Interviewing Techniques for Managers

Interviewing

Techniques

for Managers

Other titles in the Briefcase Books series include:

Customer Relationship Management

by Kristin Anderson and Carol Kerr

Communicating Effectively by Lani Arredondo

Performance Management by Robert Bacal

Recognizing and Rewarding Employees by R. Brayton Bowen

Six Sigma for Managers by Greg Brue

Motivating Employees by Anne Bruce and James S. Pepitone

Leadership Skills for Managers by Marlene Caroselli

Negotiating Skills for Managers by Steven Cohen

Effective Coaching by Marshall J. Cook

Conflict Resolution by Daniel Dana

Project Management by Gary R. Heerkens

Managing Teams by Lawrence Holpp

Hiring Great People by Kevin C. Klinvex,

Matthew S. O’Connell, and Christopher P. Klinvex

Retaining Top Employees by J. Leslie McKeown

Empowering Employees by Kenneth L. Murrell and Mimi

Meredith

Presentation Skills for Managers, by Jennifer Rotondo

and Mike Rotondo

The Manager’s Guide to Business Writing

by Suzanne D. Sparks

Skills for New Managers by Morey Stettner

Manager’s Survival Guide by Morey Stettner

Managing Multiple Projects by Michael Tobis and Irene P. Tobis

To learn more about titles in the Briefcase Books series go to

www.briefcasebooks.com

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these books in training programs, and more.

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A Briefcase

Book

Interviewing

Techniques

for Managers

Copyright © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the

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Contents

Preface ix

1. Why Am I Interviewing? 1

Behavioral Interviewing 1

Interviewing: It’s Not Just Asking Questions 9

Skills for Successful Interviews 11

Steps in Any Interview 12

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 1 16

2. How Can I Connect with the Person

I’m Interviewing? 17

How to Use the Platinum Rule 19

Discover Your Communication Style 20

Recognizing Communication Styles and

Modifying to Adapt 25

Caution: Contents Under Pressure! 35

Planning to Modify Your Way of Communicating 38

Planning to Gain Information from People

Who Are Different from You 39

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 243

3. What Questions Should I Ask—and How? 45

What Types of Questions Should You Ask? 45

How to Decide What Questions You’ll Ask 57

How Should You Ask the Questions? 60

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 3 66

4. How Should I Plan for the Interview? 68

Setting Objectives 70

Determining and Setting the Environment 78

v

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Determining and Setting the Plan: Agenda and Methods 86

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 4 90

5. How Should I Prepare for the Interview? 91

Gathering Information Before the Interview 91

What to Communicate in Advance to Prepare the Person 93

Creating and Using the Interview Tools 96

Legal Issues 101

Putting It All Together 108

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 5 108

6. How Should I Begin and End the Interview? 109

The Beginning: Gaining Attention and Creating Comfort 112

The Ending: Gaining Commitment 127

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 6 130

7. What Are They Saying ... and Conveying? 131

Active Listening 132

What Are You Listening For? 134

Active Listening Behaviors 139

Getting Rid of Barriers to Listening 148

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 7 151

8. What if They Don’t Act Like I Expect? 153

Six Difficult Behaviors 155

Behaviors, Possible Causes, and Your Response 157

Figuring Out the Causes 162

Avoiding Negative Emotions 171

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 8 174

9. How Do I Use Technology Successfully? 175

What’s Different When Conducting Interviews

Using Technology? 176

Telephone, Conference Calls, and Videoconferencing 179

Web 184

E-mail and Instant Messaging 187

Audio- and Videotaping 191

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 9 192

10. How Do I Use the Information I’ve Gathered? 194

Methods for Clarifying When You Need Additional

Information After the Interview 196

Making Decisions with the Information 200

vi Contents

Communicating the Decision and Creating a

Positive Feeling About Your Organization 201

Continuously Improving Your Interviewing Skills 207

Manager’s Checklist for Chapter 10 210

Index 211

Contents vii

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Preface

Be honest: the first reaction to the word “interviewing” is

what? Employee hiring. Yes, like the almost everybody in

the world, we hear or read the word “interviewing” and we think

“employment.”

Interviewing is simply getting information from another per￾son. We all use this skill every day. In fact, most days you’ll be

involved in at least 10 interviews a day—ones you initiate and

ones initiated by others. Every time you work at getting infor￾mation from customers about the problem they’re having,

you’re interviewing. Every time you talk with a potential cus￾tomer to learn his or her needs, you’re interviewing. In every

performance appraisal conversation that includes gaining infor￾mation from your employee, you’re interviewing. Every time

you talk with your colleagues in other companies to learn how

they do things, you’re interviewing. Every time you discuss with

your coworkers while planning a project or determining the

strategic plan for the company, you’re interviewing. And, of

course, every time you gain information from potential employ￾ees and volunteers, you’re interviewing.

It’s a bit of a twist. This book focuses on interviewing skills—

information-gaining skills—in every situation. If you’re in

Customer Service, the steps and skills you’ll learn will help you

gain information from customers. If you’re in Human Resources,

Marketing, Sales, Volunteer Management, Operations, Finance,

or IS, this book will help you make it easy and enjoyable for

your direct employees, coworkers, customers, and colleagues

to give you the information you need.

As I wrote, I struggled (no pity, please—it was great fun!) to

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x Preface

balance the “just the facts” style of Briefcase Books with the

need to give you examples for all types of gaining information

from others. No matter what managerial responsibilities you

hold, I wanted you to see yourself and the type of information

gaining you do as you read each step and worked on each skill.

To do this, as you’ll see, I wrote examples for each person and

situation in which you’d interview and/or I made the description

of each step in the interviewing process so generic that you’d

feel like this applied to you and the people you interview.

You’ll also notice that I know something about each of you—

you’re incredibly busy and you’ll read just the chapters you feel

you needed. Look at the table of contents. The chapters are the

steps to successful interviewing, in order. Reading chapters here

and there as you need them quite obviously will cause you to

miss some of the steps you need to take to gain the information

you need. So, each chapter is full of references to pages in the

book where you’ll find those steps.

Every interviewing step and every example uses behavioral

interviewing techniques, rather than interviewing with hypothet￾ical questions. Why? Because you’ll get the information you

need faster and it’ll be more accurate and more detailed. Why?

Because behavioral interviewing leads you to talk with people

about themselves! You’ll be talking with them about things that

happened to them, things they’ve done and how they’ve done

them.

Interviewing Techniques for Managers will help you plan and

prepare for any interview, conduct the all-important opening and

closing of any information-gaining session, and use the informa￾tion you gain to make decisions. You’ll get methods for commu￾nicating with different people in a way that makes it easy for

them to understand, creating questions, listening, taking notes,

and dealing with people who seem bent on making it difficult to

get the information from them. The book is full of ready-to-use

forms, tools, and checklists to make it easy for you to gain infor￾mation from anyone quickly, accurately, and in a way that

makes them feel great about you and your organization.

Preface xi

Special Features

The idea behind the books in the Briefcase Series is to give you

practical information written in a friendly person-to-person style.

The chapters are short, deal with tactical issues, and include

lots of examples. They also feature numerous sidebars designed

to give you different types of specific information. Here’s a

description of these sidebars and how they’re used in this book.

Boxes with this icon are designed to give you tips and

tactics that will help you more effectively implement

the methods described in this book.

These boxes provide warnings for where things could

go wrong in planning and carrying out your interviews.

These boxes highlight insider tips for taking advantage

of the techniques described in this book.

Every subject has some special jargon and terms.These

boxes provide definitions of these concepts.

It’s always important to have examples of what others

have done, either well or not so well. Find these sto￾ries in these boxes.

This identifies boxes where you’ll find specific proce￾dures you can follow to take advantage of the book’s

advice.

How can you make sure you won’t make a mistake

when managing? You can’t, but these boxes will give you

practical advice on how to minimize the possibility.

xii Preface

Acknowledgments

Incredible thanks to John Woods and Robert Magnan of CWL

Publishing. Bob’s editing really helped to create a great balance

between examples you’d need in order to understand what to do

and examples that just took up space (the ultimate storyteller, I

couldn’t help myself). You can actually find what you need in

this book and read it because of John’s terrific formatting and

layout. Left to my own devices, I’d have everything you needed

to know on one piece of paper: it would be huge and not very

practical—but I hate turning pages.

Interviewing

Techniques

for Managers