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Interviewing 101: Tips for interviewees AND interviewers
Episode 1015th February 2024 • Biotech Career Coach • Carina Clingman
00:00:00 00:34:19

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This week, we have something for both sides of the table, whether you're interviewing for your next job or interviewing candidates for your next hire.

Navigating the interview process can feel like a minefield. How do you follow up? When should you follow up? Have I been ghosted?

And if you're interviewing candidates, you also have a lot to keep in mind, like creating a great candidate experience and running a data-driven process.

Carina and Alison chatted about all things interviewing this week, plus how to answer the all-important question, "If you were a tree, what type would you be."

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Transcripts

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So we have had quite a few people who

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are in the process of interviews right now. And this

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is a weird time of year for a lot of reasons. But right

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after the first of the year, it seems like there's this big boom. A lot of jobs are posted.

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And so a lot of people get interviews quite quickly. That actually overwhelms the

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team. And then things move really slowly. Not to mention, we've got JP Morgan.

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We've got ridiculous numbers of holidays. And we've got, if you're

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in the Northeast, snow days and sick days. So it's actually a

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really messy time of year to move the process forward. I

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can tell you from a recruiting standpoint, the number of times we

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actually have to cancel interviews or move them, or how difficult it

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even is to get them scheduled on our part from

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the company side, things are moving slowly. It's

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not like you're going to have your first round with the recruiter, the next day

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you're going to meet with the hiring manager, and two days later you're going

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to meet with the full team. That's not a realistic expectation. So

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the questions that we get quite often are, when should I

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be following up after an interview? How long should it be? And

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kind of what does that follow up look like? What is the best way

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to follow up? And so there's no one size fits all answer because

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you really have to use your common sense here because it depends on the day of week. And

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is it a long weekend? And is it JP Morgan week? And there's like a lot of things

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to note that we talk about as caveats, but in general,

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I like to recommend a thank you note to

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anybody you spoke with within 24 hours, a

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maximum of 24 hours. If you have a conversation with a recruiter or

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the hiring manager in the morning, send them a thank you note that same day. If

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it's more toward the end of the day, pushing five o'clock, send it the next morning.

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Make sure, though, that you are sending a follow-up thank you note that

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is complimentary, that says, thank you for your time. Thank you

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so much for telling me about this fascinating thing. And

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that should come right away with then an open-ended question

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about the next steps so that they have the

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Yeah, I think that open-ended question part is really key. Because

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otherwise, sometimes what we see is someone will say, oh,

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they didn't reply. And we say, OK, well, show us what you sent

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them. And there's nothing to reply to. And so you're back in the thank you

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thing, where it's like, thank you, thank you, thank you. So yeah, perfect. Open-ended

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questions. Also, don't overstress it,

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too. Sometimes you just write the thank you

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thing and send it and you've done your thing and

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there's no point to agonizing over the timeline of when someone else gets back

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There are two important things to note with thank you notes. There's probably more

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than two, but I'm going to note two. Every

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single interaction you have with a hiring team is important. So

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the tone and the grammar and the spelling, that all matters.

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It really, really does. If you can mirror the

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tone of your interview, if it was a real chatty interview with

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a chatty hiring manager, make your thank you note in the same type

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of style. If it was more of a formal interview and

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the interview team was a little bit more formal, a little bit more staid, and you got

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the sense like, well, this is more of a formal company, make it

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a little bit more cordial. However you slice it,

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though, use a tool like Grammarly to

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ensure that you have no errors in grammar, spelling,

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or punctuation, because I don't care if it's chatty or formal, that

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matters. That matters very deeply. And so that's such

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an easy thing, especially with the technology we have today. There is no excuse.

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There is no excuse to send less than a

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Yeah, I think there's something to unpack there as well. So

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yes, you definitely want to tailor your tone to how the conversation went. But

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if you find yourself being like, oh, I'm having to sound so formal because they were so

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formal and I'm not a formal person, is that an environment for

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you? True. It's a really good time to reflect on did

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you actually really like the impression you

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got? Because if you're having to change your personality to,

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you know, make an email sound right, maybe it's not right

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for you. And I'm not saying that's your only point of, you know, thought when

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you're thinking about, is this the right job? But it's certainly something to think about

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because the person you presented during that interview and the person you

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present in the thank you note and the person you present throughout this entire hiring

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process is the person they expect to show up on

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the first day of work and to be their colleague. So Just

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make sure that's in line because I think it is really important that you

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I love that point so much. We actually had

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a pretty deep dive on that today during office hours because one

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of our Accelerator members is in

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an interview process and had a first interview. So

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they skipped right past the recruiter and ended up meeting with

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the department director, which would be their boss. And

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it was a 45-minute, she called it an exam. It

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was a 45-minute exam. And she said there was no banter.

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There was no back and forth. And knowing this person,

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my first question was, do you want to work for that person? Because

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she's quite bubbly. So I'm seeing

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like, OK, we all have had to take exams. But if that's your

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first interaction with somebody and that's your boss, The question is,

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is that how they manage, is it always going to be that intense?

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Maybe it's not going to be, but my advice to her was, even

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if so, if they're skipping steps in the process, it's a small company, it's not

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unheard of to get an offer after just speaking with a hiring manager

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at very small companies. There may not be that many more people in the company to

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even interview with. It is within your rights to ask

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for another conversation because you are interviewing them

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too. Yes. Yeah, because yeah, you're

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right. You have to be authentic. You have to be comfortable with

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I mean, I think that's really the key of the whole thing, right, is that show

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up as the person that you want to be at work. Show up as, you

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know, the colleague that you want to be and bring that person through your email

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interactions and through your interviews because Yes, everyone

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has bad days, but be the person you want to be, right? But

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don't be someone you're not, because it's not going to work out for

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you long term. You're not going to like it. You're going to burn out. And

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it's just not worth it. So I think that's a really key thing. And

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I think that was good advice you gave that person to reflect on, like,

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if this is the offer stage next, you need

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Yeah, absolutely. Just knowing her, I want

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her to be her bubbly self somewhere. That's

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really important. It's important to me too. And,

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you know, thinking about how I interact and a lot of the advice I give

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to candidates when we're workshopping emails that they're going to

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send or, you know, interactions that they're having, people

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get really wound up about this follow-up stage and when

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do I follow up and how do I follow up and all this stuff. And often

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when I'm helping to write emails, I have to say, well,

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this is how I'd say it because I would inject like

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a little bit of humor here, but if that's not you, then don't do it.

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You know, so for instance, after a long weekend, we,

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we know because we're on the hiring side. So we see the candidate requests and

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emails come through. If you have an interview, this is where the common sense

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piece comes in. If you have an interview on a Thursday before a long weekend, the

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Friday before a long weekend, everyone's going to be checking out

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mentally by midday. But before that, they're just trying to get

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stuff done so that they're done and they can go enjoy their long weekend. That

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Friday, you're probably not going to hear a whole lot in

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a meaningful way because nobody's in the right frame of mind to

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like move candidates forward, get interviews scheduled, all of that. You

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might, but it's unlikely. And then let's say then the Monday's

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the holiday. The Tuesday, everyone's just digging out

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from their long weekend. So the best day to follow up

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would actually be Wednesday or Thursday of that week. It feels like a

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long time to you, but that's a long time in regular days.

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That's not a long time in work days, and that's what we have to really operate on.

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So then we have people who get really, really upset because they'll

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say, oh, I made a mistake, and I followed up on Tuesday, and now they're not

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going to see it, and I don't know what to do. I would reply, and I'd say, well, that

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probably wasn't the best day to email you. I'm sure this got buried under 5 million emails.

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I'm just popping this to the top of your inbox. That's the way

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I would handle it, but that's totally my style. And to your point, you

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I want to go back to something you said about Grammarly. I

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think that's a really good point. And here's what I would think

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about. If you are like, I'm just going to fire off this thank you note from my

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iPhone and it doesn't even matter because I did the thank you note thing, check the button, whatever.

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Just think about that that interaction, that email you send is

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how people are going to see you as a colleague. So if you do it really fast and

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they're spelling errors and it doesn't really make sense, that's not

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necessarily someone I want on my team because I want to know that things are done correctly and

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with some thought and well done.

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So try to approach things from that thing too. Like,

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yes, it takes a little more work, but you are really showing the level

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of work and quality that you're going to bring to the job. So don't

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Ultimately, we're making drugs. That's

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what biotech is doing. We are making things that will go

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into patients. And so the level of detail expected

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of that, if we're thinking about filing INDs and pushing

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things into the clinic and all of that, Yeah, it's

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important. Detail matters. And so every interaction until they

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get to know you really, really well, and they might know like, oh, well, she's on

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vacation and firing off a quick email. So that makes sense. But

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you don't get that privilege until you have shown who you are

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and that on a day to day basis, you are that detail oriented.

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You care that deeply. Then you

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earn the right to have the occasional silly email that has the spelling error

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Everyone makes mistakes. And of course, like, you know, we're all in Slack and

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I don't always capitalize everything in Slack. Sometimes

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you're just firing things off. But when push

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comes to shove, my whole team knows that when something important is going

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out, I'm going to be reviewing it and we're going to be running it through Grammarly. And

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I'll probably even have someone else look at it because Grammarly is great.

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There's no substitute for someone else reading it and being like, I don't understand what

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you're saying here. So just keep that in mind. These

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little small things, they do make big impressions. So

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Karina, have you ever reached out

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to a candidate and things started off really, really well. And

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then they just fell apart because like maybe their emails got

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really weird or maybe you had a super strange interaction and you're like, this is bizarre.

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What's happening here? Or have you gotten someone almost to the end and

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So, so many. Really? Yeah. It's interesting

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because I, I've used this a few times now, but like, Job

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interviews are a bit like dating, right? And so

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you're going to see people over multiple interactions.

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That's why we structure interviews the way we do. There's multiple

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points where you're going to interact with people at the company. And If

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you are putting on some sort of a false personality, it's

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likely to come out at some point, right? Even if it's an accident that,

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you know, maybe the weird interaction we got was a

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result of something that was out of your control. It's going

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to just raise that little pink flag. It's like, is this person real?

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Are they bringing their authentic self to this? So

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yeah, every interaction ends up being a data point. And

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You know, that's super interesting too, especially when people

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are looking at remote jobs, I think. There

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is a different dynamic to interviewing in person, I

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feel personally, than there is to doing everything remotely,

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where it feels like you're still not completely

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reading the room and everything. So every interaction really does have that much more

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weight. Every email is a little bit more like, okay, this is my

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only correspondence with this person. I'm not going to meet them in the parking lot

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and bring them in the building and have that casual chitchat. So here we

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Yeah. That's a really good point. We have fewer

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data points in this online world than we would in

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the pre-pandemic world. We used to fly candidates out

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all the time for interviews. They might have an interview with

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me on the phone, and then they might have an interview with

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the hiring manager on the phone, not Zoom, on the phone. We

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weren't doing Zoom. And then we would fly candidates out

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if they weren't local to meet the whole team in person and make

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a whole day of it, including lunch. Like it was a

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whole thing. We don't do that anymore. And so there are so

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many fewer data points to get that read on people. So

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you, you really have to think about pretty critically what

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image you're putting out during your interview. You want it to be authentic, but you also

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want it to be professional and in line with

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the other things that you're. that are happening in your interview. So

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if you send a bunch of really good emails, lots of professional emails,

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no spelling mistakes, and then suddenly out of nowhere, this

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weird email that doesn't make any sense, you know, terrible

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You know, it's interesting. I'm sure most people have heard this and

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it is just good advice. So like take this and run with it. But

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the way that we used to talk about hiring in

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previous companies was how did they act

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with the first person they met? So if you are rude to

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the person sitting at the reception desk, that would be the first question

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I asked anyone, you know, right after we interviewed someone,

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I'd go out and say, How were they? And sometimes for a lot

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of my career, I was that person. I'd be like, they were great. Or I'd be like, oh, they were horribly

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rude. And that dictated everything. It did not matter what

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the response was after that. Like if they were like, they could have been the best

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hire, but if they were rude to the people who they thought didn't

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matter in their interview. That shows you everything

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you need to know. So that's another data point that, you know, no

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matter who you're interacting with, your initial phone screener has

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a lot of sway. If they're like, they weren't polite and they were really

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rude. Well, that's pretty

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We just let a candidate go today because they were not

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professional on the phone with one of our recruiters. We're

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not sending them through to, I mean, I'm sure

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that they were thinking, well, this is just the recruiter screen. It

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does not matter. No, they will never be

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seen by the hiring manager because we ultimately don't

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feel that they're a fit for the company because that's not the culture

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I think though it goes the other way, right? If you are interviewing

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with a company. and you're getting weird signals

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from their team, those are data

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points for you as well. It's the same thing. You're not spending a ton

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of time interviewing. You're not meeting everybody at the company. You're

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not getting to sit down and have a meal with people necessarily anymore. So

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you don't have a lot of data points to go on either. True. So

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it's also within your rights to interview them back. So

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At what point do you start getting pink to glaring

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red flags when someone's like, oh yeah, I've been on eight

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interviews with the same company? Or I've

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had to do this crazy project for free because they want to see my

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work. Like, where are you kind of like, oh boy, this is not looking

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One thing that we see more inexperienced hiring

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managers want to do often is basically

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they don't trust themselves to make a decision. So they want everybody in

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the company to sort of meet this person, back them up on it.

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and it becomes a really disjointed process. Just because now

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we can do things through Zoom doesn't mean we should spread the interview out

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over days and days and days. It's still emotionally

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and mentally draining to be interviewed. It

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doesn't matter if it's on site or on Zoom. It's probably a little bit

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less draining on Zoom, but You

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still have that anxiety, that workup, that all of that. And

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if you spread that over multiple days, that is hard. It's hard for

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candidates and they don't like it. We've had that feedback specifically

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from many different candidates. They don't like it. So it is still advisable

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to keep the interview team small. to keep it tight because

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really good candidates that are in high demand, they have

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choices and they're interviewing you. And if

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the only data points they have about your company are that the interview feels really

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disorganized, they have to come back for lots of different interviews, they're

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on different days, sometimes they get moved or canceled, what are

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they going to think about the company? The only data points they have are that your

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interview process was terrible. Are they going to think you're

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an organized company, a good company to work for? It's unlikely.

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So that is huge. The second thing

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that you brought up was doing projects. We've had some

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clients before ask us to put together what they

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call case study interviews, and this in principle is

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okay for some roles. But where it crosses into

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not being okay is if we are asking candidates to

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do a case study on actual work at the company that

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could be used to further the company's interests for

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free. That is not something that you should be

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doing, and if you are asked to do that, please jump into the Slack community and

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workshop that with us. We are happy to answer questions about how to turn down an

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interview like that politely. But if you get

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the suspicion that you're basically being asked to solve an

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engineering problem for a company, that's probably

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I would much prefer to go on site and meet people. I'm just

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more drawn to being in person with people. And

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so there's that element, too, that, like, it's exhausting no

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matter who you are. And it is really, like, I

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feel like it's personality dependent to an extent. But it's

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just, just don't do it. Just don't make anyone sit

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We revamped a process recently where they

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had 13 people meeting with a candidate one-on-one.

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Oh. They did it. I know. They

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did it over a period usually of four or

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five different days because they

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couldn't get all 13 people who were mostly remote or hybrid to

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be able to coordinate on a certain day or time. That's

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just really tough. I don't care who you are. That is grueling. When

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we started the process, we were working with some candidates that were working

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through that process already. And we basically had

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to go back to the company and say, this is the feedback we're getting. These candidates are

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leaving the process because of this. I don't want to

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see more than eight people throughout an entire process, which includes HR

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The thing is, is that everyone has lives, right? You might be

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looking for a job, but you're probably not just sitting there like being like, dude, dude, dude, I'm

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totally available for interviews all the time. I mean, think about the childcare

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element. If you're asking someone to do 13 interviews and

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or if they are employed and you're asking them to step away from their job 13 times,

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It is, in fact, pretty common practice with smaller

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companies. What happens, it's pretty natural. You have

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these really tiny companies, right, where it's actually fine to have

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somebody meet with everybody at the company because they're six

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people or eight people. It's a tiny company. Well, then the company grows

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and they don't want to exclude someone from the process. And then pretty soon you've

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got your 13 people at the company, your 15 people at the company. They

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don't want to exclude anybody. But there is a point where you

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just have to say, no, who is actually pertinent to making this decision? And

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in the interest of time, who really needs to attend and just triage

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it down. And you know what? The employees are not going to feel like

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they're excluded. They're probably burnt out from doing so many interviews, too. Everyone

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I actually think that's a super interesting a psychological thing

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as well. If you're an employee and you're not included in the interview, okay, they hired

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someone and you don't agree with it, you don't get along with them, well, like, whatever, you didn't weigh in on

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that. So that was the way the cards were dealt. But

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how bad is it if you're like, no, I really don't want to work with

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this person, or like, no, I don't think they have the skills, or X, Y, Z, and

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the company disregards that feedback? Because then you

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are sort of in a position of being like, well, I had to take all this time to interview this person, no one

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even listened to my feedback, And here we are. So I

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think the smaller interview team is essential for several

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reasons. One of them is you have too many cooks in the kitchen, then you're going to have

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We can also mitigate that with creating a more scientific

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interview process. And it's really interesting to me how a bunch

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of scientists at a company typically don't treat

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the interview process scientifically at all. And so one of

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the things we like to do when we start working with a company is create

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a scorecard system where everybody in total isolation fills

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out a scorecard with their thoughts and their feelings about a candidate's fitness. And

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then after everybody's filled those out, then compare.

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What we see often, which if you think about it, we're talking about

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a bunch of scientists. They would never do this in an experiment. They

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would never do this. But they all interview candidates.

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They sometimes capture notes. They chit chat in the hallway about it. And

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then there's this process of groupthink that

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happens because people are starting to have these sidebar conversations before

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actual data has been analyzed. It's really

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fascinating and something that I have always been just so confused

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about. And then we introduced scorecards and they're like, oh yeah, this is a much

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better way to do it. Well, you analyze your data like this.

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That is so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

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it's true. There's a lot of ways to mitigate a lot

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of those pitfalls, but you kind of need someone who knows how

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Well, if you're listening to this podcast and you are going to hire

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some folks for your team, you can do a really basic, very

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rudimentary scorecard using Google Forms. You

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don't have to have a fancy applicant tracking system if you're not going public anytime

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soon. You can absolutely do this in an easy way. and

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collect that data and then have a good sit down with the blinded data

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and have people come forward with their thoughts. But

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after seeing the data, kind of see the data first. It's interesting, too,

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when you point out, you know, the one outlier that maybe doesn't like the candidate,

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they don't want to hire that candidate. Often when they

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see raw data where it's like, okay, well, they were a

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four and a half star on this, on this, and

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there were, let's say there were 13 people and they were the one person who

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marked him a one star and everyone else wrote, marked him a five star. That

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is a lot more compelling to them usually than just

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being overruled, but it's more of just like an argument. If

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Yeah, well, you're taking the personality out of it, right? Like, going

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back to your point, not everyone is going to like each other. That is just human

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nature. But if you can't sit down and actually say, these

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are the things that are pertinent to the job and can this person do

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it and take the personality out of it, to an extent, I mean, you still have

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to be a good person that people want to work with and be a nice colleague,

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but you know, you can accomplish those things without being best friends with everybody.

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And so I think that is really interesting. I could see that being super effective

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It really is. Yeah. Before we revamp some processes with

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previous clients. We heard feedback as

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we were sort of starting up, and I would ask, well, what are your pain points with

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the interview process? And often it came down to

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this feedback session, which was a completely unformatted feedback session where

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people had talked to each other earlier, formed their little opinions, formed little

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clicks even, came in and brought that to this feedback session, which then

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it's, I mean, that's not useful. Nobody finds that useful. And

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I would hear things like, somebody would come and be like,

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well, I didn't like their shirt. Somebody said that they

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didn't like someone's shirt because it had a sparkle, like a

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sparkly thing on the side, which I'm interpreting as an embellishment,

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probably. Wow. How is that pertinent

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in any way, shape, or form to their ability to perform the

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job? So this is where we take that

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element out of this process. And it's so easy to

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do. It's just a matter of standardizing it. So if you are ever

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confused about that, again, our Slack community, we do

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a lot of work with job seekers, but if you're hiring somebody, come

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in and ask us about that too. We love to talk about best practices

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for hiring, and we can give you some really easy tips and even some templates

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and things like that. I just got together, an interview cheat

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sheet for a client. It has almost 200 behavioral-based

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interview questions on anything you could want to interview for.

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And I just have this in our drive. So if you're interviewing

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people, jump in our Slack community and ask for that, because that is gold. That

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Here's a thought. Can we also share that with Accelerator members

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Already done. Yeah, that's actually in our interview module. Yep,

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they should have no trouble, although it's a little overwhelming if you're like, oh, these 200 questions.

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The nice thing, though, is that there are themes, right?

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And so the questions are behavioral-based questions, which means you would provide

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a story to go along with your answer. And

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I can't actually imagine the need for more than about five stories.

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Because the themes for those questions tend to

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circulate around detail-oriented, communication,

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teamwork, like there's a lot of the same themes. And so as long as you're pulling

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together stories that paint those types of pictures, you

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should be fine. They might ask you about teamwork and you'd

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prepared a story about dealing with a challenging colleague, but that actually

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is okay. You can pull it back to teamwork, right? There's a

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lot of ways that you can mitigate the work that you might think that

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Yeah, I think that's the whole thing. If you practice a few of them, it's

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in your brain. It's more just thinking about like on the fly, it's so hard

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to be like, oh, when did I work with a difficult colleague? And

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then you just sit there silently, and every second feels so long. But

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if you're like, oh, yeah, I kind of knew I should pull one of these out and one of these. And

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at least then you've kind of made your brain go back in time as well, which I think is

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And humans love stories. We connect over stories.

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Even if you're not asked a behavioral-based interview question, there's

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often a lot of wiggle room in your answers to

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bring in a story. So one of our members asked

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how they would respond to a question, which is

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just a terrible question, but what's your greatest weakness? Which we almost

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never hear that question in interviews, but that's the question everyone

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fears because we've been told like, Oh,

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just say, like, I work too hard or something. Like, no, that's not,

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I'm a perfectionist. Like, I am so detail oriented. I

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mean, it's such a bad question. It's a bad question. And no one's going to be like, oh,

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I am like, I don't know. I swear like a sailor, like

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no one's saying that. I mean, maybe they are. I guess if

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we're telling people to bring your authentic self, I guess you could throw it out there, but don't.

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My example today for the Accelerator member, she's

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an immunologist. And I was like, well, it's not like you're going to come out and say, like,

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I don't know immunology. It's a terrible question. I think

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there's a way, usually, to turn around those questions,

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even if they are kind of bad questions, to pull in

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a story and almost turn it into a star-based question.

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So my example for that is, for me, And

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this is how I would even answer the question. I am aware of a weakness of mine.

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I work on it all the time because it's something that's very present. I

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generate a lot of ideas and I overwhelm my

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team members with that because I will just,

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in my ideation, I will throw out ideas. And because I

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lead a team, some team members get stressed out about that. They want

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to go into action. start enacting those ideas, but I've

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not provided any clear framework for whether they're good ideas,

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bad ideas, and frankly, many of them should not see the light of day, right?

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So the way I have trained myself to mitigate this

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is I try to write things down now, and I try and

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sit on them for 24 hours. And then a lot of

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them get crossed off my list. But the ones that I do feel are

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good, I want to provide a little more context and framework before

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I just throw them out in a meeting. This is something I work on constantly. I

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know it's a problem. And it's something that I think is also a

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strength of mine, but in the wrong context can really overwhelm a

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But you see how I can take that terrible question and sort

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of bring in a bit of a story. It's not a full story, but

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it's a scenario. And it also shows my thought process. Here

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are the steps I've taken. So in her case, I

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advised her to think back to something she actually learned from

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her last job, something that was a weakness. that she

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was aware of. One thing I noticed in my last position was

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that I was weak in X area, so I took XYZ steps to

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improve. I'm still working on it. It's something I continually want

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to work toward, but I am and this is what I'm doing. And so

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Yeah, I think the ownership piece of that is what is like just super

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critical. People love when you just say, yeah, I know and I own

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this aspect of it and then following it up exactly like you

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said, these are the steps I'm taking. No one is perfect

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and I think very few people are actually really good at delineating

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and owning their weaknesses in a way that you know, really shows

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growth. Yeah. So I think that's a perfect answer. It's a lot better than

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the time I interviewed at a company and I was asked what type of a tree

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I would be. Oh, I know like four trees. I

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think I said a palm tree because I like like the heat and being in Florida, which like the

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job was in Massachusetts. So they're probably like, oh, this isn't going to work out

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But that's a really interesting question

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So early on, there was a client that

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liked to ask wacky questions and that was something

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I challenged them on was like, what's the utility of this question? They

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were like, well, we just want to see how creative someone's answer is. Okay,

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but we're a biotech. That's right.

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I mean. Fine, but expect candidates

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to be a little put off by that because you

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can understand, even if it's a bad question, you can understand the

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question, what's your greatest weakness? You can understand that they're trying to understand

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something about you. The palm tree or the tree question, I don't know.

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I mean, basically what I told them is that I only know four types of trees. I

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was like, my tree knowledge is like, I don't know, Christmas tree, a

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palm tree, and then a maple? I don't know. I'm kind of like

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grasping here. So clearly they knew. And I wasn't

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Yeah. They're nothing to do with trees. I'm married to a woodworker and I

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would not be able to answer that question. I have no idea. I have no idea.

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He's always like, I found the coolest tree. I'm like, cool. I

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have no idea what type of tree. I could not walk outside and tell you what trees

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Maybe that's my greatest weakness. I am very poorly educated on

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I would say that's a huge weakness and something you should work on. Definitely affects

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