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Teach Your Managers How to Interview

To hire well, it’s important that those doing the hiring know how to interview. Have you trained everyone doing the hiring on how to interview? Often, the answer is no.

“Most managers have never been taught how to interview. It’s a skill that needs to be learned,” Kleiman said. “Secondly, only let your best people interview. A players hire A players.”

“I have a training program that says basically there’s only five questions you need to ask any applicant,” he said. “And the No. 1 takeaway is that most of us ask the wrong question to start the interview. What’s the standard question? It’s ‘Tell me about your last job,’ and everybody’s got a canned answer for their last job.”

Instead, Kleiman encourages interviewers to ask, “Tell me about the very first thing you ever did for money,” and then ask, “What are the three most important things you learned doing that job?”

Oftentimes when interviewing, if an applicant doesn’t have an immediate answer, we help them by giving them a different question. Instead, if applicants don’t have an immediate answer, Kleiman suggests saying, “I understand that’s a difficult question. Take as much time as you need to think about it.”

When the applicant tells you what they learned, this says a lot about the person. If they said they learned to be responsible, chances are they’re someone who takes responsibility today. The odds are they haven’t changed that much. You could explore the things they learned or ask the same question regarding another role on their resume, Kleiman explained.

“I can go through their whole career and never get off that question. Where do you go from there? (Ask them) which job they enjoyed the most or what was the hardest job they had. It becomes a conversation, not an interview,” he said.  “(Tell them), ‘Here are the top 10 reasons why people come to work for us. Which one is most important to you?’ Now you know their key driver and motivator.”