My Best Interviewing Tip

In Silicon Valley we are in a talent war. With so much technology available via open source or cloud services, you can start up quickly but just as quickly flounder against competitors. Great companies all have one thing in common: they have great people. Great people who can work together, innovate and managers who can bring out the best in their teams. 

In my position as CMO and a founding executive team member of the Linux Foundation, we experienced rapid growth over many years. I spent a great deal of time and attention on hiring and motivating employees to do their best. I may be biased but I think we managed to create a world class and thriving team. 

One of the highest value activities in this area was training others on interviewing. My best advice? Focus on behavior. In jobs related to product management, business development, sales, marketing or communications, you  have people who are verbally skilled. Ask them anything and you will likely get a good verbal response, but that doesn't mean it's true. Focusing on behavior — how they follow up, how and when they respond to your emails and questions, how they treat you vs others on the team for instance — yields more accurate data of how they will be on a daily basis. For instance, I would sometimes purposefully argue with a candidate to see how they respond to being challenged. 

The CEO of Schwab has a similar approach. In this San Francisco Chronicle article he explains that he has the restaurant purposefully mess up applicants' orders so he can see how they behave. In his words: 

"I do that because I want to see how the person responds. That will help me understand how they deal with adversity. Are they upset, are they frustrated or are they understanding? Life is like that, and business is like that. It's just another way to get a look inside their heart rather than their head.

"We're all going to make mistakes. The question is how are we going to recover when we make them, and are we going to be respectful to others when they make them?"

Of course the applicant may be on their best behavior, but it's much harder to hide the truth  in a situation that is challenging. Our actions speak louder than words but all too often we focus on words in interviews, ignoring how the applicant didn't ask us anything about the company or our lives, or blared on and on without concern for time. In a talent war, having the best talent who works well together is worth extra vigilance on behavior — even if it's staged — during the interview process.