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Psychological Secrets of Selling to Executives

Posted on November 8, 2011 by in Past Events, Webinars

You simply cannot use the same selling techniques with senior executives that you use with everyone else. Because executives have radically different personalities than everyone else in the organization. (They are NOT like Middle Managers or Directors or purchasing, etc.) So you need to fundamentally change your sales strategy if you expect to close deals with the C-Level.

This webinar & teleconference reveals the psychological motivators, personalities and fears that drive executives, and specific techniques that allow you to break into the Executive Suite and get your proposals closed. Whether you’re in a true sales position, or selling proposals internally, this program gives you the deep psychological insight that makes executives hang on your every word.

This 60-minute teleconference and webinar called “Psychological Secrets of Selling to Executives” will show you how to:

  • 4 biggest personality types in the executive-suite and the psychological levers you should leverage for each personality
  • Specific words you should never use (and words to always use) for each executive personality
  • 3 fears that drive executives (including the “fear of being left behind”) and appropriate ways to leverage or eliminate those fears
  • Why you only have 47 seconds to grab the attention of senior executives in a sales call, and how to neurologically wake them up with stories and startling facts
  • 1 sentence to say when a senior executive has stopped paying attention to you (and why they’ll respect your more after you say it)
  • 2 things you must do at the beginning of your sales calls and presentations so senior executives see you as a trusted adviser, not a salesperson
  • 3-part Socratic Questioning script that moves you beyond superficial symptoms to uncover deeper pain
  • How the “Yes, And” technique helps you correct executives who are completely wrong (without making them embarrassed or defensive)
  • How to adapt your sales message to captivate executives motivated by Power, Adventure, Achievement and Security

DATE & TIME:
This 60-Minute LIVE Webinar & Teleconference is being held on Tuesday, November 15th, at 1:00 PM Eastern time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

LEADERSHIP IQ has been featured in:Steve Jobs Killer Presentation

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management & communication experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 4 bestselling books, including HARD Goals: The Science of Extraordinary Achievement, Hundred Percenters, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s”Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

Teaching Employees to Have a Great Attitude

Posted on November 1, 2011 by in Past Events, Webinars

It’s entirely possible to turn somebody’s attitude negative (you see it every day), so why can’t we turn their attitude positive? New research shows that even complex attitudes like gratitude, empathy and optimism can be learned. Great companies, like Caesars Palace, have discovered ways to teach employees exactly what a great attitude looks like–and that’s why they’re setting new records for customer satisfaction.

In this program, you’ll learn the Behavioral, Psychological, Cultural and Operational drivers of great attitudes, and how to put them into your organization.

This 60-minute teleconference and webinar called “Teaching Employees to Have a Great Attitude” will show you how to:

  • 4-Question Test to discover if your company is teaching employees good or bad attitudes
  • Use a revolutionary technique called “Word Pictures” to define exactly which behaviors create a great attitude (and which behaviors and attitudes should never be allowed)
  • Behavioral, Psychological, Cultural and Operational drivers of great attitudes and how to implement them in your culture
  • 3 techniques that teach “learned optimism” and “empathy” and other foundational attitudes
  • How to quickly eliminate blame and other negative attitudes that destroy positivity
  • Learn about a shocking study that found that 60% of managers disagree when asked to watch a video of an employee in action and rate whether the employee showed a great attitude or a terrible attitude
  • And then discover how to get all of your managers in total agreement about what does, and does not, constitute a great attitude
  • How a psychological technique called “positive labeling” can radically improve people’s behavior (and immediately elevate their mood)
  • 2 step script every manager can use at daily/weekly staff meetings to spark innovation and reignite employees’ passion
  • How to create heroes in your organization that re-energize employees and teach them how to have the right attitude
  • 2 questions that reveal emotional landmines that can make even people with great attitudes turn negative (and learn how to disarm those emotional landmines quickly)

DATE & TIME:
This 60-Minute LIVE Webinar & Teleconference is being held on Thursday, November 10th, at 1:00 PM Eastern time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

LEADERSHIP IQ has been featured in:Steve Jobs Killer Presentation

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management & communication experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 4 bestselling books, including HARD Goals: The Science of Extraordinary Achievement, Hundred Percenters, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

Companies Are Doing a Lousy Job of Attracting Great Talent

Posted on August 26, 2011 by in Articles

Collectively, we’re doing a lousy job of attracting great talent. That’s a tough thing to hear, especially since it happens to be true. But I didn’t say it first; you did — via the collective voice of your peers.

Over the past several months, Leadership IQ has been conducting one of the largest talent-management studies ever done. We’re looking at executives from more than 1,000 companies, folks strategically selected to represent every company size, every industry, and every major country. Our goal is to learn what’s working — and what’s not working — across the full talent management continuum (e.g. recruiting, hiring, developing, engaging, leading, retaining, etc.). It’s a massive undertaking that’s already presented us with tremendous amounts of information. And one thing that’s coming through loud and clear is that the current trends in recruiting definitely aren’t working.

One thing we asked the executives participating in the study to evaluate was their companies’ talent pipelines. And we asked them to consider in particular how successful they were in sourcing the following four categories of talent: executive, professional, technical and unskilled. The feedback we got, frankly, is not good at all, and here’s what I mean. For each of the four talent categories named above, fewer than 10% of the companies said they were doing an Excellent job at sourcing that talent. Uggh. And, at least 65% of the companies said they were Average or Below Average in sourcing talent in each of the four categories.

Now some people look at that 65% and say, “Huh, I could live with being average — it’s better than totally stinking.” And I guess to some extent that’s true; technically speaking, being average is better than totally stinking. But average isn’t good enough to get the talent you’re after. This is an issue I see so many organizations getting wrong that it’s worth taking a minute to really nail it down.

I don’t care if you’re hiring a housekeeper, an engineer, a nurse, or your next CEO; you want somebody in that role who “gets it” — who wants to be great at whatever they do. As a leader in your industry, it’s not your job to hire people that aren’t totally awful. It’s your job to hire high performers, the people who have the right skills and the right attitude to succeed at your organization. But the people you want to drive to your organization aren’t always going to come knocking on your door.

High performers aren’t looking for an average job opportunity, you know, a place to go five days a week just to kill some time and get a paycheck. They want more than that, they want ongoing success. They want a job where the culture fits their personality, and where there’s a clear path in front of them that always leads to being a high performer. But these great people aren’t just sitting around waiting for your call. Generally, they’re employed someplace else. Or even if they are in a career transition, you can bet they are going to carefully choose their next job, and not just jump at the first place that offers a steady paycheck.

Ok, you might get lucky and find that your next high performer is in a weakened negotiating position. Maybe he’s been out of work for a while or she’s just entering the workforce. Or maybe you found a true “diamond in the rough” that nobody else has discovered yet. But I wouldn’t make hope or luck the foundation of your talent strategy.

Thinking competitively is a pretty typical and, for the most part, accepted mindset in the sales world. You have competitors, and those competitors have customers that you most certainly will try to steal away. You’ll identify those customers, try to find where they’re hurting, figure out how to solve that pain, understand what drives their purchasing, hone your pitch, highlight your advantages and call, call, call. Welcome to Sales 101.

The thing is, we understand and even celebrate this need for competitive differentiation and pursuit in the world of sales. But when it comes to sourcing talent, we often operate as though there’s millions of high performers sitting around with nothing better to do than jump at our job ads. We act like all we have to do is describe our open positions and, voilá, the best of the best will be lined up outside our door.

It’s time to grasp the reality that unless you want to remain trapped forever in a world where fewer than 10% of leaders have “excellent” talent pipelines, you’re going to have to change the way you recruit for the talent you want.

The Worst Way to Start a Job Ad

Posted on August 17, 2011 by in Articles

Imagine you’re out on a date (it could be date night with your spouse, or a blind date with a total stranger, or whatever). Now, let’s say you really want to win that date over, become the only person in the room he or she can see or hear. We’re talking full-blown smitten here. How do you think you should start that date — by talking about yourself, or by talking about your date?

Now, almost everybody gets the right answer in the date scenario. Of course, you talk about your date. But here’s the shocker: In the world of recruiting, a place where you also want to quickly capture the positive attention of another person, almost everybody gets it wrong. And it’s destroying a lot of recruiting pitches.

Let me prove it to you. Over 90% of job ads begin with a paragraph like this:

ACME Corp. is a top-tier solutions firm that provides information technology, systems engineering and professional services to customers in the public and private sectors. With 30,000 professionals worldwide, the company has the customer knowledge, technical expertise and proven performance to manage large-scale, mission-critical IT programs. With fiscal year 2010 sales of $10 billion, ACME Corp. is the third-largest company in our industry. Our vision is to be our customers’ first choice in each and every market we serve. To earn our customers’ trust and meet their individual needs, we will provide valued solutions with the best prices, products and services that make our customers’ lives easier. But we’re not finished. We’re on our way to even bigger and better things. Providing superior customer service requires superior people.

Unless you’re attending a narcissist’s convention, this opening paragraph is terrible. You don’t even have to read every line to feel the automatic turn off. This ad is all about “you”: when you were founded, how many clients you have, how big you are, how many awards you’ve won, etc. In the blind-date equivalent of this ad, you’d be sitting alone at the bar before the first round of drinks arrived. It doesn’t matter if you are recruiting one person or a thousand; the only way to grab a high performer’s attention is to open your pitch by discussing the issues that matter to them, and whether or not you can meet their needs.

Neurologically speaking, the opening paragraph of your ad (the first few seconds you have someone’s attention) are the most important. It’s during these first precious moments that your audience forms their opinions about you, when their brains decide whether or not to allocate any more neurological energy to listening to what you have to say.

The lesson in all this is, whether you’re dating to find the perfect match or recruiting to find the perfect match, always start the interactions by talking about the other person and their interests. Let them know that you know what they want to hear about, that you are sensitive to what they want to gain from this interaction, and that you care about the same things that they care about. And if you don’t know what their interests are, do some research and figure it out.

This might sound like heresy, I know, but candidates really don’t care how long you’ve been in business or how many awards you’ve won — at least not right off the bat. Is somebody really NOT going to apply because you don’t have enough employees or awards? Are they really sitting there thinking, “Well, I would have applied, but they only have 30,000 employees and $10 billion in sales, and I have a strict rule that I will only work for companies with over 40,000 employees and over $15 billion in sales.”

People care about whatever they care about, so that’s what you need to give them in your job ad. Meet their needs, and you’ll attract them. Don’t and you won’t.

Past Webinar: How To Recruit High Performers (and Repel Low Performers)

Posted on August 9, 2011 by in Past Events, Webinars

This event is now past. To purchase a recording of this program, contact Nicole Jordan, VP of Business Development, via email at nicole@leadershipiq.com

Win The Best People: How To Recruit High Performers and Repel Low PerformersWith so many candidates, how can you possibly sort out the highest performers from everyone else? And how do you focus your time on only the people who can take your organization to the next level?

Leadership IQ studied more than 1,000 companies from the U.S., Europe and China to discover which recruitment methods attract the highest A++ performers (and which methods attract people just looking for a paycheck).

Right now, 65% of companies say they’re doing an “Average” or “Below Average” job attracting executive, professional and technical candidates, so there’s lots of room to improve and become the most attractive employer in your market.

The high performers you want, the people who can really exceed your goals and boost your brand, are NOT looking for average jobs. In fact, most of them are already employed and moderately content. The only way to attract the best people is to make sure your recruitment efforts 1) reach these people and 2) tell them the 3 things that high performers really want to hear.

In this live 60-minute webinar called “How To Recruit High Performers (and Repel Low Performers),” we’ll reveal those 3 things, and you’ll learn everything you need to know to recruit the right people for your organization.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

  • Discover the best recruitment channels for your industry, including job ads, social media, employee referrals, networking, internal recruiters, external recruiters and more. (We’ll show you data from our study of 1,000+ companies broken down into categories to reveal the best channels to recruit front-line employees and executives as well as the best channels for the top-tier financially successful companies.)
  • How to identify the core attitudes of your current high performers and use them to drive your recruitment efforts to attract not just the right candidates but the right candidates for your organization.
  • Why job ads that promise things like “work with dedicated, passionate coworkers” and “tremendous opportunities for professional growth” make your company sound generic and actually turn off the high performers you want to attract.
  • Why the first paragraph of most job ads chases away high performers who are currently employed elsewhere.
  • 4 critical turnoffs that top companies say make great candidates less likely to apply for jobs.
  • Secrets from the largest online employment websites like CareerBuilder.com about harnessing the power and reach of social media to attract the best people, even if they’re not currently looking.
  • 2 aspects of your company culture that you must share if you want to attract the best people for your unique organization.
  • The top 3 demotivators that send most high performers running away from your opportunity, and how to shape your recruitment efforts to say “we don’t do that here.”

DATE & TIME:
This 60-minute LIVE webinar is being held on Tuesday, Aug. 30, at 12:00 PM Eastern time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

LEADERSHIP IQ has been featured in:Leadership IQ Media Coverage

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management & communication experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 4 bestselling books, including HARD Goals: The Science of Extraordinary Achievement, Hundred Percenters, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

Interview Questions You Should Never Ask

Posted on April 11, 2011 by in Articles

There are two categories of interview questions that are basically useless.

These questions, while quite popular with many organizations, render little to no valuable information. Instead, they can actually create uncertainly and confusion and taint your candidate evaluations. Finally, they eat up time, something every hiring manager could use more of.

If you currently use any of these questions, or questions like them, eradicate them from your hiring process.

Easily Gamed Questions

There are three interview questions candidates rarely answer candidly:

  • Tell me about yourself.
  • What are your strengths?
  • What are your weaknesses?

It’s not that these are inherently bad questions, but the majority of interviewees are ready for them. They have a pre-planned and rehearsed answer for each. And if you do run into a candidate that stumbles over their response, or acts like you’ve just asked them to do long division in their head, well, they obviously aren’t the high performers you seek anyway.

You need to find out this information, but an interview is not a test of the candidate’s skill in reciting scripted answers; it’s to find out how they will perform when they’re working for you. To further prove this point, think about the answers you usually get when you ask, “What are your weaknesses?” Typically, you hear things like:

  • I work too hard.
  • People tell me I care too much.
  • I’m too much of a team player.
  • I can be a perfectionist.

If someone was actually to respond to this question with a reply such as, “I have a violent temper, and I stalked my last boss,” or, “I hate people, and I can’t stand taking orders,” then perhaps this line of questioning would have value. But how often does that happen?

When Leadership IQ discovered in a groundbreaking study that 46% of new hires fail within their first 18 months, we wanted to know why. As we dug deeper, it turns out that 89% of them failed for attitudinal reasons, not for the lack of skills. With skills already being one of the easiest things to test in the interview process, we developed a new resource to teach the concept of “Hiring For Attitude.” Follow this link to learn more about “Hiring for Attitude” and to download the FREE white paper now.

Hypothetical Questions

Questions that ask, “What would you do if,” invoke an answer that reflects an idealized version of who the person thinks they are. And despite what we might like to believe, there’s a huge gap between our hypothetical and real selves.

Most people will say that if they saw a complete stranger being assaulted in a public place, they’d either rush in to help or immediately call the police. But that’s only hypothetical. They might actually freeze with fear, or maybe, in an effort to protect their life, they’d run away from the scene of the crime and then call the police. You just never know until you’re actually in the moment.

There was a news story about a Kansas woman who was stabbed during the robbery of a convenience store. The entire incident was caught on the store’s surveillance cameras. The stabbing was brutal, but that’s not why the story made national headlines. Footage from the surveillance camera showed five patrons stepping over the woman’s prone and bleeding body to exit; not one of them stopped or did anything to help. Only after all the witnesses had left the store did anyone call the police. The woman later died at the hospital.

There were dozens of online comments following the article, many that included statements of public outrage. Things like, “I’d never have walked away.” And yet, all five people in that store that day showed no hesitation in stepping over a dying woman to exit a bad situation. Maybe if at least one of them had stayed behind to help or to call 911, I’d have more faith in hypothetical responses. But they didn’t.

So the next time you feel tempted to ask a job candidate, “What would you do if two angry customers demanded your attention at the same time?” save yourself the time and trouble. Because whatever answer they give you is highly unlikely to predict what they would do in real life.

When Leadership IQ discovered in a groundbreaking study that 46% of new hires fail within their first 18 months, we wanted to know why. As we dug deeper, it turns out that 89% of them failed for attitudinal reasons – not for the lack of skills. With skills already being one of the easiest things to test in the interview process, we developed a new resource to teach the concept of “Hiring For Attitude.” Follow this link to learn more about “Hiring for Attitude” and to download the FREE white paper now.

Past Event: Hiring for Attitude

Posted on April 10, 2011 by in Past Events, Webinars

Are you discovering candidates’ attitudes?

You’ve probably seen Leadership IQ’s famous study that found that 46% of all new hires will fail within the first 18 months (reported in Fortune, HR Executive, Industry Week, and more). But did you read our whole study? Did you see the part where we discovered that when new hires fail, 89% of the time they fail for Attitudinal reasons, not Skills?

You’ve undoubtedly experienced how tricky it is to hire for attitude. Have you ever hired someone who had great technical skills but couldn’t fit your culture? Or had the perfect resume but wasn’t coachable and couldn’t accept feedback?

Our research discovered that issues like Coachability, Emotional Intelligence and Temperament determined whether new hires would succeed or fail. And now, as the people who led this groundbreaking research, we’re now holding a special teleconference & webinar called “Hiring for Attitude.” We’ll teach you everything we discovered in our study and all the specific techniques you need to hire people with both great skills AND great attitudes.

In this teleconference & webinar called “Hiring for Attitude,” you’ll learn how to interview for”attitude” issues like coachability, temperament, motivation, and other high performer characteristics that often go undetected in interviews. We’ll help you define the attitudes you’re looking for and then develop “attitudinal” questions (and eliminate useless interview questions) so you can identify the high performers with the best attitudes. We’ll even give you some of the best attitudinal interview questions as a starter set.

This 60-minute teleconference and webinar called “Hiring for Attitude” will show you:

  • 2 quick tests to discover the attitudinal characteristics that your organization MUST include in interviews
  • Why you should never ask “tell me about yourself” or “what are your strengths/weaknesses”
  • 4-part interview question that gets people to reveal the TRUTH about what their last boss really thought about them
  • 6 words that most people add to the end of every behavioral interview question that just destroys its effectiveness
  • Learn why most hiring managers ask way too many questions, forcing candidates to give very fast & superficial answers (and learn how many questions you SHOULD ask)
  • 1 sentence to say when you think the candidate is lying to you
  • How to assess attitude when you’re conducting team interviews
  • Get a structured form for assessing and evaluating all of your candidates
  • 1 question that reveals if somebody has an “above and beyond” attitude

DATE & TIME:
This 60-Minute LIVE Webinar & Teleconference is being held on Friday, December 2nd, at 1:00 PM Eastern time. 24 hours before the event, you will receive an email with detailed instructions for calling in and downloading handouts.

PRICING:
This 60-minute interactive session is $249 $199 only for the first 100 registrants. You can invite as many colleagues as you’d like to listen in at one site or location, using a single phone line and one computer. You will also get slides to download before the session.

LEADERSHIP IQ has been featured in:Steve Jobs Killer Presentation

THE FACULTY:
Mark Murphy, Chairman & CEO of Leadership IQ
Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy is one of the country’s leading management & communication experts. Mark has lectured at Harvard Business School, Yale University, and more. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins, and hundreds more.

Mark leads one of the largest leadership studies ever, and his groundbreaking work has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Investor’s Business Daily, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many more. He has also appeared on ABC’s 20/20, CBS News, Fox Business News and NPR.

Mark has authored 4 bestselling books, including HARD Goals: The Science of Extraordinary Achievement, Hundred Percenters, Generation Y and the New Rules of Management, and The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention.

Mark Murphy is a 3-time nominee for Modern Healthcare’s “Most Powerful People in Healthcare” Award. And Mark won the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Helen Yerger Award for Best Research.

The Biggest Mistake With Behavioral Interview Questions

Posted on February 1, 2011 by in Articles

The following are some standard behavioral interview questions commonly asked by managers around the globe, and every one of them is seriously flawed. See if you can identify the problem:

  • Tell me about a time when you had to adapt to a difficult situation. What did you do?
  • Tell me about a time when you had to balance competing priorities and did so successfully.
  • Tell me about a conflict with a co-worker and how you resolved it.

First, there’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring questions that target previous behaviors. Past behavior is a great predictor of future behavior. But there’s a caveat: Behavioral questions are only effective when they prompt a response that reveals the truth about both weaknesses and strengths. And that’s where the questions above go horribly wrong. Every one of those questions contains an obvious “tip off” on how to game a response that showcases the good and hides the bad. They are all leading questions.

Imagine you asked a candidate the following question: “We have a very team-based culture here, so you’ve got good teamwork and collaboration skills, right?” The candidate would have to be completely clueless not to get the correct answer to this question; of course they’ll say they have great teamwork skills. And while we can all laugh at how overtly that teamwork question was “leading” the candidate and tipping-off the correct answer, the questions that started the article are more subtle, but just as problematic.

In one of our most famous studies (reported in Fortune, HR Executive and Industry Week), we found that a whopping 46% of all new hires fail within their first 18 months. But here’s the kicker: 89% of them fail for bad attitudes, not skills! Imagine all the time, money and frustration you could save, not to mention everything you could gain, by following a few simple yet powerful techniques to improve your interview process. In our upcoming webinar, Hiring for Attitude, we’ll reveal everything you need to know. The first 100 attendees save $50, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

In this world, there are problem bringers and there are problem solvers. When you ask a problem bringer about a problem, they will tell you about the problem and nothing more. When you ask a problem solver about a problem, they will tell you about both the problem and the solution.

Now, the problem with leading questions is that they steal your chance to find out if someone is a problem bringer or a problem solver. Let’s say you ask a candidate about “a time when you had to adapt to a difficult situation.” The leading word here is “adapt.” It signals to the candidate that you only want to hear the one good example of the time they “adapted.” But what if you had left that question more open-ended? What if you had asked them about “a time when you faced a difficult situation.” In this case, a problem solver would still naturally tell you about the time they “adapted” or “solved” the situation. But all those problem bringer personalities out there would tell you about a time they “faced” a difficult situation. They wouldn’t tell you how they solved it, because that’s not what you asked. You asked about a problem, and that’s what you’ll get (and just think how much fun that personality type would be to work with).

Let’s take the question: “Tell me about a conflict with a co-worker and how you resolved it.” This question goes wrong with the phrase “how you resolved it.” With this question, we’ve just signaled that we don’t want to hear about any times that they did NOT resolve the conflict with a coworker. But from a hiring perspective, that’s the really important information. What if they resolved a conflict one time, and failed to resolve the conflict 500 times? By making this a leading question, you’ve lost all the data on the 500 episodes where they couldn’t resolve a conflict.

And how about: “Tell me about a time when you had to balance competing priorities and did so successfully.” “Balance competing priorities” tells the candidate NOT to tell you about all the times they struggled or failed to balance competing priorities (which would be good to know), but instead to find the one time they were able to balance priorities successfully and relay that example.

Now, will people be honest when you strip out the leading parts of the questions? Will they honestly tell you the bad examples? In a word, YES. In a recent project where we redesigned interview questions, our client started asking candidates: “tell me about a time you lacked the skills or knowledge to complete an assignment.” Here are snippets of some actual answers:

  • “Happened all the time; that’s why I’m interviewing with you guys.”
  • “I told them to find somebody else.”
  • “That’s why we have customer service; let them figure it out.”
  • “When I didn’t know what to do, I’d rather do nothing at all.”
  • “I just ignored their request.”

Those are really honest answers. They’re terrible, of course, but honest. And any hiring manager who hears those answers knows instantly that this person does NOT have a great attitude and is NOT a fit for their culture. And that’s the point of an interview question; to reveal the candidate’s true attitude, not their canned, rehearsed interview personality.

It should now be clear that leading questions only result in false or skewed answers that in no way stimulate the truth or reveal a person’s true attitude. Which leads to the obvious question: What should you be asking your candidates?

In our upcoming webinar & teleconference called Hiring for Attitude, we’ll reveal the tricks and scripts to ensure that you’re hiring for attitude.

In one of our most famous studies (reported in Fortune, HR Executive and Industry Week), we found that a whopping 46% of all new hires fail within their first 18 months. But here’s the kicker: 89% of them fail for bad attitudes, not skills! Imagine all the time, money and frustration you could save, not to mention everything you could gain, by following a few simple yet powerful techniques to improve your interview process. In our upcoming webinar, Hiring for Attitude, we’ll reveal everything you need to know. The first 100 attendees save $50, so hurry to reserve your seat now.