How I Hire: You're Not Interviewing For the Job You Think You Are

By the time I’m considering a senior-level candidate, the final decision rarely comes down to their ability to relate a prior experience or convince me they can perform specific tasks in the job description they're interviewing for. Frankly, if I’m doing my job, by the time they get to me the candidate’s experience and proficiency has been vetted and established.

What I’m looking for is what they are going to be able to do to make us successful beyond their job description.

How does the individual sitting in front of me relate to people, approach unusual challenges, flex when blind spots are exposed? In essence, I want to find out not just how they “fit” their defined functional role but how they will be able to quickly adapt and make decisions that will have impact well beyond it.

Those able to spot opportunities for change, early, and flexible enough to move strategically toward addressing them, even when they may be outside business-as-usual parameters, are going to add disproportionate value. Most of the best executives I've observed take their roles well beyond what an organization can even contemplate at the time of an open position. Further, they have enough emotional intelligence to be able to push the organization forward without leaving a cloud of smoke in their path. I want those people on my team and I try to use the interview and vetting process to find them.

If proficiency in the skill set can be presumed, I might ask interview questions about flexibility and off-the-top-of-one’s-head decision making to an analytical thinker; or perhaps I'll push a discussion of business specifics and timely action with someone seeking a more traditionally “creative” position. Give me the marketer who sees that their role goes far beyond a piece of key art to promote a new show, for instance, and actually understands that marketing truly lives in the center of our organization. Or a finance person who is energized - and not paralyzed - when the story the numbers are telling and the aspirations of the business seem to conflict at forecast time.

The assumption I'm comfortable making in interviews, if a candidate has made it this far, is that they can do the job they were brought here to talk about. What I really want to get down to is their ability to perform beyond the specific functional tasks that are written on the paper in front of us.

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