The way we interview candidates is broken.
Most organizations currently interview candidates solely based on skills, which limits our ability to recruit top talent.
It's a far cry from how some ultra-successful business executives recruit their team members. John Sculley, former President of Pepsi and CEO of Apple, called Steve Jobs the best recruiter he had ever met with. Jobs closed the deal on Sculley's leap from Pepsi to Apple with one powerful question: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
Think about that question. Jobs played the legacy card to close Sculley. Now think about how the roles you're recruiting for right now could also help your top candidates leave behind powerful legacies of their own.
What's also more important than skills when you're interviewing candidates is mindset. The skills one needs to perform his/her job successfully will evolve all the time. So if you solely assess skill sets without assessing whether or not your candidates have the mindset of learning, you may hire folks who refuse to learn the new skills required to advance your business. And that will surely feed into the engagement problem you may be facing right now at your organization. On the other hand, when you assess whether your candidates have the mindset of learning, you may very well end up hiring someone who will always pick up new skills required to help you achieve your business goals because the person has that mindset of learning.
Think of this interviewing concept that evaluates skills, mindset and legacy like an iceberg.
The Iceberg Model
When you look at an iceberg, what you see above water is only 20% of the iceberg — its other 80% is below water. That 20% above water represents skills. The other 80% below water consists of mindset (40%) and legacy (40%).
To implement the iceberg interviewing model, try this during your next interview.
Spend 20% of the time assessing skill set: Either through different interviewing techniques/questions or test projects, figure out whether or not the candidate has the basic skills to do the job you're recruiting for.
Spend 40% of the time assessing mindset: If the role requires the person to create new products or services, then you may want to assess whether or not your candidates have the mindset of risk-taking by asking them to tell you a career story where they had to take a risk to create something new. They may have all the skills needed to create new products, but not the mindset of risk-taking when it comes to creating new products. And that may stifle your business growth. So think about the mindset(s) required to succeed in that role, and then take the time to assess all those within each candidate so that you don't end up hiring a "false positive."
Spend the last 40% of the time assessing legacy: This is that part of the interview where you want to assess whether your candidates want your job just for the paycheck so they can pay their bills, or if they really see their job as their craft. Organizations and employees succeed when they both want to leave a legacy behind with their remarkable work.
The iceberg model for interviewing candidates can help you hire top talent every single time — talent who will take your organization to the next level. The question is, do you want to throw away the "old" interviewing template and try something new?
