Motivation-based Interviewing: A Revolutionary Approach to Hiring the Best

Magic.

Introduction

For most people in the corporate world, hiring is just one responsibility of many. For me, it’s different. Hiring is my passion, without a doubt. I knew it in college when I had that monotone professor for Personnel Management 101. You know the type; all we saw was the back of his head because the entire class time consisted of him writing on the whiteboard. To make matters worse, the textbook was dry and it had no pictures. All the students complained to each other that this class was a snoozefest. But yours truly aced that class. I found the material absolutely fascinating.

From there I went to work for an employment agency. A year later, I opened my own agency. Over the years, I attended every workshop and seminar I could to learn more about hiring. I became familiar with behavior-based interviewing, competency-based selection, targeted selection, and other techniques. The workshops and seminars all promised that if I followed the prescribed process, I would hire great employees. But you know what? Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. Those bad hires still seemed to slip through—too much for my liking. Something was still lacking in the process. After all, if you could hire someone great one time, why couldn’t you repeat this result more often?

After spending many years in Corporate America in the hiring arena, a nationwide retail organization employed me to revamp their management selection process. In their early years, a secretary was promoted to become their first recruiter. She developed the process that was in place when I arrived. Facing a double-digit growth phase, the organization recognized the need to improve both how they hired and whom they hired. For a period of three months, while their old process was being dismantled and replaced with a new process I created, I handled the entire interview process myself; I was the only interviewer and the sole decision-maker of which management candidate got hired and which didn’t.

This had the potential to turn out very good for me, or very bad. Think about it—it would be one thing if these candidates were being hired to work for me, but I was the gateway for everyone’s future employees. The first time their bosses would meet them was when they showed up for work. If my hires were better than before, there would be a lot of praise to reap. On the other hand, if the supervisors were not satisfied with their new hires’ performance, I (justifiably) would receive the blame.

You can tell by the fact that I am writing this book that it turned out for the better—the hires were better, turnover dropped, and the cost-per-hire decreased. One of the best benefits for me personally was the important learning opportunity of tracking these hires’ ongoing performance: I could compare a candidate’s pre-hire interview with their post-hire performance for a year or longer. I could also compare their job performance to those hired before I came onboard.

Guess what? Those who interviewed the best and even those who had the most skills and work experience were not always the ones who performed in the top 20 percent. And within the group of top performers, there were those who were not the most skilled or the most experienced at the time of their hire. Some of the better job performers hadn’t even interviewed well but were hired anyway. What exactly was it that the high achievers had in common that was missing in others, even in those possessing great skills, and—most importantly—how could it be distinguished during the interviewing process?

The pursuit of this missing piece or pieces taunted me for quite a while. I couldn’t settle for hit-and-miss hiring results. I wanted to know how to hire well and how to do it consistently. I kept these questions in the back of my mind as I conducted hundreds of interviews, day in and day out. Gradually the answers started to reveal themselves. Long story short, I came to realize that how interviewers had been going about assessing a candidate’s motivation was all wrong! As it turns out, candidates who possess the best skills to do the job may or may not be the best people to hire. To hire well, interviewers must have a greater understanding of motivation to be able to correctly distinguish those who are genuinely self-motivated from those who will need to be motivated to do their job. Some skilled candidates lack the right kind of attitude, while others are missing the passion for doing the work—two key components that fuels the high achiever’s self-motivation. Knowing what I know today, I’d put my money on the candidate with the most self-motivation to do the job, hands down! Motivation-based interviewing fills in the missing pieces when it comes to hiring, and it’s already revolutionizing how we hire. This second-edition MBI book (formerly titled Don’t Hire Anyone Without Me!) will change how we hire forever.

Chapter 1

The State of Hiring

In the past, I’ve had my share of hiring success stories, just like most interviewers have. I’ve also hired plenty of people who fell into that average-performer category. But oh, the pain of a bad hire! I don’t know which I focused on more—hiring high performers or simply avoiding bad hires. Clearly some bad hires are worse than others, but none are a pleasant experience. I recall one particular hire in my early years of interviewing. His first day on the job was supposed to include getting on an airplane and flying to the corporate office to begin management training. As it turned out, he figured out a way to cash in the airline ticket we gave him and neither he nor the money was ever seen or heard from again. Then there was the time I was ready to expand my recruiting agency. It was a one-person operation with yours truly doing all the work, which became too much to handle. It was time for me to hire my first employee. I was very careful in my selection process, and quite confident in my abilities. After all, I was a successful recruiter and had already interviewed hundreds of job candidates! The person I selected came with interviewing and hiring experience as well as management experience. She seemed like a hard worker and expressed a profound interest in the job. On top of that, I liked her. However, much to my dismay, it turned out to be a total disaster! For the next few months, she had one excuse after another for not meeting her goals and her lack of productivity. Initially I felt compassion towards her hard-luck stories and gave her the benefit of doubt. Since she wasn’t bringing in much revenue, the cost to retain her was putting a financial strain on the business. That hiring choice caused me so much stress! I would have been better off if I had never hired her and did all the work myself. I almost lost the business because of one poor hiring decision. The good part, however, is that experience got the wheels turning in my head: how did I get it so wrong?

After thousands of interviews, along with tracking the job performance of those hired, I discovered the real difference between high performers and everyone else. It’s not how eager a person is to get the job, or even about their bounty of skills, but rather, it’s how eager a person is to do the job. The million-dollar question was, how could I make this distinction before they were hired? I knew the answer would lead me to a place where I could genuinely tell the difference between the great hires and the not-so-great ones. Then it hit me: everything revolves around how we assess self-motivation.

Speaking of Motivation…

Motivating employees has always been a hot topic in the business world. As supervisors, we’re continuously trying to come up with ways to prod workers to take action, produce results, and achieve higher goals. We spend countless hours seeking ways to make workers want to perform better. We coach and counsel. We dangle carrots. Sometimes we discipline and threaten job loss just to get them to do the job they were hired to do. Around the turn of the century, this age-old problem got a new name: unmotivated employees are now called disengaged employees and the act of motivating employees became "employee engagement." It’s the same problem—unmotivated employees—just a new name.

Have you ever noticed that the word motivation is often preceded by the word self? One would think we could just say a person is motivated or isn’t. But somewhere along the line, someone attached the word self to the word motivation to make a distinction. When we refer to motivation, we aren’t automatically talking about the ability to put oneself into motion, not at all. This is where many interviewers go astray. They think all they have to do is assess whether or not a candidate is motivated.

So, go ahead and ask a candidate about his motivation. Ask him, on a scale of one to ten, how much effort he puts into his work or how important he thinks initiative is. Or how about a candidate who finished a project. Can we assume she is motivated? The project got done and that’s what counts, right? What if the boss told her prior to the project, If you miss this project deadline the way you have missed so many others, you’ll be fired? What if the boss constantly had to check up on her progress and push her when she lagged behind? What if this employee made excuses and argued with her boss, insisting that the boss was being unreasonable, that there was no way it could all get done? What if the employee spent too much time on the phone or took long smoke breaks? The project may have gotten finished barely on time. But during a job interview, this person can brag about how she finished a tough project. Only talking about the success of the project and conveniently leaving out the details about the boss’s push, this candidate probably appears to have been self-motivated. But she wasn’t. She had trouble with the self part.

If you fail to assess motivation correctly during the interviewing process, you can become the proud supervisor of employees who lack self-motivation and will be dependent on you to motivate them—also known as employee engagement. Too often these people slip through the screening process and are hired.

How Are We Really Doing at Hiring?

Organizations spend a tremendous amount of time, money, and resources teaching managers how to motivate employees as a way to improve the organization’s overall performance and success, yet put forth very little effort training interviewers.

I think a little healthy introspection might offer some enlightenment. Ask yourself these questions: Why do we assume we have hired well when the employee is underperforming? Did they change or did we miss the mark? If the act of motivating employees is so effective, why then do we still have unmotivated or disengaged employees? Why do we think trying to fundamentally change another human being is a better strategy than fixing the selection process?

So then, what is the state of hiring and why is it important that we know the answer to this question? It’s important because many interviewers and many organizations believe they are already doing a fine job at selecting their employees. This belief comes with a side effect: not being open to learning and implementing a better way. After all, what is there to improve when you’re already good at hiring? Before we can leap into motivation-based interviewing, we must start by opening our minds. Knowing where the employee selection process is going awry is how we open our minds. There is a good chance that what you have always known to be true about interviewing and hiring, whether that’s a little or a lot, is about to get disrupted. It’s important to understand where we are today and why much of what we are doing when it comes to hiring is broken. I recommend that you sit down and buckle your seatbelt. You’re in for a ride!

Untrained Interviewers

This is a good place to start. Over the past two decades, in the Hire Authority interviewer training workshops, attendees have been asked to raise their hand if they’ve never received any kind of formal training on how to interview. More than 80 percent raise their hands. Let’s think about this; we have a lot of hiring managers out there who have never been properly trained on conducting interviews and making hiring decisions. What are we thinking? Do we believe there are no negative ramifications for hiring mistakes? Do we believe we have the power to change bad hires into high performers?

Imagine yourself for a moment sitting in the pilot seat of a commercial airplane that’s in flight. You’ve never flown a plane or had any training and now you’re told that you’re the new pilot. There’s a fairly good chance you’re going to crash! This scenario is totally absurd, of course, but it is similar to promoting people into management and giving them the responsibility of interviewing and making hiring decisions without ever teaching them how. Many managers are essentially winging it when it comes to selecting new employees. Several years ago, after an onsite motivation-based interviewing workshop, a director-level executive came up to thank me. He said he had been interviewing for nineteen years and admitted he’d never really felt confident that he knew what he was doing when it came to hiring. He said he wasn’t terrible at it, but he’d had his share of hiring mistakes. He finally felt that he received the training that would help him hire better. He said that he wished he’d had the opportunity to learn this information nineteen years sooner.

Of the 20 percent or fewer who had received training, most say it was some interviewing basics, legal dos and don’ts, and behavior-based interviewing, none of which will help any interviewer correctly or consistently hire high performers. When you think about this, there is no way anyone can believe we’re getting the best possible hiring results under these circumstances. But it doesn’t stop here. It gets worse.

Behavior-Based Interviewing

Next let’s tackle behavior-based interviewing. There is so much wrong with it that using it is likely to erode your quality-of-hire.

Decades ago, when behavior-based interviewing was first introduced, I—like many of us—thought it was great. Considering where we had come from (e.g., gut instinct, the introduction of open-ended and hypothetical questions), behavior-based interviewing seemed great. However, after using it for a while we have come to discover it produces extreme hit-and-miss hiring results, and there are a lot of reasons why. Behavior-based interviewing is like interviewing in the Wild West: there are few rules, no minimum hiring standard, and almost anything goes. There’s an infinite amount of bad behavior-based interview questions, along with instructions on how to answer them well, posted all over the Internet. Many of the questions are so ineffective they actually help candidates provide overly positive answers, causing interviewers to give unjustified high ratings. This wouldn’t be a problem if each candidate actually performed at that level, but that’s not the case. We have a big problem with underperforming employees because of this overrating. Ineffective interview questions gather candidate information that is unsuitable for use in predicting future performance, yet that’s exactly what is being used to make hiring decisions. This is why behavior-based interviewing is essentially unreliable for identifying high performers.

Job Skills

One of the most common misconceptions in hiring is that skill level equates to job performance level—the better the skills, the better the job performance. Skill simply means the person can do the job, not that they will actually do it.

Hiring based on skill level alone is not the answer. Think about it: if it were all about skill, we would not need to interview anyone. We could hire everyone and teach them the necessary job skills, and 100 percent would be high performers. We would never have to terminate anyone either; we would simply fill their skill gaps so they too would become high performers. But we know it doesn’t work this way, and that’s because it takes more than just skill to succeed.

Skills are useless without the initiative to apply them. The world is filled with people who lack the initiative or motivation to do what it takes to make full use of their potential. Some skilled employees may lack motivation, while some unskilled or underskilled employees may be highly driven to achieve. Therefore, hiring well is more than measuring skills. If one relies on skills alone as the determining factor for hiring, the results can be employee job performance that ranges from very good to very bad, which is why most organizations employ the full gamut of performers. Hiring results become more about luck rather than effective interviewing. Skills and motivation go hand in hand, but they are assessed in very different ways.

Because of its limitations, it is impossible to correctly assess motivation using behavior-based interviewing. However, motivation-based interviewing aligns with what brings achievement and success about, making it far more effective at accurately identifying high performers.

Predicting Future Behavior

Behavior-based interviewing works on the principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. The problem with this is that it infers that a candidate’s past behavior will repeat exactly the same way in the future. It suggests that they behave in only one way and are therefore predictable, but behaviors can and do vary.