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Business owners, hiring managers, and applicants have all experienced job interviews that started going south at some point, and kept grinding downward from there. But organizational psychologist Adam Grant says even recruiting exchanges that seem to offer neither side much reason to continue may hold opportunities to uncover the hidden capabilities of flub-prone candidates — if they’re handled correctly.
The best-selling author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business underlined the hiring potentials in what otherwise appear to be no-hope job interview scenarios. Speaking at the WOBI World Business Forum in New York last week, Grant urged company owners and HR executives yearning to pull the plug on unimpressive exchanges with sputtering candidates to instead give them a second chance to demonstrate hidden capabilities. Ideally, that would involve a follow-up encounter with the struggling applicant, conducted from a different angle that they may respond better to.
The point,t, Grant said, is for interviewing executives to identify and repurpose the very areas job candidates had been stumbling on to see if they can overcome those during a second chance. The reason that’s worthwhile, Grant said, is that research has shown “how well somebody does a job is not indicated by how the first interview goes, it’s how much growth they show from the first interview to the second,” according to CNBC’s coverage of his presentation.
Aware that many business owners and human resources managers won’t have the scheduling flexibility to call a hapless applicant in for a second interview, Grant offered a workaround requiring far less time and organization.
“Even if you could pause an interview halfway and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a couple of notes for you,’ and then watch the motivation and ability to grow from the first attempt to the second, that is a great window into ‘is somebody excited to get better,’ and also ‘do they have the capability to learn the skills that you’re trying to get them to excel at?’” Grant told the audience, CNBC reported.
The key to offering that second chance, Grant explained, is giving flailing candidates a task directly related to the job they’re vying for. That will not only require both the applicant and interviewer to focus on skills the position involves. But it also creates the opportunity for potential recruits to demonstrate their capacity for bouncing back while proving abilities performing the work.
The extra effort, Grant said, will spare employers from “missing diamonds in the rough.”
The strategy springs from Grant’s own pre-Wharton near-miss experience, while working in advertising and hiring people for sales positions. He recounted one applicant he described as “the worst fit for sales imaginable,” particularly in refusing to make eye contact. “I didn’t know a thing about neurodivergence then,” Grant noted.
But his reaction also overlooked a key employment detail that Grant’s boss soon reminded him about.
“You realize this is a phone sales job, right?” the company president asked him, presumably from beneath sharply arched eyebrows. “There is no eye contact in this job.”
As a result, Grant called the all the applicants back in and gave them a task related to the sales jobs being filled, and using a reference they’d all be familiar with: a rotten apple. The challenge was for candidates to convincingly sell Grant on the idea of buying the withering fruit.
The person he’d scratched off his list for not making eye contact never hesitated, and promptly demonstrated his abilities for the sales job being filled.
“This may look like a rotten apple; it’s actually an aged, antique apple,” Grant recalled of the nearly axed candidate’s second-chance presentation. “You know the saying ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away?’ Well, because of the nutrients in the aging process, you only need to eat one of these a week. And then afterwards you can plant the seeds in your backyard.”
Though Grant said he had certain reservations about the ethics of making that exact product pitch, he wound up hiring the candidate — who became the best performer on the sales team. The experience made Grant change his thinking about recruitment beyond the valuable recruit he’d nearly written off.
“What I learned from that story was not just that I needed to see him in action to gauge his potential… (b)ut also, I needed to give him a do-over,” Grant said before broadening that lesson further, according to CNBC. “I realized I had to reboot our hiring process. If you want to gauge somebody’s potential, the best thing you can do is actually give them a challenge that’s really part of the job and watch how they handle it.”
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Bruce Crumley
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