Ask the right questions
Once you know what you need to have to be successful, then you need to ask the right kinds of questions in the interview process to identify if the candidate in front of you will embody those traits. This can be a tough process, but Dukker says to start with trying to figure out what makes the candidate tick.
“I actually try to find what gets them passionate, what gets them irritated, what makes them happy, so I’ll ask them about things that they felt were particularly successful in their careers and how their people react to them,” he says.
He says the key is to ask questions beyond your typical interview questions that just get at technical capability.
“I like to ask questions that will kind of put the candidate off-balance a little bit,” he says. “I don’t mean being provocative or off-color, things like that, but rather ask questions that are unexpected because generally, off-the-cuff answers give you the clearest indication of how a person thinks.”
He also tries to look for experiences in his own career that may elicit responses from them, such as making a comment about how difficult it is to work with PR people and seeing if they agree and if they run with it.
“Then listen very carefully about how they personalize an experience that I might describe, which attempts to frame the particular issue that I’m looking to clarify, …” Dukker says. “They run for a while, and you get a really good indication for the person beneath the veneer.”
Getting beyond the veneer is critical to getting a successful team member for your organization.
“The person you’re interviewing is not necessarily the person you’re hiring, so to speak,” he says. “When we go out and meet new people, particularly in the context of looking for a job, we’re putting on the best face — the face that we think will be most successful in terms of landing the job. It’s the job of the interviewer to kind of piece through that and get to the person underneath and sort out if that will work.”
He says that 75 percent of failures in hiring at the senior-executive level revolve around personality issues as opposed to technical or job competency issues, so that’s why it’s so important to take time drilling into a person’s personality.
“There are people who, when faced with pressure or adversity, get angry with their colleagues and become screamers,” Dukker says. “There are people
in adversity who become highly supportive. You have to find a way to tap into it, and it’s usually through storytelling — ‘I remember when I did this; how about in your career?’”
This technique is very effective because it’s more real than, say, hypothetical situation questions.
“As the person who’s interviewing, when the interviewer asks you for episodes in your life that are relevant or something, you start telling a story that’s genuine, and it comes from inside, and I watch very carefully as people talk about these different things for where I see inconsistencies between what I’ll call the canned presentation of who they are and what motivates them in business versus what I see on a more extemporaneous side,” he says.
