4.4 Hiring for relationship
Have you ever noticed…
How polite hiring is like polite dating?
What do I mean by polite dating?
The two of you get together for dinners and movies. You’re both on your best behavior. You focus on having a good time together. You each entertain fantasies of happily ever after. You start thinking things like, “He completes me,” or, “She’s my dream come true.”
Meanwhile…
You learn nothing about how you’ll do in a real relationship.
So when you move in together, and the honeymoon energy fades, suddenly you’re face to face with the ordinary everyday version of your partner, parked on the couch, killing time, no longer hustling to win you over.
And maybe childhood issues erupt and cause trouble.
Or maybe you have a baby and now you’re under more stress that you ever imagined. You’re up in the middle of the night, you’re exhausted, you’ve got short fuses, and the financial demands are running ahead of your income.
This is not what you expected, not in your happy fantasies. It was all supposed to work out on its own. He was supposed to be Mr. Right and she was supposed to be Ms. Right, but it turns out both of you are very, very human.
What’s the cure for polite dating?
Get real with each other.
As soon as you know you really like each other and can have fun together, start bringing your whole self to the relationship. Save your Sunday best for special occasions.
Or…
Maybe you want to just be real from the very beginning.
And what about trouble? How will the two of you handle that? This is a question worth working on because at least 99% of couples will find themselves in conflict sometimes, or having to deal with crises.
You know how pilots get extensive safety training and have to practice over and over what to do in an emergency when something goes wrong? You can do the same thing with a relationship. You can prepare. You can do dress rehearsals. If we have this problem, here’s how we will handle it.
And as you do your rehearsals, you’re actually doing the real work of relationship. You’re learning if you can negotiate with each other effectively, and in the spirit of mutual support.
And this matters because if you decide to make a life together, you’re going to have to do a whole lot of negotiating with each other.
But…
How does this relate to hiring?
Polite interviewing
In world of activism…
The most important work we do is to get the right people on our team.
Nothing makes a bigger difference than this.
So how can you give yourself the best chance at getting the people you need? Hiring is a tricky business. It’s so easy for it to go wrong. Especially if the candidate is determined to show you only his best side.
Post-hope activism is so challenging that we need to know that every person we hire has got the moxie and the motivation to help get us through the tough times, all of us together.
But what’s the most common kind of interview people do in the nonprofit sector? I’ll bet it’s the polite interview.
This is certainly the easiest strategy. It’s an hour of cordial conversation with soft-ball questions. It sounds like this…
Are you a team player?
Oh, yes, I am. I’m a very good team player.
Do you take initiative?
Oh, yes, I’m very good at taking initiative. I do that all the time.
Are you able to do this job?
Oh, yes, I can do it. I’ll be very good at it.
This interview is like ships passing in the night. You don’t learn what you need to learn.
You’re not pushing on the candidate, you’re not seeing what he’s made of. And because the conversation is going so smoothly—no bumps, no friction, pure accommodation—you might start fantasizing about how the two of you are going to be working together happily for years to come.
But you haven’t tested him, so you’re just rolling the dice.
Now, why might an ED or program director default to this approach?
Maybe she feels it’s not okay to be pushy with a stranger.
Maybe she takes pity on this candidate knowing how stressful a job interview is for most people.
Maybe she’s under the influence of the nonprofit culture which is swampy with co-dependency, so she decides to care-take him through the interview.
Maybe she has a thing about wanting people to like her, so the interview becomes about keeping the candidate happy.
Or…
Maybe she’s super stressed and jammed for time and just can’t find the bandwidth to do something better.
All these motivations are completely understandable, though misguided. But luckily there’s something significantly more effective that’s not all that hard to do.
Behavioral interviewing
What you do is…
Ask direct questions about behavior.
Ask for stories and examples. Ask for in-depth answers. And there are two main reasons for this.
First, if you ask the applicant to tell the whole story with key details, you may discover that the story doesn’t measure up to the headline.
Say the candidate assures you he’s very good with handling conflict. But as he tells his story, you find out the situation he’s bragging about was a minor disagreement rather than a significant conflict.
The job-search consultants tell job-seekers to rehearse answers to commonly asked questions. But in the course of telling a whole story, as opposed to repeating a few pat lines, a candidate might stumble into revealing something about themselves that they would otherwise be able to keep hidden.
Second, and at least as important, I have found that many people who are super effective are also surprisingly modest, and when I get them telling stories, I hear things they did not mention in their initial answer to my question.
If you get actual stories of actual behavior you might see talents and strengths that are exactly what you want and that you might otherwise have missed.
In an interview I want to do everything I can to call forth the talents and strengths of the candidate. I want him to tell the truth about himself, but I also want to put him at his ease because I want to see him at his best, too.
What does a behavioral interview sound like? Say you want to ask about teamwork. The polite and easy question would be, “Are you good at teamwork?” Instead, you could ask…
“Tell us about three times when a team was struggling with a challenge or was falling apart and you intervened and got them working together again? What was it that you did? What was your strategy? What was the result?”
“Tell us about your proactive strategies for keeping your team working at its best, instead of waiting for trouble before you intervene.”
If you want to ask about conflict, the polite question would be, “Are you good at handling conflict?” Which is a close-ended question. It can be answered with a yes or no. Instead you could make it open-ended, and the candidate will have to dig deeper and reveal more to answer it…
“Tell us three times when you handled a conflict in your organization. What was the conflict? How did you help people deal with it? What was the result?”
“Tell us three times when your organization had a conflict with another organization or the community you work in or a politician or a funder. How did you intervene? What result did you get?”
If you want help developing behavioral questions, there’s a book I recommend called, How to Choose the Right Person for the Right Job Every Time. Ignore that overblown self-help title. The book itself is solid and substantial.
It’s a favorite of mine because in Chapter 4, the authors, Lori Davila and Louise Kursmark, list 401 behavioral questions in 50 different categories.
Reading through that list is a great way to get a feel for the practice of behavioral interviewing, and you might find that you’ll use many of those questions in your interviews.
If you’re doing hiring, behavioral interviewing is always a good thing to have in your toolkit. But please don’t limit yourself to that. Because a fast talker can still manage to slick his way through.
What’s up next is a system that’s more challenging by far, but far more effective.
Real-work interviewing
The idea here is that…
You do real work together.
So you can find out…
If you’re a genuine match for each other or not.
If a candidate is determined to show you only his best side, and is hiding his limitations, you might get to feeling that you are adversaries. Like he’s trying to finesse you into hiring him.
But…
You need to get real with each other.
It’s obvious why this is good for the interviewer. You need to see who this person really is in order to make your decision.
But this is also good for the candidate. Because if you win a job under false pretenses, there’s going to be fallout. Maybe your boss resents you for fooling her. Maybe you’re in over your head with this job and you’re going to get fired, and you’ll be back out on the street searching for a job again in just a month or two.
It’s just a fact that…
Creating a great working relationship takes real relationship work.
And you might as well start that right there in the first interview.
What this means is that real-work interviewing is intense. It takes serious time.
It asks a lot of the interviewer, and even more of the candidate.
And because real-work interviewing is not the conventional way of doing interviewing, you might want to introduce it to the candidate, to show him the why that’s behind it. To enroll him in it. So maybe he can see that this is actually a good thing for him, as well as for you and your organization
Here’s one example of how you might introduce a candidate to a real-work process…
At this organization, when we do hiring, we’re very serious about finding the right person for our team. We’re looking for someone who can do the specific job, but also someone who is a good fit for our team culture.
We’re really happy to be able to tell you that in our organization we’re the wind under each other’s wings. We don’t have any serious acting out going on. No personality battles. No gossiping or snipping. None of that kind of stuff.
To achieve this means that our interview process is intense.
We don’t want to make the wrong choice. Not only for our sake but for the sake of the new hire. Because we don’t keep people who are not the right fit. If it’s clear to us that someone is not working out, we let them go. We don’t take months and months to do that. We don’t waste a lot of time or mess around.
Again, this is because we care so much about having a culture where everyone can be happy together and perform at their best.
So we will do our best to be real with you. We want you to know exactly what you’re getting into if you join our team. We don’t want to screw up a hire, and then that person is gone in three months and has to start their job search all over again.
This is a happy place to work. And we love that we can promise that to new hires. And so we’re intense about making sure that not only is a candidate right for us, but that we are right for that candidate.
This means you get to ask all your questions. You don’t have to be polite. You can be forthright with us since we are being forthright with you. This interview process is not just a one-way street. You get to push on us and see what we’re made of. We welcome that.
Now, having said all that, we understand that any job interview is stressful, and our process is way more intense than most. So we’re not looking for you to have perfect answers for every question.
Really and truly, our process is designed for us to get to know you, and for you to get to know us.
And it’s fine with us if you’re a bit nervous or stressed. There might be times when you see us being a bit nervous or stressed, because hiring is a big deal for us. The biggest. We consider that getting the right people on our team is the most important work we do.
Please know that we’re not saying these things to scare you, but to show you something important about who we are.
Now, take a breath if you want, and do you have any questions for us, about this process, or about anything?
Of course, there are many other ways to present the real-work interview to a candidate. And you’ll want to do it in a way that is a match for you. You get to use your own personality and your own style and voice to say what you need to say to explain the process.
What kind of reactions might you get?
Jennifer: “No questions, just a comment. I like what you’re saying very much. To be honest, one of the reasons I want to leave where I’ve been working is that there’s a lot of gossiping and acting out going on and I hate that stuff. I’m someone who is intense about whatever mission I take on. I get my pleasure from the work and from working with people who are as dedicated as I am.
“I’ve heard good things already about this place, but hearing what you’ve just said makes me even more eager for this interview.”
She gets it.
Or…
Tom: “Oh, sure that’s fine. No problem. Go ahead with your questions for me.”
What does that mean? Is he really fine and ready to go with the interview? Is he just being agreeable because he thinks that’s the best strategy to get the job? Does he just not get what it means to make an agreement about how you’re going to have a conversation?
Is he coming from a job where he’s been beaten down and his self-esteem is suffering, but he’s a dedicated worker, and you’ll be able to call that forth during the interview?
This response leaves us with more questions than answers.
But we don’t want to jump to conclusions. An interview, or an interview process, is a complex situation.
And it is somewhat unusual to make an upfront contract for a conversation. Lots of people haven’t had experience with it and don’t know the difference it can make.
As you see someone open up, you can circle back to the contract again if you like. There’s nothing that says you can’t make an upfront contract in the middle of a conversation if that’s what works.
Or…
Phillip: “No problem.”
But you notice his body language is telling you something. He’s pulling back. His facial muscles tighten. The tone of his voice is flat. Your intuition is telling you, it’s actually not so fine. So maybe you ask some questions right then about the upfront contract you’re offering. Or maybe you circle back later in the interview. Or maybe you add in some extra questions about staff culture to try to draw him out.
Or what if you heard this…
Bill: “The law says if you just carry out the job objectives and that’s all you have to do. And I can do this job. You’ve got a lot of nerve asking for more than that. What is all this wind and wings stuff? What are you, a cult?!”
Congratulations! You’re done with the interview, it’s over, and you’ve suddenly got some extra time on your hands, so maybe you and your team go out for a long lunch.
Now what exactly is a real-work interview? There are a lot of variations.
Here’s an example…
Last year, you finally had enough funding to hire a development director for the first time in the history of your organization. But you’ve been burned twice. The first person you hired was impossible to work with. The other one choked when it came time to go out and ask for money.
So you’ve lost precious time. Now you’ve got a candidate you’re really interested in, but how can you be sure he’s right?
Here’s a radical idea. Hire him on a consulting basis to come in and work with you for two days.
And during this time, do real work together.
Ask him to help you design the work plan for the first year for the DD position. You’ll get to find out…
Does he listen?
Does he ask questions?
Does he plow ahead on his own, telling you what you should do?
Does he ask too many questions because he has nothing to say for himself?
Does he have ideas and strategies of his own to suggest?
Do you like working with him?
Does he show you the kind of thinking you’re looking for?
Take him out to do a couple asks with you. Let him lead. You can be the backup person when there are specific questions about the work you do, but see how this candidate handles himself with donors. Will he actually ask for money? How comfortable is he with this? What’s his style?
When I propose something like this, I sometimes hear objections, like: Why should I pay someone I’m interviewing when I haven’t even hired them yet?
Good question, and of course, you don’t have to. But if you’re going to ask so much time of a professional, it seems fair and considerate to pay for their expertise.
And given how important a development director might be to the future of your organization, some hundreds of dollars to check out a promising candidate in depth, might well be worth it.
Especially when you think of the cost of getting the wrong person, not only what you’re going to pay them while they’re working for you, but even more the cost of the lost opportunity.
And yes, it’s a big investment of your time if you’re a super busy ED, but how much does it matter to you to get the right person?
This real-work strategy can work the other way around as well…
A former client, Howie, called and said he had been offered a DD job, but he had doubts, and he couldn’t figure out why.
I recommended he call the ED and say, “How about if I come in Monday morning for three hours and we put together the work plan for the DD for the first year? That way we’ll get to see how we do when we’re doing real work together. We’ll get to see if this is really a match or not. And at the very least you’ll have a professional development plan for the first time ever.”
The ED was thrilled. Howie went in on Monday morning. That afternoon he called me and said, “After our work session, I admire this ED more than ever, and there’s no way I could work with her. Our personalities are so different. We’d drive each other crazy. I’m so glad I didn’t commit two years of my life based on a short, polite job interview.”
Here are some other simpler ideas that can give you a feel for doing real work with someone.
Ask the candidate to do brainstorming with you, for real, about actual challenges that your organization is dealing with.
Or do role-playing. Present the candidate with a challenging situation that you’re really dealing with and ask him to play it out with you.
You might play a difficult Board member, or a waffling funder, or the hostile ED of a competing organization, or a politician you need to win over for a vote at the City Council.
Of course, this is not easy for the candidate. But if you assure him that you’re not looking for a perfect answer, not at all. You just want to get a beginning idea of how he would handle real situations that you’re dealing with.
Right now I’m remembering an interview from years ago. My ED, Kate, and I were interviewing a woman for a position as our program director. In the first part of the interview, she wowed us. She was articulate and shared our philosophy about activism and community organizing.
Kate and I gave each other a surreptitious nod, to indicate, this is the woman we’re going to hire. Then with big smiles on our faces we asked her to play out five different situations with us. On each one she drew a blank. A total blank. We were crestfallen, this lovely person with such a good heart choked when it came to taking action.
But think if we had hired her just because we enjoyed talking with her. Such a good, good person would have been so hard to fire.
Here are a few more examples:
Say you’re hiring a program director. Ask them to come see the program in action, then have them do a strategy session with you, evaluating what they’ve seen, and what improvements they could see making. This would not be a theoretical discussion, because they’ve now actually witnessed your work.
Or…
Ask the candidate to come in and do an inservice for the staff or to lead a staff meeting so you can see them in action.
Again, you make it very clear to the candidate that you understand it’s stressful to jump in with a new group of people and teach them or lead them. Yet, aren’t there lots of times when leaders have to jump into new situations with new people. So this is not an unreasonable request.
It’s not always easy to come up with ways to do real work together, but I’m surprised when my clients and I brainstorm possibilities, how often we come up with something good.
Finally, a crucial piece of real-work is the real work of negotiating a working relationship. This would mean addressing issues such as the following…
If you and I were to disagree about something, something significant, how would you want us to handle it? Tell me in detail.
How do you like to be supervised? Do you like regular feedback? Do you like to work on your own and come to your supervisor only when you have questions or problems?
What brings out the best in you?
What questions do you have about what I’m like to work with?
