Stop Telling Me, And Start Showing Me!

Most interviews go something like this…

• Tell me about a failure
• Tell me about a success
• Tell me about your dream job
• Tell me about…

Stop telling me, and start showing me!

I’ve hired hundreds of people over the past five years at LinkedIn. And I’ve learned that the best way to assess talent is to give a candidate 48 hours to complete a task that replicates the job they’re interviewing for.

We’ve implemented this concept for numerous roles: sales people do mock client meetings, marketers design marketing programs and analysts get problem sets that they must bring in to discuss. Guess what? It’s highly predictive of job competence... so much so that for many roles we’ve made this the first interaction so we don’t spend hours falling in love with candidates only to realize that they don’t nail the core job capability.

Here are some tips for creating a great “homework assignment.” Obviously different roles call for different needs, and the more senior the role, the more work it takes to craft the assignment. But here are some general best practices:

1) Ask a range of questions, some highly specific and some more open-ended. See if they can get the basic answer right, and whether they can deal with more vague issues.

• Specific: What characteristics would you use to define your target market?
• More General: As the business evolves, how would you expect your segmentation strategy and success criteria to change?

2) For junior roles, provide a very clear format in which they should deliver the answer. For senior roles, let them decide how to present their thinking and how to use the time with you to discuss the answer.

• Junior: Fill out this analysis table
• Senior: Assume you were to deliver the results on a weekly basis to a senior executive audience

3) Ask them to provide their answer in writing or via a presentation. For most jobs, you need to be able to communicate such that your work can stand on its own. Seeing what they produce is very enlightening.

4) Spend most of the time with them in person asking questions that you did not ask in the assignment. In an hour-long interview, perhaps 20 minutes should be spent discussing the answers themselves, while another 40 should be spent expanding the question.

• How would you take these insights and apply them across the business?
• What else do you think we should assess given these answers?
• What other data would you like to collect to refine your answer?

Perhaps one of the biggest insights I get from this process is understanding the level of preparation that the candidate feels is acceptable for such an assignment. Some people do incredible work that showcases the depth of their thinking and their commitment to answering the questions fully, including bringing in outside research. Others do little research and answer the questions at a cursory level. If they don’t crush it when the job is on the line, they're not going to crush it every day... which is what you really want.

By the way, a side benefit of this is that people get a real sense of what the work is like. Most people who turn out to be stars LOVE this process because it's both challenging and reflects the kind of work that they inherently enjoy. If they don't like the assignment, they probably won't love the job.

Of course, once you find someone who nails this, you need to continue your assessment on cultural fit, motivations, aspirations, etc. But this can be an incredibly helpful guidepost for you to hire amazing people consistently.

Photo: cristovao / Shutterstock.com

Originally Posted On: Linked IN By: Daniel Shapero