We were listening to a podcast recently where an entrepreneur described his self-described unorthodox process to hiring a CFO. He interviewed something like 100 candidates. His “hack”? If it wasn’t a fit, he’d get off the phone in five minutes. To a couple of Midwesterners, this sounds terrifying. (Note, FWIW…he was from the East Coast.)
We aren’t suggesting that you take this as permission to start speed-running interviews. Plenty of interviews need time. People get nervous. Great candidates aren’t always great interviewers. Someone having a different personality, background or way of answering a question than we expected is probably a reason to get curious, not call it. Sometimes the candidates we aren’t sure about in the first five minutes are exactly the ones we’re glad we kept talking to.
But we’d also guess that you’ve been in an interview and known it wasn’t a fit in the first 5 minutes. Maybe you learned something fundamental pretty quickly in the interview. The schedule doesn’t work. You’re nowhere close on compensation. They don’t want to do a major part of the job. A qualification you truly need, not one you threw on the job description because it sounded nice, is missing. Or the person sitting across from you is describing exactly what they want next, and you know your job is not it.
And then… we keep interviewing them.
We move on to question four. We explain the company. We talk about the team. We nod, take notes and use the full hour sitting on our calendars as though Google will fine us if we give 37 minutes back. We get it. Ending an interview early feels rude. It feels abrupt. And frankly, it’s easier to keep going, ask the questions sitting in front of us and send a rejection email later (especially as midwesterners!). But if we genuinely know something that isn’t going to change, more time doesn’t make us more thorough. It just makes the “no” take longer.
We like to think about an interview in two parts (depending a bit on where you are in the process).The first part is simple: is this job a fit for this candidate? Does the schedule work, does the compensation work, do they actually want to do the work the job requires and is there something that suggests they could do that work? The second part is the one most of us think of as “interviewing”: could this person excel here, and how do they compare to the other candidates we could hire?
The purpose of an interview isn’t to successfully complete an interview. It’s to figure out whether there is a match. Sometimes that means asking another question when your first instinct says no. Sometimes it means realizing you have the right person sitting in front of you, but you’re talking about the wrong job (how we’ve often found team members!). Or maybe you’ve learned enough to know this one really is a no.
If you have, you don’t get extra points for making it to question eight. And they don’t either.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team