Video: Always and Never
Interview questions and answers are critical to hiring success, and one thing we want to be careful of when we’re talking about interview questions and answers is not hiring people who say the words “always” and “never” a lot. Here's why.
Teaching attitude is something that a lot of leaders give up on before they even try. They say “Pat just is the way he is. He’s a little cranky, and he’s a little sarcastic, but I can’t do much about that.” But when you look at great leaders, they do teach attitude, and so can you.
Whenever we talk about Hiring for Attitude the discussion typically turns to what are the best and worst interview questions to ask. Now, there is always some group of people that will start asking pop-psychological kind of weird, goofball sort of questions.
No one likes getting tough feedback from the boss, but it’s often necessary to grow and develop on the job. Your company doesn’t want to hire folks who can’t constructively receive constructive criticism. You want people who can bounce back in a positive manner.
Teamwork. It means something different in every organization, which means you need an interview question that effectively assesses whether or not a candidate is a fit for your unique definition of team.
If the job candidate you’re interviewing says “always” and “never” a lot, it may be a signal that you’re talking to a low performer. How do we know this? My
We’ve all used behavioral interview questions—questions that ask job candidates to recount a past experience so we can assess their likely future performance. In theory, behavioral interview questions should work just fine (because past behavior is usually a decent predictor of future behavior).
It’s pretty hard to recruit a high performer if you don’t know what attitudes define being a high performer. And yet, that’s exactly what most companies are doing to their recruiters. At Leadership IQ, we recently surveyed 656 human resources executives and asked them to what extent their organization had clearly and scientifically defined the attitudes that distinguish the highest performers from everyone else.



