In- Person Interview Questions

I walked into an ice cream shoppe in Cincinnati to enjoy two scoops of Cotton Candy ice cream in a waffle cone with sprinkles on top.  Yes, I am a grown man, and yes cotton candy with sprinkles is my preference.

Waiting in line I noticed the manager of the shop come around from behind the counter and sit with a lady who had just walked in wearing workout gear.  My first assumption is that it was a friend or family member coming into say hello.  As the two sat down the manager pulled out a piece of paper and began awkwardly asking questions…

“What experience do you have working with customers?”

“What jobs have you had before?”

“What do you think you would like about working here?”

I did not time their conversation, however, there is no way it lasted longer than 2 minutes.  It was noticeably brief and the conversation was vanilla (sorry, the dad joke just came out!).

The interaction will be remembered as a waste of time for all involved.

In-person interviews tend to either be too robotic and templated, or too meandering and wasteful.

There is a better way.  

The business owners that tend to experience less chaos are the owners who have a mapped out, purposeful, sustained hiring process that walks potential candidates through the various attributes of the business.

The exposure creates either desire or lack of desire.  Imagine being guided personally throughout the various worlds of the Magic Kingdom at Disney.  You don’t ride the rides, but you take in the sights and the movement.  

At the end of your tour, you either love Disney... or not.

Most in-person interviews are akin to showing someone a billboard about Disney and then asking them if they are ready to commit their lives to the cause based on a crafted, pass-by advertisement.

In order to earn the right to have a great live, in-person interview, you must first have gone through the hard work of the first sections of your hiring process:

• Understanding the gap in your business and writing a role to fill that gap
• Budgeting for a new role
• Writing out your vision, mission, and values
• Drafting your organizational layout or chart
• Initiating a phone call with the candidate before bringing them in

If you skip those steps, you are setting yourself, and your candidate up for a billboard-style job interview.

Once it is time to bring the person in face to face (or via video conference if remote), you will resist the urge to talk about the actual job role.

YES!  You will resist discussing the job role.

Instead, you will focus on sharing the things that matter most: a) where you are headed as a business (your vision), b) WHY you do what you do (your mission), and c) how your business makes decisions every day (your unique core values).

You sit down with your candidate and hand them a written copy of your vision, mission, and values, and you will start to walk through each one pausing periodically to see what questions or thoughts they may have.

In the first in-person interview you will discuss ONLY the culture of your business.

Why?

It is of no value to discuss the role or compensation if you come to find out that this candidate has no desire to head in the direction that you are going.

Why would we share the details of their involvement in our trip to Kogi State, Nigeria, if we come to determine that our candidate would actually prefer to travel to Sarasota, Florida?

At Business On Purpose we do things a certain way with certain elements and it can feel invasive even though our entire team is remote.  We are in each other's business and are obsessed with predictability and consistency through the tools we have built and expect each other to use.

Many businesses have the mindset of “get the work done however you get it done.”  We do not.  For some that does not sit well... For others, they thrive with it.  

A client of ours, a mid-level Architecture firm in the Southern United States came with this idea of only discussing culture in the first sit-down interview.  Once complete, the candidate looked across the table shocked, and simply said, “wow, that helps so much”.

As the employer, YOU lead the way.  YOU set the tone.  This is the culture that YOU and your team are building and it must be both protected and shared with thoughtfulness and preparation.

During the phone conversation, it will be best to let the candidate know the entire flow of your hiring process by simply saying, 

“This is a six-step (or whatever) hiring process that will likely take 3 to 6 weeks (name your duration) to complete.  After a casual phone interview where we start to learn your background, we will then invite you to an in-person live interview where we will focus our time on the vision, mission, values, and culture of our business.  To be clear, we will not be discussing the specific job role or compensation details until the 2nd in-person interview (or whatever step that is for you)...”

The more structured you are in the hiring process the more confidence you will breed into your candidate as to what they are signing up for (or not).  

You will constantly fight the urge to want to “move fast” to hire someone because you need their help.  

Relationships rarely benefit from HASTY starts.

Your first in-person interview is about sharing culture, and then evaluating if that person matches the right ingredient profile of the culture you are growing.