Waiting for the candidate’s responses is key to making the right hiring decisions

“Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.”

– Muhammad Ali

Silence makes us uncomfortable.

Lulls in conversations are awkward. Dead air during a radio broadcast has us reaching for the dial. During interviews we are tempted to nudge candidates in the right direction when they fail to respond immediately.

There is a principle in science that nature abhors a vacuum. Air or liquids rush in to fill the void. During conversations, we want to rush in to fill the gap with words.

When the conversation is an interview, interviewers may be tempted to help candidates out when they don’t respond immediately. If that’s you, stop doing it. Apply a technique mastered by journalist and detectives—the power of the pause.

In Five Little Pigs, Agatha Christie illustrates how her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot  employs the power of pause to gather evidence:

But as though his expectant silence hypnotized her, she said reluctantly.

“I think I said, ‘Certainly, Mrs. Crale. It must have been suicide.”

Like Poirot and other detectives, plan for times when candidates hesitate.

The purpose of interviews is to learn as much about candidates as you can in a short time—more perhaps than candidates want to tell you and more than they realize they should tell you.

How you respond to moments of silence will impact the quality of the information you gather.

Having asked about collaborating with co-workers, we may fill the gap by suggesting how to respond. “Can you think of a project when you had to work closely with a colleague to solve a problem? Did you sit down to talk about the problem before you started to work on a solution?”

By helping out in this fashion, you may unintentionally be offering clues about what you want the candidates to say in answering your question. As detective Peter Diamond observes in The Tooth Tattoo by Peter Lovesey, “Putting words into the mouth of witnesses wasn’t a good interviewing technique.”

Just ask your initial question and wait for the candidate to respond. Five seconds. Ten. Up to 15 seconds.

You are creating a conversational vacuum that will work to your advantage. Candidates will feel that they need to fill these gaps. Don’t provide them with an easy escape. Require them to describe what they did without any prompts from you.

A common mistake that leads to poor hiring decisions is that interviewers are too talkative. It’s difficult to learn about another person when you are the one who does much of the talking. As Chief Inspector Gamache explained to a new investigator when he joined the homicide squad: “You must listen. As long as you’re talking you’re not learning, and this job is about learning (The Cruelest Month by Louis Penny).”

Of course, you can’t wait forever for candidates to respond. After 10 to 15 seconds of the candidate just sitting there staring at you and others on the interview panel, you will need to apply other techniques to move the interview along:

1. Emphasize that it is important to you to hear an answer because it will be something you will be considering when making your hiring decision.
2. Repeat the question, or ask the candidate to reread it if you are using interview cards that I described in an earlier article.
3. Remind the candidate of what you may have said when introducing the candidate to the concept of behaviour description interview (BDI) questions when beginning the interview: “Don’t feel that you have to give us an example of some big event or task. Often a small example will provide us with the information we require.”
4. Refer to an example of collaboration from the candidate’s resume or cover letter. “I noticed that in your resume you referred to being ‘part of the team’ at ABC. Tell us how you worked with others on that team.”
5. Ask the candidate if they would like to move on to the next question and return to this one later.

The power of the pause can also be used after the candidate answers your question. Wait a few seconds before asking your next. The vacuum you create may form an impression in the candidate’s mind that you are looking for more, which you are. There may still be unspoken information that will help you identify the right person.

One word of caution: some candidates will understand the power of the pause and intentionally create a conversation vacuum, hoping you will fill it with clues about how to answer the question with the information you are looking for.

Want to discuss this or other interview techniques? Schedule a 15-minute telephone consultation. It’s free and there is no obligation.

Listeners learn more during interviews and in life

Some famous person, such as the oft-quoted and frequently mis-quoted baseball great Yogi Berra, likely made this observation, years ago. If not, I’ll take credit.

“You can hear a lot by just listening.”

It’s a lesson I learned from my mother that applies to interviewing. 

More about listening during interviews in a moment, but first, here’s how I learned about listening from my mother.

Many in her community were curious about the relationship between a widow and a high-profile, “eligible bachelor.” There were, of course, a barrage of questions which went unanswered.

Unlike others, my mother, who was friends with both of the individuals, didn’t ask.

This restraint prompted the woman to say, “You never ask about our relationship, but likely I tell you more than I do anyone else. Because you listen, you know more about us than those who are always asking about us. Because you listen well, you hear more.”

She could have been talking about those who are effective interviewers. Those who listen well learn more about those who they interview.

Listening is one of the important items in every interviewer’s toolbox, all of which I discuss during my Interview Right to Hire Right workshops.

In addition to listening, interviewers need to be able to identify the skills and attitudes that make top performers successful. Then they need to write questions that will produce the evidence that candidates possess those skills and attitudes, in order to decide who is the right person to hire (and which people would be oh so wrong).

Add to the list an ability to take notes, which are essential to avoiding confusion about who said what when it’s time to assess each candidate against previously established criteria. 

In-between writing great questions and recording the responses during interviews comes listening.

The first requirement of being a good listener is knowing when and how to remain quiet. Previously, I have suggested that one of the 7 ways to improve hiring interviews is to “take a vow of silence.” Let the candidates speak. Avoid interrupting their responses unless necessary (more about that later).

One of the 13 Reasons Managers are “Unlucky” When Making Hiring Decisions is being too “talkative.” When you talk too much, you are handing control of the interview to the candidate.

A piece of advice that jobseekers receive is that if they encounter a talkative interviewer, they should let them talk. The more the interviewer talks, the more likely he is to hire himself, “but you will receive the paycheque.”

The need to focus on listening during interviews is one the reasons for specialization on interview panels. While one person asks the question, others can focus on recording what is said.

The person asking the question can concentrate on what the candidate says. Is the response complete? Which followup questions need to be asked to get a more complete picture of the candidate?

The interviewer who listens well can determine when the interview is going “off-track.” The candidates may stray from the topic of your question, perhaps unintentionally or maybe because they lack related experience or because they want to highlight other expertise.

The interviewer who listens well can interrupt the response to refocus the interview by re-asking the question.

Another way interviews go off-track is when candidates respond to your question about what they have done in the past with a future-focused answer.

Stop them and remind them that what you want to hear is what they have done, not what they think they would do.

Whenever you interview, the more carefully you listen to the candidate the more information you will learn that will enable you to identify the right person to hire.