin talking more. You know, to get them interested in the job.

Except, of course, you don’t know a thing about them yet.

Interviewing is full of traps like these.

• We’re drawn to good looking resumes that fit our mental picture of what the resume should look like (regardless of who actually wrote that resume, or whether people from other backgrounds might be more qualified).
• We’re seduced by appearances in the interview (regardless of the fact that interviewing ability does not predict anything about the candidate’s ability to do the job).
• We’re most comfortable with people who are “like us” even though teams are strengthened by diversity.

Traditional interviews are 80% theatrics (performance art) and 20% substance–your instincts will routinely fail you unless you methodically guard against your unconscious biases. Don’t wing it.

Skilled researchers pored through 85 years of scientific literature to identify which employee selection methods were the best predictors of job performance, and they distilled it down to a few things anyone can do.

Do You Really Know Who Exactly Are You Driving Away?

“If they can’t be flexible to a schedule change, I don’t want them working here.” The hiring manager was emphatic as he changed his interview schedule for the second time.

When the manager proposed a new interview time of tomorrow, he said “If they don’t get back to me quickly, they must not be that interested in the job.”

When the manager further insisted on requiring three hours of online skills testing, he said “If they are afraid of a little testing, their skills probably aren’t very good.” (Yes, you guessed it, they had never used these tests before).

In behaving this way, the manager was absolutely convinced that  he was protecting his company from hiring brittle, inflexible, incompetent twits.

In fact, his behavior was actually driving away people who expect to be treated with courtesy, people with other good employment options, and people who are better at doing work than taking arbitrary tests.

Before you ask a candidate to jump through hoops, stop and ask yourself  if you your behavior is gracious and respectful of the candidate’s interest in your organization.

Are You Interviewing Effectively, Or Just Instilling Doubt?

Have you ever been part of an interview process that went on forever? You know, when there was always just one more step, just one more test, or just one more person who just had to be included at the last minute?

When you are the candidate, and an employer suddenly introduces several new steps in the hiring sequence, you are bound to wonder why. You switch from a mental state of “They love me, I’m a perfect fit, this is going well!” into a state of “What’s wrong here? Why can’t they decide? Are they just trying to find fault with me? What will they ask me to to do next, hop on one foot while reciting the Constitution?”

Effective interviewing is an exercise in risk management. You want to be rigorous about verifying a candidate’s ability to to the work. You want to follow a fair and methodical process … but you also want to be sure you don’t cross the line into analysis paralysis. When you surprise a candidate by introducing new steps into the interview process, you are not reducing your hiring risk, you are actually increasing it.

When you needlessly create doubt in the mind of the person you want to hire, you are either getting your employment relationship off to a bad start, or worse, you might not start a relationship at all (if your  job offer is rejected).

Don’t ever forget the lessons learned in the third grade school yard. If someone starts thinking you don’t like them, they will soon find a reason not to like you.

Managing Expectations in the Hiring Process

Have you ever interviewed an ideal candidate, gone through a lengthy interview process, excitedly put together a job offer, expected a quick acceptance … and then you were rejected?

Of course you felt disappointed, and perhaps even embarrassed. When it comes unexpectedly, the rejection stings even more. But why does disappointment feel so bad? Neuroscience can explain why … and neuroscience also yields a few clues why your job offer might have been rejected.

It’s all about expectations.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Alina Tugend interviews David Rock, author of “Your Brain at Work.” It’s a fascinating read, but this quote really stands out:

“When we don’t hit our expectations, our brain doesn’t just get slightly unhappy, it sends out a message of danger or threat.”

Woah. When your expectations are not met, you actually feel threatened.

OK, well enough about you, now let’s talk about why your ideal candidate might have rejected you. If you are like most employers, you did not do a very good job of managing their expectations during that lengthy interview process. You left them hanging several times by not clearly communicating what your interview sequence would be, or how long things would take, or how many times they would need to come back for additional interviews. In my experience with hundreds of small to mid-size organizations, the normal interview process almost always fails to meet candidate expectations.  So your normal hiring process constantly puts your ideal candidate’s brain into danger and threat mode. No wonder they rejected your job offer.

Three years ago, one of my first blog posts was about managing candidate expectations during the interview sequence. Candidates assume that how you manage the hiring process is how you manage the organization. If employing top performers is important to you, candidates assume you’ll demonstrate it during the interview process.

It That Good Interviewing Advice or Just a Cheap Parlor Trick?

When you read advice about interviewing, it usually falls in one of these categories:

1) Self-serving studies where the study sponsored by pre-employment testing company X, shockingly, recommends you use pre-employment testing. Whatever… your eyes start to bleed in a few seconds and you can click away without much harm done.

2) An interview with a successful CEO where the journalist asks them their secret to hiring. As if you could take the hiring process used at a PR firm in New York and apply it to hiring forklift operators in Tulsa Oklahoma. While this sort of thing is amusing, it will not help make you a better interviewer. What works in one culture is irrelevant to another.

3) Thoroughly researched works that deal with the real-world complexity of hiring, and methodically track the results over time. A good example is  George Anders book, “The Rare Find.” Research this good is indeed a rare find. Read it, learn from it, wrestle with it–it’s worth it.

4) My real problem is category four. The stuff that sounds like science, and may even be decent science–but is not grounded in any kind of hiring process. People who have not rigorously worked on their hiring process gravitate to this stuff, like a “magic bean”–a panacea for all that ails their hiring process. But when you put it in practice, you find it’s just a parlor trick.  Here are a couple examples that people sent me this month:

One article says not to lean to the left when negotiating your salary. Pish posh. Interviewing is not a game of Twister. You’ll tie yourself in knots trying to pay attention to this stuff.

Watch the video below and you will think that giving someone a hot or cold beverage will influence your opinion of them (Hint: if you are interviewing, go for the hot beverage):

This stuff is ridiculous. If you want better hiring results, ignore the parlor tricks and focus your interview process on the factors that really do predict job performance.

How to Interview for Career Patterns

One of the most interesting parts of interviewing for me is listening to the stories people tell about their career. Some people are always the victim of circumstance, but most often (in their own stories) they are the protagonist, and the boss or external events are the villain.

Sometimes the hero overcomes the obstacles, learns a lesson and reaches a new level of self-awareness. But sometimes the “hero” just quits to find a new job … and then proceeds to find a new job every 18 months after that.

Funny thing about 18 months.  That seems to be just about the time that people are really held accountable in executive roles. The new job honeymoon is over, problems can no longer be blamed on the predecessor, and all those easy breezy first year promises have come due. When people have 2 or 3 stints that are right around 18 months, I become very concerned.

So how do you begin to suss out the patterns in someone’s background?

At the beginning of every interview, I always ask candidates to walk me through their resume. Starting with college, I ask them to tell me what was best about each job and what was the worst aspect of each job. Good boss, bad company? Great experience but low pay? Great co-workers but no challenge? I just jot it down. I ask why they chose to leave and what they were looking for in the next job. Sometimes I have to ask a few times to pry loose the “bad” comments.

Then I look for the pattern in both the good and the bad. What answer is most frequent? Did they often just decide it was time for a change? Did they repeatedly get recruited by a former boss? Did they often leave just to get more money? Were their coworkers usually a bunch of losers? Did they make reference to “I did this” and” I did that” or make positive references to the team achieving something? Was the best thing the work itself, the clients, the challenge, or the people?

Everybody makes mistakes, most people take at least one bad job that they never should have taken, but did they own their part in the problem, or were they the victim of external forces? This is a powerful concept called “Locus of Control” and if you are not familiar with it, be sure to click the link to learn more.

After someone has walked through their resume like this for 20 minutes or so, I dive into all the behavioral interview questions specific to the job. (You do prepare interview questions in advance right?)

But I find that starting with this twenty minute review helps me quickly find the patterns in their answers. Then I just need to decide if those patterns fit the job… because tigers don’t change their stripes.

“The Rare Find” is a Must Read for Hiring Managers

If you want to lock in a long-term competitive advantage for your organization, be among the first to read and apply the lessons of George Anders new book “The Rare Find:  Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else.”

Drawing on vivid examples from the U.S. Army Special Forces, Teach for America, Facebook, Hollywood, and professional sports, he shows how you can see what everyone else is missing in their hiring.

This is no vanity book. He’s not pitching his hiring system, or trying to sell you consulting services. Even better, he is not advocating that you “just do your hiring like we did at GE in the 1980′s.”

No, this book is the real deal.  Space does not permit me to cover all my favorite quotes, but here are a few:

“American social norms call for job candidates to tell a story of uninterrupted success. Previous experiences are burnished until they all sound like triumphs. Traditional resumes are set up so that resilience becomes invisible. That’s a horribly unfortunate distortion. At some point fate slams all of us to the ground. What happens next determines who we become. Some people are so bitter or dispirited they never fully recover. Others do whatever it takes to bounce back. The more you can learn about how people handle adversity, the more astutely you can judge them.”

or:

“…we’re in the midst of an enormous economic and technological upheaval that is redefining what it means to be enduringly successful. Long track records my be irrelevant or impossible to find in fields that are taking shape so fast the everyone is a newcomer. Competence is not enough anymore. The difference between growth and stagnation comes down to finding people with bold, fresh approaches, who can create opportunities that no one else saw before. That’s true not just in Silicon Valley, Hollywood or Wall Street; it’s the new norm in almost every field.”

From how to define what kind of person you are looking for, to how you should interview candidates, this book covers the landscape of talent spotting. I found no evidence of vague, sloppy platitudes or lazy thinking. For example:

“Take something as universal … as ‘work ethic.’ That’s a cherished value at almost any top tier organization (but) everyone’s definition of ‘work ethic’ calls for slightly different virtues. Some jobs call for people who can summon up extraordinary stamina and ingenuity in a crisis. Others require orderly souls who are totally comfortable with the tireless preparation for a challenge that may be months or years away. The work ethics of a great doctor and a great football player are not the same. Solving the talent puzzle means looking for exactly the right ethos that’s vital for a particular job–rather than trying to match candidates to a along list of universal virtues that might or might not be especially relevant.”

How Can You Judge Someone’s Expertise?

We’re often asked how to judge the expertise of someone else. Here are three simple rules to help you quickly winnow the field.

• Experts don’t talk jargon, pretenders do. Experts can explain it in English. If they don’t tell SHORT stories/analogies/examples that explain complex concepts, they are a hack.

• Conversely, If they tell LONG stories about past glories they are a hack. Talking is not good. Asking you questions is good. If their questions don’t make you think, they are a hack.

• If they don’t focus like a laser on the BUSINESS IMPACT of what you want to have done, they are a hack.

Interviewing is not a Horse Race

Have you noticed that much of the news coverage of presidential politics focuses on the horserace aspect? Will (s)he run or won’t (s)he run? Which candidate won the straw poll (whatever that is) in Iowa? But then someone else won in Florida?  Who is climbing in the polls?

And while all of this is amusing (or tedious) it’s not very insightful. Because none of this kind of coverage helps me learn who actually has an intelligent solution to our national problems, or even who holds positions that I agree with on key issues. I can follow all the news and still have no idea who is capable of doing the job.  

Sometimes an interview processes can devolve into a horserace instead of a substantive evaluation of someone’s credentials for the job. When you hear yourself polling different interviewers to ask which candidate they liked better, beware…you might be in horserace territory.

Instead, be sure to keep your discussions of candidates focused on their skills and abilities to do the actual work. Because when you don’t focus on skills, you might end up hiring a real horses ass.

How to Interview a Senior Executive; Getting Beyond the Superficial

Everyone knows that the traditional interview is a poor predictor of future performance on the job. So if you want to consistently hire great people, you need more rigor in your interview process (without crossing the boundary into being disrespectful).

We recommend work sample testing–going beyond talking about work and actually having the candidate do some work. But this can be daunting when you are evaluating a senior executive. How do you design a work sample test on business acumen, or strategic thinking? How do you assess their ability to turn ideas into action? How do you suss out their ability to work well with your executive team?

One good way to assess executive ability is to ask the candidates to grapple with a significant strategic issue you are facing. Some organizations ask candidates to make a presentation on a strategic issue, but this approach risks giving too much importance to showmanship and presentation style at the expense of substance. The plain fact is that most executive jobs require people to be good at discussing complex, substantive issues in meetings–only rarely are people called upon for their charismatic performance artistry in presentations. So if presentation skills are not critical for the job, don’t look for it in the interview. Instead, we recommend that you do the following:

• After the first interview, once you have narrowed down your list of finalists to 2 or 3 people, provide a “homework assignment” for the candidates to think about prior to the second interview. These are busy people, so give them notice that you will be doing this, and give them ample time to do what you request. Asking for about 2 to 3 hours of work, and giving them a week to do it seems fair to me.
• Outline one specific strategic challenge in a few sentences. Provide some written background material, and ask them how they would tackle the problem. Ask for their proposed timeline and action plan to implement their solution.
• Tell the candidate to come to the second interview “prepared to discuss the issue.” Do not ask for a written proposal or formal (Powerpoint) presentation because that requires the candidate to spend significant time on stylistic issues and not substance. How organizations present information varies widely–so most people will guess wrong and be needlessly embarrassed. Simply being prepared for a conversation keeps the emphasis where it needs to be–on their solution to your strategic problem.
• Let them present their recommendation without interference. Listen to see if they made a well-reasoned argument for their point of view. Did they frame the issue properly, or not really understand it? Observe how accurate their assumptions were and if they acknowledged their own “blind spots.” But the real value of this exercise comes next–in the discussion of the topic with you.
• After they share their thoughts, ask lots of questions, challenge their assumptions, disagree with their conclusions, and look at the issue from a variety of perspectives–just like your executive team probably does in meetings. You want to see how they react to intellectual debate, disagreement and critique. You may find that the person with the best solution is really not a cultural fit with how your organization actually makes decisions.
• Observe how well the candidate handles disagreements. (Do they get brittle and defensive? Do they meekly back down and simply defer to others? Do they get energized by the conversation or exhausted? Do they find common ground and build consensus for their solution? Do they humbly acknowledge when someone else has a better idea? Are they trying to prove themselves right, or actually working to find the best solution? Are they curious? Do they ask good questions?)
• Observe how respectfully the candidate deals with everyone in the room, do they defer only to superiors and act condescendingly toward everyone else? Do they give credence to the views of others, or just stick rigidly to their point of view?

So don’t be distracted by interview showmanship or smooth-talking-fast-on-their-feet-confidence in candidates. That’s fun, but it predicts nothing. Instead, observe how a potential senior executive thinks, plans and handles themselves in meetings. These aspects of cultural fit are powerful predictors of both long-term retention and effectiveness on the job.