5 Interview Questions That Expose the Bullsh!tters

Episode #379 5 Interview Questions That Expose the Bullsh!tters

NAILING TALENT ACQUISITION

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract and retain the best people.

Some companies conduct regular talent management reviews to assess the performance and potential of their leaders.

Other companies don’t have a formal process as such, but that doesn’t stop them from spending an inordinate amount of time pondering the question, “How can I attract and retain the best people?”

We all know how fickle the hiring process can be. Recruiting talent is an imprecise science, which is why you have to get really good at interviewing. This is where you get the chance to meet your potential employees face to face.

The interview is your best opportunity to separate the most talented candidates from the ones who just talk a good game.

In this newsletter, I give you an interview technique that’s guaranteed to identify the people who’ve actually done what they say they’ve done, and expose those who are just full of sh!t.

I begin with a general recap on the job selection process; I look at an article from The Economist that revealed some of the best interview questions from their subscribers; and I reveal the interview technique that I used to find out exactly what a candidate has and hasn’t done.

THE COST OF A HIRING MISTAKE

Hiring people is tricky… so tricky that many leaders freeze on their hiring decisions, knowing that if they make a mistake, it can be incredibly costly.

In extreme cases, it can be career limiting.

Getting a hiring decision wrong pushes you into a hellish cycle: performance management, exit planning, and tiptoeing through a legal minefield. It means you’ll be forced to spend a huge amount of time, money, and energy that you didn’t plan on spending… not to mention the disruption of the team and the loss of personal credibility that you’re going to suffer.

Even after you get through all of that, you’re back where you started months ago, because you still have to replace the bad hire with a good hire.

At the most senior levels, the cost of a bad hire increases exponentially, because unwinding an executive contract can be prohibitively expensive.

One example that’s fresh in my mind is Louisiana State University football coach, Brian Kelly. Even though this is not your typical corporate example, it illustrates the cost of a bad hiring decision beautifully.

In US college football, LSU is a performance powerhouse. Competing in the premier SEC conference, over the years, LSU has won a bunch of conference championships and four national titles. Of the 130-plus teams in the FBS, LSU spends a disproportionate amount of time amongst the list of the top 25 ranked teams.

So, when they decided in 2021 to hire one of the top coaches in college football, Brian Kelly, LSU had great expectations of hitting a new purple patch.

Kelly was able to negotiate an eye-watering 10-year, USD $95 million contract. And remember, this is college football.

Kelly’s first three seasons were less than stellar… not terrible, but underwhelming given his oversized contract. LSU never really looked like being in contention for an SEC title, let alone a national championship.

So, a few weeks ago, in the wake of a humiliating home loss to Texas A&M, the LSU front office decided enough was enough. Kelly was fired, initially for cause (in other words, under-performance).

But after a little bit of wrangling between their respective legal teams, LSU conceded that Kelly was fired without cause. What does this mean? Well, the implication of this decision is that Kelly will be owed the full contract buyout of USD $54 million.

Not only did he get paid for the three and a half years he coached the team, but he’ll get paid a fair whack of the six and a half years that he won’t be coaching the team.

This situation is a cautionary tale for corporate businesses:

1. The first lesson is the contract itself. Every executive contract should have a clause that enables you to terminate for convenience. Some people call it the “face doesn’t fit” clause. I call it the “love is gone” clause. It effectively means that either party should be able to terminate an employment agreement without punitive exit provisions.

To me, a 10-year contract with such onerous buyout terms seems to have an intolerable level of risk.

2. The second lesson is alignment of expectations. I have no idea how acceptable performance was defined under the LSU / Brian Kelly contract. But being sacked when your win-loss record is 34-14 indicates expectations of elite performance on the part of the LSU administration.

The confusion around the basis for termination seems to suggest that expectations may have been misaligned.

3. The third lesson is the inevitable flow-on effects of bad hiring decisions: the media circus, the appointment of interim coaches, and all with a team that’s halfway through the season. This is not going to help LSU to attract the top player talent in 2026.

THERE ARE PLENTY OF TOOLS…

The reason I just told that cautionary tale is to impress upon you the need for diligence in the hiring process. You can’t outsource the risk of a bad hire:

• You can’t outsource it to HR…
• You can’t outsource it to a recruiter… and
• You certainly can’t outsource it to an executive search firm (no matter how much you pay).

Reducing the likelihood of a hiring mistake should be a key focus for every hiring manager, which is why we use a range of tools to give us the best chance possible of making the correct decision.

Interviewing is just one of these tools.

I released an episode earlier this year looking at the hiring process in more detail (Ep.343: Securing Top Talent.

In that episode, I gave six practical tips for securing top talent. But it always starts with knowing your market.

Who is going to turn up in your candidate pools? Well, that depends upon your location, your industry, your brand, and the mobility of your talent pool.

When competition for talent is fierce, as it was in the post-COVID employment market, what does your company offer to any potential hire?

What’s your employee value proposition?

I went through the six tools of successful hiring in a little bit of depth:

1. Advertising and brand awareness;
2. Resume filtering;
3. Interviews (which, of course, is the focus of this newsletter);
4. Aptitude and psych testing;
5. Reference checking; and
6. Setting up a robust contract.

I’d really encourage you to go back to Ep.343 before you embark on your next hiring campaign. Let’s face it, you don’t want to have to unwind an employment contract… even if it has a couple less zeroes than Brian Kelly’s LSU contract!

THE BEST QUESTIONS TO DETERMINE FIT

The Economist can always be relied upon for excellent business insights, and this was no exception: Titled “What Questions Would You Ask a Candidate in a Job Interview?”, the article captured some of the best interview questions submitted by Economist readers.

I think there’s enormous power in asking great questions in any area of business (or life, for that matter). I want to give you a feel for some of these questions, because they typically tend to go to culture fit, capacity for lateral thinking, and personal expression.

The brief to the subscribers was this:

• “What’s the one question you ask in an interview that reliably says the most about a candidate?”

It didn’t ask which questions were the most predictive of performance in the role, and I suspect that may have elicited a slightly different response.

In any case, one reader offered a useful question for new graduates hoping to join the company at entry level. The question was in two parts:

• Part one: “What was your favorite subject at university?“, and
• Part two: “What did you learn in that subject?“

I can see how this might be a searching question to ask a newly minted graduate. This particular reader shared the best answer with us, too. One applicant apparently said, “That was nine months ago… I don’t remember.”

I think that might’ve just told you everything you needed to know about that individual.

One interesting question that might uncover someone’s personal focus was:

• “If we gave you a blank check and a free weekend, where would you go, what would you do, and who would you go with?”

Cute, but I’m not sure the answer will help you sort out the dogs from the fleas. In the same vein, there are questions like:

• “What was the last book you read?”
• “What do you do in your spare time?”
• “Not including work or family, what is your biggest achievement?”

A slightly more performance-focused question is:

• “We all want to talk about our accomplishments, but tell us about something you tried that didn’t work.” or
• “Tell me about a time that you failed.”

All of these questions are pretty interesting, and they may help you to discover more about someone’s personality. They may speak to whether or not the individual would fit in with the rest of the team.

But you know what they won’t do? They won’t provide any value in trying to work out if someone can do the job that you’re asking them to do.

SOME PEOPLE CAN REALLY SELL THEMSELVES

I’ve heard leaders say in the past, “We can work out if someone can do the job from their academic qualifications, their experience, and their reference checks. The interview is really just about fit.”

Au contraire…

I found many people who are a good fit, but couldn’t do the job they were being paid to do.

Don’t get me wrong; cultural fit is important. But maybe that should be reserved for an interview that a skip-level manager conducts with a hire two levels below them… or maybe for a second or third interview of a candidate who has already established their capability in a previous interview round.

Assessing culture fit alone leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and it certainly won’t provide the rigour that’s going to expose an accomplished bullsh!tter.

Interestingly, finding the bullsh!tters is harder in some cultures than it is in others. Every country develops its own unique identity, which is enshrined in its social norms.

For example, in the US, job applicants are much more likely to be able to talk a good game than they are in Australia. That’s because in the US, there’s a much stronger culture of shamelessly selling yourself than there is down in the Antipodes.

From a relatively young age, children in the US become accustomed to interviewing for places in school, often starting as young as grade school. Obviously, interviews at that age are more about the parents than the child.

But I know from experience, my teenage nieces have had to interview for places at schools from junior high onwards; so we’re talking from the age of 11 or 12.

As a whole, the US working population is no better or worse than any other. But the fact that they develop high-order interview skills at a young age just makes it harder to sort out the sheep from the goats.

With the emergence of AI, the ability of people who are practically illiterate to produce relatively intelligible resumes and cover letters means that you’ll find it a lot harder to get the right people into the interview room in the first place.

ARE MULTIPLE INTERVIEWS VALUABLE?

For more senior jobs, it’s really important to have multiple interview rounds, so the behavioural fit questions will come into play at some point. Just be careful that you don’t fall into the trap of only hiring people who have the same interests and leanings as you do: that’s how you promote groupthink.

I’m a really strong believer in the fact that multiple interviews are essential for most leadership roles.

About 25 years ago, for my first executive role as Chief Information Officer at global mining company, MIM, I went through five rounds of interviews over a six-month period:

• Two interviews with my direct manager, the CFO;
• One interview with the HR Director; and
• One interview with each of the two executives who ran the largest global business units.

Each person took a different approach based on their exposure to the CIO role, and each asked questions that were relevant to how I would solve their individual problems and meet their needs.

They did a pretty good job of working out what I knew, what I’d done, and what I was likely to bring to the company. Unsurprisingly, the process also gave me a really good understanding of what I was getting myself into.

A FOOLPROOF INTERVIEW TECHNIQUE

Putting cultural fit aside, the interview process is there to help you work out who the best candidate is for the job.

Done well, it’s also going to reduce the risk of making a bad hire, which is an important goal to have.

Remember, the best predictor of future success is past performance.

This is why we use a technique called competency-based interviewing, which is also known as behavioural interviewing. It’s relatively straightforward, but it takes a bit of time to get used to, and you’ve got to be strong to pull it off well.

It goes like this:

1. Start with the job description.

Work out what the key deliverables of the job are. I’m not talking about the role, duties, and responsibilities. I’m talking about the deliverables… and there are probably only four or five that really define success in that role.

2. Frame a question around each deliverable.

For each key deliverable, design a question in the following form: 

“One of the key outcomes of this role is X. Please tell me in as much detail as you think appropriate about a time in the last two to three years where you did X successfully.“

This is going to tell you a lot of things.

• Can the person credibly communicate their track record of achievement in each key performance area? (don’t worry, you’re easily find the gaps);
• Do they talk at a level of detail that’s appropriate for the role level they’re auditioning for?; and
• Is their story (along with the key facts) consistent with the claims they’ve made in their résumé and LinkedIn profile?

Just allowing them to tell you how they move from situation to result is usually pretty enlightening.

3. Depending on the response, redirect the conversation to dig a bit deeper.

For example, you may be interviewing an optometrist. That’s one of my favorite slang terms for someone who’s very egocentric: every time they open their mouth, it’s, “I… I… I…“

Equally, you’ve got to be attuned to any individual who uses “The Royal We” to claim the glory.

My standard follow-up question, especially if I didn’t get a good sense of their initial answer is: 

“Can you give me some specific details about the role that you played individually in that outcome?” 

That one really exposes the bullsh!tters.

In some cases, someone’s going to say to you, “Look, I haven’t specifically done X.” In that case, you can easily say: 

“No problem. But knowing what you know about the role, can you please walk me through how you would approach that situation if you had to do it?“

RESPECT BEFORE POPULARITY

This interview technique is as effective as it is simple.

I’ve had lots of very senior people come to me after an interview and say, “Gee, Marty, that was the toughest interview I’ve ever had.“

But it doesn’t feel tough when you’re the one asking the questions.

Curiosity tends to take over, as you try to get to the bottom of each individual’s credentials, and work out how likely it is that they’re going to be successful in the role… and that’s good for both of you.

To do it effectively, though, you can’t be afraid to have the hard conversations with someone who’s put themselves forward for a job in your team. Your mantra, as it is with all areas of leadership, has to be respect before popularity.

You’re going to find out pretty quickly who has really achieved what they claim to have achieved, and who is just hoping that they can get through the interview without being exposed as a master bullsh!tter.