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162 How to Hire A-Players
‘‘Why did you choose that strategy?’’
‘‘What made you believe that layoffs were the right answer?’’
‘‘What steps did you take to make purchasing more efficient?’’
‘‘What specific things did you do to reduce the time to close the
books from 30 days to 7 days?’’
This tactic puts less pressure on you to come up with a lot of
‘‘creative’’ interview questions. Instead, you spend your time listening.
If you follow this simple approach, you will conduct a strong
interview every time.
A-Player Principle: The most important question to ask in
an interview is the follow-up question. Don’t let candidates
get away with just providing their rehearsed answers to your
inquiries about their past accomplishments.
Case Study: Follow-Up Questions Work
While helping a client interview for a director of branch operations
position, I saw a perfect example of why follow-up questions
are so important. There were three candidates in the final
interview process. We asked them to describe how they had
taken underperforming branches and made them profitable.
Then we dug into their initial answers with follow-up questions.
The first two candidates provided fine answers to our questions
by giving specific examples of times when they replaced
managers or rolled up their own sleeves to improve how these
business units were run. The third candidate provided answers
that were dramatically more systematic and detailed than the
other two. He described, step by step, the processes that he
taught his managers to follow in order to hit their financial
goals. He also had multiple, specific examples of strategies he
used to improve all aspects of branch operations.