Harvard Business Review, JulyAugust 1989

ABCs of Job Interviewing

by James M. Jenks and Brian L.P. Zevnik
Your organization is looking over several candidates for a vacancy in its managerial ranks,
and you have the final say in the decision. You are getting ready to interview the applicants.
Are you well prepared for this task? Poorly conducted interviews can come back to haunt you
you may hire someone who doesnt work out or reject someone with star potential. Or in these
litigious days, you may risk being slapped with a lawsuit and hauled into court.
Unlike your human resources people, you interview applicants only occasionally. You dont
catch that duty often enough to hone your skills. The candidates themselves are likely to be more
adroit than you. Often they have received careful instructions from the recruiting firms that sent them
your way. Recent experience on the job trail may have taught them all the right things to ask and say.
Then there are the personal attributes that you bring to the interview. The aggressive
characteristics that helped put you in an executive position also put obstacles in your way to becoming
an expert interviewerlearning how to ask, to watch, and to listen. The take-charge attitude of many
top executives makes it hard for them to keep their ears open and mouths shuttwo critical
characteristics of the expert interviewer.
On the other hand, you know the job and the qualities youre looking for. Furthermore, your
concern over having a good fit between individual and organization is your greatest advantage: with
the proper preparation, it will give you an edge in the interview.
Prepping for the interviews
Before the interviews begin, write out a job profile based on the job description. The purpose
is to translate duties and responsibilities into the personal characteristics the manager must have to do
the job.
Take the job description for a national sales manager for a life insurance company. One duty
is, "Reviews data to calculate sales potential and customer desires and to recommend prices and
policies to meet sales goals." From that you distill these requirements for your profile: powers of
analysis, managerial skills, and commitment. Another duty, "Prepares periodic sales reports showing
potential sales and actual results," calls for skill in writing and in oral communication.
Now you get down to specifics. For every duty or responsibility, you list the characteristics or
qualities your candidate must possess to do the job. For instance, regarding powers of analysis:
"Finds information in such publications as Insurance and Tax News and interprets it to show how sales
agents can use tax law changes to sell life insurance policies." And concerning written communication:
"Writes copy for advertising department to prepare new sales brochures for agents describing benefits
of various types of life insurance for young singles, young newly marrieds, and mature empty nesters."
Naturally, youll find that many requirements for different jobs are alike. Your human resources
department can help in determining the most important characteristics and otherwise preparing you for
the interviews.
Once youve listed the job requirements, put them in black and white: prepare a written
interview guide. Using such a guide doesnt mean that you lack verbal facility, smoothness in meeting
people, or deftness in leading a discussion; rather, it contributes substantially to a wise assessment of
applicants with whom you must go one-on-one.
Here is a checklist of items as a basis for an interview guide:
Consult the applicants resume and application for jobs, experience, accomplishments that are
most relevant to your job requirements.
Plan questions touching on the qualities you are looking for. In the interviews with applicants
for insurance company national sales manager, if you know that a candidate indeed reads
journals like Insurance and Tax News, you might probe: "Tell me how youve interpreted
information from such publications for sales purposes."
Prepare a step-by-step scenario of how to present the position.
Do the same for your company, division, and department.
1

Seek examples of behavior by focusing on what the applicant has done, not on what he or she
might do. Of the life insurance sales manager applicant, you might ask: "Can you show me
samples of brochures, sales letters, or articles youve developed?"

An interview guide will help you to be consistent and focused in your questioning, thus ensuring each
applicant a fair shake, steering you clear of improper questions, and preventing you from putting
applicants on the defensive. Moreover, an interview guide keeps you in control of the conversation.
Past performance
It has long been established that a persons past behavior is the surest guide to future
performance. To determine an applicants fit with the people in your company (including you) requires
questions that uncover personality characteristics.
How can you make a judgment as to whether an applicant will do the job and fit in well? You
are looking for a particular kind of behavior for every critical requirement youve listed for the job. The
question to keep in mind is, What has this candidate done in the past to meet these requirements? So
make a list of questions that are relevant to your concerns about them.
The following examples illustrate the kinds of questions that reveal willingness to do the job as
well as style and personality:
Your concern: In this era of DINK (double income, no kids) couples, you may wonder about the
prospective employees motivation to work. Will this person put in the hours necessary to get the job
done?
Faulty question: "Is your spouse employed?"
Comment: Such a question makes for amiable conversation, but it doesnt meet your concern. It has
little to do with the candidates motivation to work.
Improved questions: "Can you tell me about any project you had to tackle where you had to meet a
hard deadline? What did you do to get the work out on time?"
When the individual you seek is one who can make an appreciable difference in the company,
simply meeting the positions technical qualifications is not enough. Youre not just filling a slot, youre
hiring someone who is flexible, who will do what the job requires.
Your concern: How well this candidate will meet the demands of the position.
Faulty question: "Did you ever drop the ball on your last job and get bawled out by your boss?"
Comment: There are several problems with this question. For one thing, it can be answered with a
single word"yes" or "no." And a single-word answer (whichever it is) does nothing to get at your
concern. Secondly, youre asking for a confession of failure, which is difficult for anyone to make.
Finally, the question is unrelated to any requirement of the position and therefore gives you no
behavioral matches.
Improved question: "Tell me about a task you took on in your previous job that would prepare you for
handling the requirements were discussing here."
Naturally, you want to consider how well the applicant will get along with colleagues as well as
top executivesif the job opening is at a high level.
Your concern: How well the candidate will fit in your organization.
Faulty questions: "You need a lot of personal PR in this position. Do you get along well with people?
What clubs do you belong to?"
Comment: No matter how strong the candidates or how expert in their fields, if they dont work well in
your particular environment, theyll fail. Some interviewers ask about hobbies and clubs to ascertain fit.
But such questions stray into irrelevant areas. What does being a good tennis player have to do with
getting along with peers or superiors?
Improved question: "Tell me about any incident in your last job that caused a conflict with another
manager; what did you do to smooth things out?"
Assessment of how well candidates have mastered human relations skills is difficult.
Interviewers often ask questions about activities that are at best only dimly connected to the positions
requirements.
Your concern: On paper, your candidate for a professional position is well qualified. But the person
selected will also direct a staff that includes several supervisors, so you need to find a candidate with
good people-managing skills.
Faulty question: "What do you do on your own time, say, with clubs, associations, or groups of
people?"
Comment: This question is designed to find out if the candidate is congenial and well rounded, but it
promises to uncover nothing valuable about the candidates behavior.

Improved questions: "We all run into instances where two people disagree on how to get a job done.
Can you tell me how you handled a particular argument or disagreement about operations that came
up among the people you managed in your last job? How about disputes between colleagues?"

Wrong and right tacks

Doing your homework thoroughly will help you maintain control of the dialogue and avoid
pitfalls that interviewers often run into. Here are some "donts" in the art of interviewing.
Dont telegraph the response youre seeking. Suppose you are exploring the candidates
ability to work with departments that he or she would have no control over. "Do you think youll be able
to get cooperation from managers in other areas of the company?" you ask. The applicant smoothly
replies, "No problem. I get along with everybody."
Your question not only allows a sharp interviewee to give you the response you want to hear
but also gives you zero help in finding out what you really want to know. We suggest something like:
"Tell me about a time when you had to gain the cooperation of a group you had no authority over.
What did you do?"
Dont get defensive if an interviewee directs a tough question right back at you. You may be
concerned, for example, about the persons steady availability. So you ask, "Do you have any small
children at home?" She replies easily, "I think youll agree that my experience and education clearly
show Im qualified. Im not at all sure why you asked that question. Can you explain?" The applicant
has neatly lobbed the ball back into your court and put you on the defensive. (And since the question
is rarely asked of males, it borders on illegality anyway. See "Shooting the Rapids" at the end of the
article.)
A better approach would be: "I dont know if youre aware of this, but we need managers at
your level to be at work by 8 A.M. At unscheduled times each month, youll have to come to executive
committee meetings beginning at 5 P.M. and lasting several hours. How do you feel about that kind of
unpredictable schedule?"
Dont get into a joust. Some people revel in one-upmanship or competitive tilting. You wonder
whether this candidate is willing to work what are usually leisure hours to complete projects within
deadline, so you ask, "Would you work weekends and holidays when necessary?" Your applicant fires
back, "Absolutely. I can keep up with anybody elses schedule."
Implicit in this thrust is the claim that he or she can do anything you can do. Feel your hackles rising?
Avoid that kind of behavior with straightforward business questions. Keep your feelings in check and
your combativeness on a short leash. A better tack would be, "How do you plan your weeks activities?
Tell me what you do in your current job when you cant meet your planned schedule."
Finally, dont get uptight if the applicant gets uptight. You control the situation, its your show.
Part of your job is to make the interview an informative meeting, not a trip to the dentists chair.
Remember too that part of your task is to sell your organization to a top-notch candidate. You do that
with convincing descriptions of the position, the opportunities, and the organization itself; also by how
you come acrossnatural, prepared, professional. Furthermore, if you get uptight, youre liable to do
too much talking and not enough listening.
Hiring is like a contest, especially when youre engaging skillful players who are the kind you
always want on your managerial team. Choosing the right applicants for important management slots
is a key to achieving exceptional results for you and your company. Behavioral-match, performanceoriented questions, buttressed by careful preparation, give you the best chance of finding talented
candidates who will do more than just fill those slots well.
Shooting the Rapids
The principle of fairness in employment, which has become the law of the land, does not
ignore the seemingly straightforward job interview. Not only must you be sure that your hiring practices
conform to legal specs but you must also take great care in your questions.
The dangerous questions arent those that reflect overt discrimination. In any case, the law
and its enforcers are more concerned with the effects of employers actions than with their intentions.
The dangerous questions are those meant to discover something interviewers think they need to
know, something it would be nice to know, or even something intended to put the applicant at ease,
like questions about family or nationality.
Executives ask irrelevant questions because they reason that the information may be useful
should the job seeker become an employee. Questions that can be asked after hire, concerning age
and marital status, for example, may be illegal during pre-employment interviews. (Technically, a
question by itself usually isnt illegal. Its when the answers are improperly used that the gendarmes
swarm in.)

Suppose an executive asks a female applicant this seemingly innocuous question: "What kind
of work does your husband do?" He wants to put her at ease and at the same time get an inkling
about how long the candidate might want to stay on the job. But the question is patently discriminatory
because it is seldom asked of males. Moreover, it is irrelevant to the job requirements or the persons
qualifications.
Our society seems intent on using the courts as the first resort, not the last, to redress
suffering. Corporations and executives are being dragged into court with dismaying frequency, and
juries are awarding enormous sumseven into the millionsagainst both "deep pockets" corporations
and individual executives.
The key to preventing discrimination claims lies in one simple policy. If a question is not
directly related to the hiring decision and relevant to the job, dont ask it.