Are You Being Fooled by the People You Interview?

The group of six women at the nearby table in my favourite coffee shop were obviously in high spirits. Loud. Each excitedly speaking over the words of the others. An abundance of laughter.

It was evident that most were recent university graduates who were looking for their first jobs. They regaled each other with tales of their interview experiences, particularly how each had attempted to fool interviewers into believing that she was the right person to hire.

The loudest burst of laughter came when one recalled what she did when asked, “Where do you expect to be in five years?”

“I lied!”

While lying to potential employers is not a practice I condone, it’s not a surprise that it happens. Most people looking for employment search the Internet, attend workshops and scan books on how to conduct a successful job search. 

The wide availability of such resources is why most job seekers are better prepared for interviews than the people who will be asking the questions.

Websites, training and books all include suggestions on how best to respond to common interview questions, such as about the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, why the interviewer should hire them, and career plans (“Where do you expect to be in five years?”).

These are the types of questions I had in mind when I included “asking the wrong questions” in my list of 13 reasons managers are “unlucky” when making hiring decisions. Asking these questions provides opportunities for candidates to recite the words they practised in anticipation of being asked the question. Settling for those well-rehearsed answers is another reason that managers make poor hiring decisions.

Those responses fail to yield valuable information on which to base hiring decisions. There is no evidence of what the candidate has done in previous jobs. Past performance may be the best predictor of future performance, but if you learn nothing about what they have done previously it is impossible to confidently predict what they will do if hired.

When participants in my Interview Right to Hire Right workshops argue that asking about where the candidate expects to be in five years results in useful information about the candidates, I suggest that if they feel they must ask about career plans they should ask a followup question: “What steps have you taken toward reaching your career goal?”

If they have done nothing to move them closer to their goal, does that goal really exist? Or are they just responding to your question in the way they learned to respond during a workshop on conducting a job search? Are they lying in hope of fooling you into believing that they are the right person to hire?

The old saying is, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” 

And if they fool you trice, it’s time to get some training in how to conduct interviews.

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I have previously written that a right time to ask about career goals is after people are hired, with the intent of providing learning opportunities that will help them grow professionally.

Better yet, link their career goals to how you recognize them for their successes and contributions. In my new book, Thanks, Again! More Simple, Inexpensive Ways for Busy Leaders to Recognize Staff Theme #10: Linking Staff Recognition to Career Goals suggests 24 ways to do this.

Recognition is a source of better mental health

A while back, Robert Manolson of Powerful Play Experiences shared a video from the Mental Health Commission of Canada that identified recognition and reward as one of 13 factors that support psychological health and safety in the workplace.

Other factors that are allied to recognition include engagement, organizational culture, civility and respect, and clear leadership and expectations.

After viewing the video, I met Robert to discuss how recognition contributes to better mental health at work.

I began by asking Robert how he would describe himself. Is he a mental health advocate?

He said he prefers to identify as a mental health optimist. He explained that mental health optimists are able to face defeat and adversity and find ways to deal with it.

“Mental health optimists choose not to be consumed by it. We surround ourselves with support networks,” he said.

“We are resilient. We move on. We look for healthy ways to maintain our daily personal wellness.”

During our conversation, Robert emphasized that who we are and what we do shapes the mental health of others. “An amazing gift that’s never talked about is how what we do can shift people’s mental health from good to better,” he said.

He illustrated this point by describing what happened when he ordered a cappuccino at the cafe where we met.

It was a pleasant experience. The person behind the counter greeted him with a smile and engaged him in a brief conversation while taking his order.

“How staff treats me changes my mental health,” he said. “When we serve people, we don’t realize the impact we can have on people’s state of mind. What if I made one person feel better?”

Shifting to the purpose of our conversation, he says, “Staff recognition is good for mental health. By acknowledging others and expressing appreciation, we show we care about the other person and the role they play in the organization.”

Recognition can changed an individual from feeling, “I’m not good enough,” to feeling that “someone feels I’m important.”

A manager or supervisor who recognizes a staff member is saying, “I care about you, you have value, you make an important contribution.”

He added, “No one ever says, ‘We’re here to improve your mental health’ at recognition events, but when done correctly, that’s what recognition does.”

Robert believes that as a legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic, “There is an increased awareness of mental health, but awareness is not enough.

“No one is immune from dealing with mental health challenges. Everyone is going through something, everyone has come through something, everyone will go through something,” he said. “Action is required. We need to do something.”

To address this need, Robert has developed a 60-day program that provides leaders with a three-stage action plan to reclaim positive mental health in the workplace.

This involves re-prioritizing self-care and personal well-being at work, rethinking psychological health and safety at work, and recommitting to team rebuilding and fun at work.

And one expects, emphasizing the value of recognition in the workplace.

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Thanks, Again! More Simple, Inexpensive Ways for Busy Leaders to Recognize Staff includes hundreds of low-cost/no-cost, easy-to-implement staff recognition tips, tools and techniques to express appreciation to staff members for how they contribute and what they achieve. Thanks, Again! will officially launch in the fall but you can receive early access to autographed copies of the book and other valuable perks.

An author’s work is never done

“The past, for everyone, is full of missed chances.” 

– Humanitarian, Le Ly Hayslip

While it may not be politically correct, the adage, “A woman’s work is never done,” is a useful starting point for a discussion of what’s not in my new book, Thanks, Again! More Simple, Inexpensive Ways for Busy Leaders to Recognize Staff.

No sooner than the manuscript is placed in the hands of the publisher, its author begins to discover more information that should be in the book; but it’s too late.

When this happened just after I had signed off on the final version of Thanks, Again!, I recalled the words of the late Dan Poynter, who travelled the world providing advice to would-be authors.

“Your book will never include everything it could,” the guru of self-publishing said, during one of our conversations. “Think of your book as being 85 per cent complete. You will always discover information that could be added. That’s for the second edition.”

Right now, it’s hard to think about a second edition when we are still weeks away from the fall launch of Thanks, Again!

But if someday there is a second edition, one addition will be references to Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life, by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, both of whom teach at Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Their words would be a valuable addition to my book’s Theme #14: Important? Certainly, But Recognition Can Be Fun, Too.

Humour has a place in staff recognition. Fun recognition that generates smiles and laughter has a positive impact on the workplace. It helps build relationships and boost morale. Having fun at work increases engagement.

“Unexpected, playful moments of praise or recognition can often be more meaningful than ‘official’ ones because they signal that someone is not only paying attention to what we’re doing well, but cares enough to go out of their way to celebrate it,” Aaker and Bagdonas write.

In this one sentence, Aaker and Bagdonas indirectly acknowledged that at least three ingredients of meaningful recognition (identified in my acronym GREAT) are part of humorous recognition. 

Fun recognition is meaningful because it is Genuine—motivated by a sincere sense of appreciation for what someone did. By “paying attention” to what people are doing, we are preparing ourselves to provide Explicit (i.e., specific) recognition. Recognition that is Appropriate depends on “caring enough” to find ways to recognize individuals that reflect who they are, their interests and their recognition preferences.

It’s important that you know staff members as individuals when humour is part of your staff recognition practices.

The theme about fun in Thanks, Again! is one of the longest in the book. Yet not everything that’s suggested—much of it depends on puns that make you laugh or groan—will work for everyone.

Referring to workplace humour, Aaker and Bagdonas caution, “What we find funny—or appropriate—is far from universal. There are a whole lot of gray areas when it comes to humor.”

In Thanks, Again!, the theme filled with fun ways to recognize staff ends with three serious points:

• Humour can be risky. What some staff enjoy as a fun award may not be Appropriate for others. Know your staff.
• Humour based on ridicule or bullying has no place in staff recognition.
• Be aware that staff members for whom English is a second language may not understand humour that depends on puns for its effect and could take unintended offence.

When humour fails, you need to do what some people find difficult to do—offer a sincere apology.

“When humor fails or offends, it can be tempting to brush it off as the other person’s problem—‘he didn’t get the joke’ or ‘she’s being too sensitive’—instead of stopping to consider how it might be our problem,” Aaker and Bagdonas write. “In these moments, lean in: trust their reaction, understand and acknowledge your mistake, reflect on your blind spots and make it right.”

If only I had known about Humor, Seriously before I finished writing Thanks, Again!, I might be able to say, “My book is 85.75 per cent complete.”

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Theme #14: Important? Certainly, But Recognition Can Be Fun, Too is just one of 30 themes included in Thanks, Again!. There is alsoa Bonus Section with at least 101 more thoughts, tips, tools and techniques that didn’t fit any of the themes but were too good to leave out.

Click here to discover some of the other themes and how you can be among the first to receive an autographed copy of Thanks, Again! before its official launch in the fall.