SuperManager Podcast: Interview Horror Stories

Christine: You’re listening to SuperManager, the podcast for people who manage people and business with ideas, trends and expert interviews to help you be a SuperManager.

Sam: Welcome to the SuperManager podcast. This week I’ve got my fellow, caped crusaders in management,

Vicky: Victoria Wors, Wors consulting, human resources consulting.

Jerry: I’m Jerry Richardson. I’m a Labor and employment lawyer at Evans and Dixon.

Sally: My name’s Sally Bowles and I’m with Prefix Technologies.

Sam: And I’m Samantha Naes with CN Video. We do corporate video production. So we’re going to talk today about some horror stories in interviews and that can be both sides of the table. I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing, but I remember the worst interview I ever attended as the interviewee was with a very large financial institution here in St. Louis. It was a six hour interview. The shocking look on your face, that’s not the worst part of it, the idea was they wanted me to speak with six different people one hour each back to back because they had me speak with each person individually. I talked with the first person and when the second person came in they would essentially ask the same questions that the first person asked me and so on and so forth. But I was able to use it as an opportunity to get some of my questions answered. And here’s what made it a true horror story. I don’t know how much you know about financial institutions, but VPs are kind of a dime a dozen. Having VP in your title is not a big deal. Being an officer of the bank is more of a big deal and so I wanted to know what it would take because at my current position I was an officer of the bank and I wanted to know what it would take to be officer of a bank in this position. First person I asked, he was very vague. He said, well, you know there are some requirements and you get invited and you know, maybe, maybe not very vague, which raised a concern. So the second person, I asked the same question and he gave a similar answer but still vague and I was having a hard time getting an answer. So I thought, you know, I’m going to press this. The next person came in and I asked him about it and I pressed him on a little bit. I said, what are the requirements you have to meet? And then what happens? And he said, well, you have to do this, this and this, and then you may be invited. I said, what do you mean maybe invited? What does that mean? Well, you know, it’s by invitation. And I thought, no, not getting a good feeling about this. So by the time I got to the fifth interviewer, another male vice president, I asked him of the six VPs that are interviewing me today, how many are officers of the bank? And he said, five five out of the six. And I said, okay, okay, so it’s not impossible. And he said, well, you know, you have to. And I’m like, what is going on here? So the sixth, the VP, the only female VP that I was interviewing with that day came in. And before we got started I said, hey, before we do this interview, can I ask you a question? I’ve been told that five of the six people I’m speaking with today are officers of the bank and one is not. What’s the story with that? And she kind of stared at me for a second and I said, are you the one that’s not? And she said yes, the other five are, I am not. And I had to kind of think about it for a minute cause I thought, I don’t want to burn any bridges. I don’t want to, if this is a good place to work, I don’t want to ruin the interview, but I want to ask the question and I thought I’m just going to go ahead and be direct. And so I said, is there a problem with gender bias here? And she just kind of stared at me and I said, have you experienced anything that you feel is problematic? And She just kind of stared at me and she said, okay. Yes, the other five VPs are officers of the bank. I am not. We have had newer male VP’s come in after me that have been made officers of the bank. There are no female officers of the bank,

Vicky: And there will be no females.

Sam: Well she went on and as she started talking it’s like the dam broke and she started using terms like there’s a real good old boy club going on here. If you’re female, you just don’t have a chance at having a career here. And it ended with, I recommend that you only, if you’re female, that you only take a position with this company if you have no other options. And I said, okay, thank you for your time. And I got up and walked out after five, five hours of interviewing. So that was obviously a nightmare interview from the interviewee side of the table.

Sally: However, she did you a big favor.

Sam: She did. She did because that could have been,

Sally: That probably would have rarely come out in any other interview.

Vicky: I wonder if she was still at that bank after that occurred.

Sally: My hunch is she was actively looking.

Vicky: Yes, especially after that conversation.

Sam: Well, and even if she wouldn’t have come out and told me that I wouldn’t have had a warm fuzzy because I just from my conversations with the five previous people, I was a little bit concerned and suspicious. So, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked the question straight out.

Sally: Right.

Sam: Yeah. That interview with me may have prompted her to say,

Sally: Gosh, yeah.

Vicky: I had an interviewee, a candidate come in to interview and it was a production employee position. He was a young individual but old enough to know better. He brought his mother.

Sally: Oh yeah, that happens all the time.

Sam: I’ve had one of those.

Sally: I’ve had two.

Sam: I have had one.

Sally: I’ve had two of them.

Vicky: It’s beyond me. How a young, and this happened to be a man, would acquiesce even if his mother insisted that she would attend, that he would bring her or anybody else into an interview for a job.

Sam: It’s not that uncommon.

Vicky: Well I have to tell you that interview did not last very long. I just looked at him and said, this wasn’t considered to be a group interview here. I don’t believe we have an interest at this time. Thank you.

Sally: On the different side of things, I interviewed someone who, her 15 year old son had a learner’s permit so she thought it’d be great for him to get some driving time in and brought him to the interview. When I suggested did he want to wait in a car or maybe you know, walk someplace, get a soda, whatever. She said, no, we do just about everything together. He can stay right here.

Vicky: A little oedipal complex going on there, possibly.

Jerry: She brought a witness.

Sally: Yeah. So, um, that interview, um, politely probably lasted longer than it should have. But yeah, that was a new one for me. I have had two people bring their mothers with them that were in their mid twenties but she was the only one that insisted that her son come.

Jerry: Most of what I get as the lawyer is after the fact and it’s kind of forensic and you find things out that maybe didn’t blow up for the employer, but you cringe as the lawyer when you hear what happened during the, the interview. There’s someone that is trying to be breaking the ice and that’s where the interviews go off the rails. Instead of sticking the questions about the candidates qualifications, what the relevant experience of the candidate is, and determining how well the candidate communicates. They say, well, let’s be friendly. Oh, I see you’re wearing a hijab. Where did you get that?

Everyone: Oh!

Jerry: No, no. These are not questions. You know, you might think you’re being friendly, but these are not the kinds of questions to ask. So if you keep what you’re there to do in mind and keep your questions on target, you’ll do much better.

Vicky: On an interview that I was on, I was in a group interview session, not that there were a number of interviewers. They had a group of interviewees in an oral interview session that they were asking us questions as a group.

Sam: I’m actually curious about that because it’s so easy to apply for a job, now. You post a job opening, you get hundreds and, but the thought has occurred to me, I’ve never done it. Is there a way to do some kind of group interview? How did that,

Vicky: It was a competitive environment, there were only, they had like nine candidates and I think there were only three spots. So you can imagine what kind of a scrape was going on.

Sam: No, I can’t imagine, do tell.

Vicky: You have to compete with the next person. It’s kind of a one-upmanship to be able to at least get on the radar screen. It was the wildest thing I’d ever experienced in my life. Interesting. And of course I’m so full of BS I made it, you know. But I mean,

Sam: Oh you were an interviewee, so you were,

Vicky: I was an interviewee and I had all of these other interviewees with me.

Sally: Well see, when I was an office manager years ago, we used to do large group interviews cause we did a lot of summer hiring and you know,

Vicky: This was for a professional position.

Sally: Well okay. But still, I mean these were young adults kind of thing coming in to get a summer job and we do group interviews. Because it saves so much time.

Sam: So it actually worked when you did it?

Sally: It really did. And we found out really quickly as far as personalities and you know, if somebody comes out ready to scrap somebody, you think maybe you’re not going to be this team environment.

Sam: Well depending on what the, what the environment is. I mean if you want somebody who’s more cut throat, you know and that’s a good way to find them.

Vicky: It was for a labor relations manager position, which means I had to get in there, I couldn’t be reticent whatsoever.

Sally: Gotcha.

Sam: Well and you got it though, right?

Vicky: Yeah.

Sam: So it worked, crazy experience for you, but it worked.

Sally: It’s a time management thing to be honest with you and I never thought about it the way you’re saying it cause I was on the other side of the table.

Vicky: If I was going to match up with teamsters and machinist and pretty scrappy individuals out in the field. I was going to have to show and especially being female, and I had to show that I could step up.

Sam: Jerry is about to jump out of his skin. What’s going on Jerry?

Jerry: Well, not so much on the interview as a group, as long as you’re staying out of questions that would get you into trouble from a legal standpoint. If you ask one person that question, I mean, standard recommendation when you are interviewing candidates basically is that you have all the interviewers asking similar questions of the same candidness.

Vicky: Consistency.

Jerry: So that you don’t wander off the reservation and get yourself into trouble. But kind of a horror story, I was doing a training session and it was for a business that did recruiting. Some of the recruiting they did was for medical practices. And so when I got to this point and when I’m talking about have the slide up with the big picture of Irish need not apply on there, I said, you know, back in the 1850s this was a pretty common sign. You can’t lawfully do this.

Sam: Wow.

Jerry: And suddenly a hand goes up and says, oh, what do you mean by that? Uh, you know, we have a doctor’s practice and there’s four Jewish doctors and they tell us they want another Jewish doctor. What’s wrong with that? He said, well, it’s illegal, you know, if you don’t have any,

Sam: Other than that.

Sally: It’s fine.

Jerry: You know, that’s fine. But customer preferences, no. Defense.

Sam: Sally, you had a candidate.

Sally: Well, yeah, yeah, we had a candidate apply for a job. Resume looked great. We were excited about the interview as we started asking very direct questions, problem solving questions, words were literally made up that would have nothing to do with the field.

Sam: By you or by the candidate?

Sally: Oh No, by the candidate. I think he thought he was going to BS his way through an interview, get a nice raise and have a good job. And it was very evident he wasn’t even qualified to fill out the application, let alone come to the interview.

Sam: So he was actually a words to try to sound like he was,

Sally: Oh yes. Yeah. He thought he was very knowledgeable.

Sam: Or maybe, maybe one of his friends played a joke on him and was like feeding him incorrect words or something.

Sally: It was hard to keep a straight face. And, um, uh, you know, I, I wished him well and off he went. And that was the end of that one, but that was um, yeah, people are amazing sometimes.

Vicky: Oh, I mean people are actually kind of fun, but you got to be careful, right Jerry.

Sally: That one was fun to, to ask some in depth questions and get these answers,

Vicky: Watch him go off all over the place. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah. That kind of goes back to the assessments and being given the opportunity to show what you can do. You were speaking technically with this person and he wasn’t able to talk with talk and,

Sally: No, no, it was a first interview, so it was, you know when I, when you simply couldn’t be polite and keep a straight face anymore, we wished him well, so.

Vicky: At least you’ve got people coming in to interview. What a number of HR managers are telling me is that they set up appointments for interviews and they don’t show it’s ghosting is going on right and left.

Sam: Oh. Even worse than that, there’ve been people that have gotten job offers, accepted them and then don’t show up for their first day of work. Yeah. That’s a whole other topic that we’re going to bring up is, is employees ghosting employers. So talking about solutions a little bit, Jerry, I wanted to respond to something that you said earlier about sticking to the questions. I found that there’s a way that you can ask the questions you want to stick to the questions, but there is a way that you can ask them that puts people more at ease and gets them into that talking mode. So like for example, I used to ask common interview questions that you hear are, what do you like most about your current job? What do you like least? What are you looking for? I found that when you’re asking a list of questions and writing down responses, you’re setting the tone for, I’m asking you questions and you’re answering them and they have predefined answers. So like you say, what do you, what do you like least? Oh, I wasn’t kept busy, you know, and what do you get these,

Sally: It wasn’t challenging enough.

Sam: It wasn’t challenging enough. Yeah, you get these BS answers. And so I found instead of asking that, you know, I won’t talk about their star of David that they’re wearing, but I’ll say things like, you know, so your, Jerry’s giving me the okay sign. I’ll say things like, so you’re just now graduating and you’re looking for your first full time, your actual career. That’s a very exciting time. Have you thought about what you’re really looking for? You know, instead of saying what’s important to you, what are you looking for? What do you like most in a job? Or instead of saying things like, what are you trying to avoid in your next job? Kind of doing the reverse of that and saying, you know, it can be an exciting and stressful time. Are there any things that you’re concerned about as far as what might happen once you start your career once you start this full time job and I that that gets people more into conversation mode and they’re a little bit more honest in their answers.

Sally: I, yeah.

Jerry: Well, can I challenge your thinking? There are certain things you need to come away with and there’s no single question that gets that right. And so you know what you need from this person in this job. Usually you’ve had other people in the job, you know what made those people successful. And so you can ask questions like, well, tell me about your experience that is relevant to this position. You know, this person does blah, blah, blah.

Sam: Sure.

Jerry: Okay. That’s an opportunity. Basically say, tell me about yourself. Tell me you know what you’ve done. That’s the kind of information that’s good information to get.

Sam: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I always ask for stories about similar projects that you’ve worked on and what you liked about it.

Jerry: And then if you get a blank, you know there’s somebody who has no experience.

Sally: Right. Right.

Vicky: One of the things I use is I, whether it’s a truthful story or not, and rather than just going on the bland click, click, click, I’ll set it to a scenario that may have occurred. Has anything like this happened to you in the past or can you speak to them? You know, some sort of scenario either I experienced or someone else’s experienced and you know, can you speak to that? And they usually will respond in the same manner that I told it’s like it’s a template and I just get everything I want in that response and,

Sally: See I, I prefer the more conversational.

Sam: Yeah.

Vicky: It’s a conversation. But you know,

Sally: For example, even being really open, um, you know, what, what are your hobbies? What do you like to do? Like on your vacation time kind of thing. If somebody says all my family’s in Seattle and,

Vicky: That’s where I am when I’m not here.

Sally: Right, right. That probably indicates you just got out of school, you’re going to stay here for a bit until you find something in Seattle. So oftentimes you can find out just in conversation a lot about a person,

Vicky: I usually open my mouth and they know I’m not from here, so.

Sally: No, and I don’t mean to like that cause they’re, I mean we have actually most of all but one of our employees did not grow up in St Louis and they’ve been here a long time. So that was perhaps a bad example of a question. You can find out a lot about their company culture by just having a conversation with them.

Sam: I remember working with a nonprofit organization that helped people who are in between jobs and they did a lot of interview preparedness and they talked about what are good responses to certain questions. And I think that is really the enemy to both parties because if you’re not using the interview to really determine if you’re a good fit and let the company determine if they’re a good fit, it’s just not gonna work out and it’s going to cost the company a lot of money. And I love those conversations where you can tell they’ve gone off script and they’re having a real conversation.

Sally: Yes. And when you get a response, you really got nothing. And I think people that are interviewing need to realize the interviewee is also kind of feeling you out to find out if they want to work there.

Jerry: In my opinion, it’s interviewing malpractice if the person being interviewed hasn’t at least gone to the website for sure.

Sam: Oh yeah.

Vicky: Oh yeah.

Jerry: And has something to talk about, about that business and comes in thinking, well this is what I have done that’s related to what you do and in this position, you know, experiential interviewing is the interviewing that’s done today. Here are examples. Here are some good responses,

Vicky: Interviewees or candidates need to understand they’re kind of in a selling mode that they need to tell or respond to you in a way that they’re selling what they can do for you, not necessarily what you can do for them.

Sam: I disagree with that. I disagree with that. I think it’s more like a relationship. Are you going to get along with me and am I going to get along with you because I found that a lot of the questions I ask are more about are you going to be happy here? Because I know if you’re not going to be happy working for this company, you’re not going to do a good job, you’re not going to last, and it actually makes the interviewee perceive me as someone who’s thoughtful and caring and I, and I’m glad of that, but really I’m doing it to serve my own self interest. I want to make sure that you’re going to be a good fit, that you’re going to be happy here.

Vicky: If they’d gone in, like Jerry was talking about from a research standpoint to show that they have enough interest in your organization. Yeah. To be able to speak to your needs, at least as they see it from the website. They need to make sure that they’re able to present that, and this is what I’m talking about from a sales standpoint, that you have to measure their fit, but they need to understand when you’re asked questions, you need to be forthcoming. And you need to show that you have taken this step to research and show what your background, your abilities are that the company could use.

Sam: Jerry, that was a really good point about them doing some research because if they’re interested in the position, if they care about the position or something they want, they’re going to look into it. And I’ve had interviewees come in and say, so tell me a little bit about what you guys do and, I’ll say have you looked at our website? And I get this kind of pause. And sometimes they’ll say, oh, you know, I was having trouble finding yet. Or, you know, I didn’t, I meant to. And my cell phone was, you know, the network wasn’t working on yeah. And that right away, I mean, that’s just in your interview killer because it’s like you’re clearly not that interested in this particular position. So, and you looked like you were,

Jerry: No, that’s, that’s exactly right. And that’s very valuable information.

Sam: Yeah.

Jerry: And some of these other things, there’s a lot of ways you can ask questions where the information you want is to tell you, is this person a good fit? But you got to be careful how you ask the question. For example, a simple thing like, well, in your last position were you absent a lot or you’re going into attendance. That’s not a good way to test it. That’s an Americans with disabilities act nightmare. Okay. However, there is a way to say, well gee, you know, for the last couple of years, how many of your regularly scheduled days did you miss? That’s perfectly legal and that’s the kind,

Vicky: It’s just a, it’s just to turn on those,

Sam: But it’s not though.

Jerry: Well is it verifiable? Well, depends. In most cases I would say no because usually if you contact the employee.

Sam: Right.

Jerry: And if the, if the person has a job, he’s going to say, you won’t, don’t contact my employer, my employer doesn’t know I’m here. If you get the information and it doesn’t match up with other pieces of writing, right. Yeah, it’s valuable information. The same thing about, you know, do you, do you have child rearing responsibilities that would interfere with working into the evening or on weekends or overnight travel? That gets asked to females and not males. Why is that right? It’s okay if you ask both and why do you have to ask it in a way that isn’t just you had any responsibilities? Why is it that child rearing responsibilities are, you know, the female genders,

Sam: They could be caring for an elderly parent.

Jerry: They could be on a traveling rugby team, I don’t know.

Vicky: I could be there’s travel required with this position. Do you have any obstacles to traveling?

Sam: Any other thoughts on how to avoid horror stories in your interviews as an interviewer?

Jerry: Well, I think training the people doing the interviewing is helpful because it is not something that is innate. Hey, everybody’s a good interviewer. Some people are horrible and they will stumble into things that would create legal problems, or they’ll ask a bunch of questions that doesn’t give you any information at all. It tells you whether this is a good person for you.

Sam: Right.

Christine: Thanks for listening to SuperManager by CN Video Production. Visit our website cn-video.com for additional episodes and lots of SuperManager resources, or give us a call at 314 VIDEO ME.