The Profit Builder Unscripted

Interview Right: Hire the Best Fit

• Vicki Suiter • Episode 72

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Hiring the wrong person is draining, time consuming, and costly..  But how do you truly know someone is the right fit before they start?

In this episode, I give you practical, step-by-step approach for conducting interviews that let you be really clear if a candidate can do the job..

I show you how to prepare, as well as ask open-ended questions that let you know if they can actually do the job you’re hiring for. You’ll learn what to listen for, how to dig deeper when needed, and avoid the common trap of leading someone into answers just because you like them.

These techniques will help you to distinguish between a candidate who only looks good on paper and one who will be successful in that role.

If you’re tired of hiring mistakes and want a repeatable process that gives you confidence in every hire, this episode is for you!

Don’t let another bad hire slow your construction business down—learn how to interview smart and hire right.

If your interested in having a full proof system for hiring, make sure to check out my “Contractors Hiring Blueprint” course.

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In today's video, we're going to talk about what are some best practices around interviewing. And in the last three videos, I talked about how do you first be clear about what's the position that you ideally want to be hiring for. In the next video, I talked about how do you be clear about what are the skills and qualifications and the responsibilities somebody will have in order to do that job well. And then in last week's video, I talked about how do you not waste time interviewing the wrong person by having a good screening process in place.

So we'll assume for the moment that you've gotten past all those steps and here you are and you're about to interview somebody. How do you make sure that when you're finished with that interview, you know that that person really has the skills and qualifications that you want them to have in order to be able to do that job well? In other words, you've either identified they are a right fit or you've identified that they're not a right fit. And one of the things that I've seen is that and I'm sure you have too, you know, ⁓ people have titles in different companies, whether that's I'm a project manager, I'm an estimator, I'm a office manager, I'm a bookkeeper, I'm a, you know, a carpenter, that while there's certain skills or functions that go along with any of those, the thing that distinguishes a lot of those titles and the skills that are required to do those jobs well, can vary greatly from company to company. So while you might have somebody who says that they're a project manager, they may have entitled been a project manager at another company, but in function, they may actually be like a lead carpenter or a foreman. And we've all seen this, right? 

If you've been out there for any time at all and you've been interviewing people that you've experienced that probably where you have somebody that you go, but you said you were a project manager and you, you know, they start working for you and you're like, no, it's not really the job that they did. They just had that title. So it's super frustrating, right? So we're going to talk today about how do you avoid that happening and how do you prepare for that interview in a way that will allow you to really have that be a process by which you will know that before that conversation is over and there won't be those bad surprises after that person has started. So the first thing that I recommend that you do is be prepared before that interview ever begins and be prepared with a list of questions that you want to ask specific to the position that you're hiring for. And I'm going to use for this conversation, project manager.

So let's say that you're interviewing for a project manager. So in the world of contracting, a project manager is somebody who delivers on time, on budget, as promised. It's sort of the overall responsibility of a project manager, quite frankly, no matter what your industry is. And so the first thing that you want to do is identify, okay, well, so what are the abilities that somebody has to have in order to have those? Well, hopefully you've already scoped those out, but let's say if it was somebody who needs to be able to have skill in scheduling, right? They need to be able to manage and control costs on a budget. And they need to be able to manage relationships and manage scope of a project within the promised scope that was agreed upon with the customer to start with. When you're in an interview, a lot of times, so first of all, let me back up for a second. 

So the first of all, one of the things that you wanna do is have questions related to each of that skill set already written out. Like, what do you want to ask them about that? One of the other things that you want to be careful of before you even begin the interview is that you do not spend most of the interview time talking about your company. Like, I know in today's environment where it's really tough to find good people, that we go into these interviews feeling like, to just come work for me ⁓ because you're desperate for good qualified candidates. And I appreciate that. I appreciate that it is ⁓ upon us to be able to sell our business and sell our company and sell the right candidate to wanting to come work for us. But in the interview process, you want to make sure that you don't spend ⁓ most of your time talking about the company and not enough time really evaluating if that person's a good fit.

I have a headhunter that I work with a lot. And she said, it's amazing to her that candidates come back. She goes, and this is like the majority of them come back and say that the owner or the manager spent 80 % of their time talking about the company and only 20 % of the time asking questions. And it should be exactly the opposite. And so how do you do that? And how do you ask the kind of questions that will really let you identify if somebody is a right fit?

I recommend when you begin the interview that you start out with the candidate just saying, listen, here's what I really want to get accomplished with you today. I have this whole list of questions I want to ask you. I want to make sure that you and I both get all of our questions answered, that you ask any questions that you need to of me, of our company, about how we function, about the structure, about the job, and then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about your skills and what you've done before, because I really want to get an understanding of how do you work and how do you think and how do you like, what are your set of practices so that I can know and you can know, are we a good fit? And are we going to be able to create a win-win with each other? Because if I'm hiring you for this job, I want to make sure that A, that it's right fit for us, but I want to make sure it's right fit for you too. And you want to keep in mind that part of what you're doing also, this isn't a process of the questions that you're going to ask are not about eliminating candidates. What it's really about is helping you identify, obviously, if somebody is a right fit. mean, clearly, if they don't have the skills, they don't have the skills, you're much better off finding out right now than later. And secondly, though, where do they have strengths and weaknesses and where might you have to invest in that person?

Later on, so let's say you're interviewing for a project manager and you might ask ⁓ people. We have a tendency to ask these like what I call closed ended questions. Yes or no kind of questions. So how do you avoid doing that? So in the example of a project manager instead of saying so have you done? Do you do schedules for projects? And they go yes. Well, how often well we do them on a regular basis whenever their scope change.

Now that might like you might stop there. And I think a lot of times we have a tendency to stop right there without probing further. But what I'm going to encourage you to do is to start to ask a different set of questions that are not yes, no, but are actually questions that are going to let you understand more of the breadth of how they actually do those things. So if I've got somebody who said, so I, yes, I do schedules.

I might ask a question. So tell me what's, you what software do you use? And they go, let's say Microsoft project. Awesome. We use that too. Or I use co-constructor, whatever. Can you just tell me like, how do you like, how I'll tell me a little bit about like maybe think about the last couple of jobs that you've done. That's actually a really good practice by the way. Ask them to share real life examples of real life work that they've done in real life projects.

You might say, you know, for the last couple projects that you've done. Tell me a little bit about the projects. What kind of projects were they? What was the scope? What was the size? What was the nature of the job? You know, was it a homeowner? Was it commercial? Whatever, right? And then ask them, so tell me a little bit about how you manage the schedule for that job and how did you address changes in scope? How did you address delays?

How did you ⁓ manage, ⁓ how did you do resource leveling with it if they had employees that they were responsible for? ⁓ So just, you wanna get them talking and get them telling you real life examples. And you also wanna try to ask enough questions that will give you some insight into how do they think about it? How do they approach it?

Are they reactionary in the way that they deal with project schedules or are they proactive? Do they regularly meet about them or do they wait until the customer has a complaint and then they re, you know, re-look at the whole thing and then address it? Obviously, what I'm talking about is going to vary for your company depending on what your set of practices are. But essentially, you kind of get the idea. What you're going to ask is you're going to ask questions that let you really get a breath of who that person is, how they think, and what kind of discipline and practices they have about the work that they've done. ⁓ Also for a project manager, let's say another good question would be, tell me about how you manage costs, right? So if the first one's on time, on budget's the second one, tell me about how you manage costs on a project. Tell me about how you manage labor hours. And if they say, well, I look at a report every week. Okay, great.

Can you kind of give me an idea of like, what kind of report? What does it look like? What does it tell you? What do you do with that information? know, tell me about like, just tell me about this last project that you did and how you did that. Like, give me just a real life example. The more you can get them talking about a real life example, now it's gonna go out of this theoretical conversation and it's really gonna go into them speaking from experience as opposed to theory, because everybody can talk about theory, about how it should be, right? You might ask them questions about how they manage change orders. You don't want them to describe the change order process for the company. You want them to describe how they've done that. Maybe ask them about how you've dealt with a customer who had a, you know, who challenged you about a change order, or where you had to go ask for a change order after work was completed. ⁓ when it comes to as promised, you know, a good open-ended question might be something about, tell me about how you manage the client relationship. And then as you ask questions, there's two key recommendations I have. 

One is be really curious and be willing to dig and ask more questions so that you really move out of the realm of sort of these canned answers or procedural answers and really dig into understanding more about how they think. The second thing is to talk less and let them talk more. So really encourage them to be willing to talk more so that you don't end up ⁓ leading the conversation. And I'm going to talk about that for a second too because ⁓ and I've gosh I've done this in interviews where I really like somebody and I just like, there's like, I connected with them. I liked them. I liked them on the phone. I liked their experience and I really want it to be a great interview and I want them to be a fit. And what I'll notice that I'll do is I will lead the questions and I'll lead them into giving me certain answers. And I have to be like, I had to train myself to pay attention to that when I was interviewing people so that I didn't do it.

So I encourage you that you really ⁓ start to train yourself to listen for if you're leading an interview because you like somebody. Because sometimes liking someone who's gonna do a job that's very different than our job ⁓ is also can be really dangerous if it's like somebody in a finance position and they act more like a marketing person or a salesperson that person is not necessarily gonna be a best fit in your finance position. So those are just some tips that I have for you about what to be careful of and what to watch out for. So as you're going into the interview, so I'm gonna kind of just like summarize for you some recommendations that I have that I just shared with you about interviewing. One is go into that interview really clear about...

What's the skills and qualifications and responsibilities of this job I'm interviewing for? Have I identified those? Be very clear about them. Secondly, have your interview questions listed out before you even meet with that person and have them in writing so that you can refer to them and make notes on it. Third is I would at the beginning of the interview prep the conversation with the person that says, here's how this process is going to look and make sure by the way that you leave enough time for that interview so that you really have the opportunity to do that deep dive with that person. The next thing is make sure that you're asking open-ended questions, not yes, no questions, and to not leave the questions, to be willing to be super curious and ask more deep questions when you're really not clear about what it is they mean, and try to get them to use real examples of real projects as opposed to talking theory.

My experience tells me that approaching interviews and using the set of practices that I just shared with you, you end up with much better qualified candidates and you don't end up hiring the wrong person only to find out, you know, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days later that they really were not a right fit. I hope this has been helpful for you and feel free to leave a comment below or to email me and I will see you next time.


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Vicki Suiter

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