Tag Archive for: Ask These Two Questions During The Interview.

It’s rare to find a recruiter or hiring manager that will disclose the unvarnished truth about what it’s really like to work at their company. Especially in tight labor markets, they’ll paint the rosiest picture possible to persuade you to join their team. But you need to be choosy and push for a peek behind the curtain to see what it’s actually like to work there.

That’s why you need to ask these two revealing questions:

1. Could you tell me about a time when one of your employees had a great idea that improved the business?
2. Could you tell me about a specific frustration experienced by one or more of your employees?

Let’s look at the logic and science behind each question.

The first question matters because the study The State Of Leadership Development revealed that only 27% of employees say their leader always encourages and recognizes suggestions for improvement.

If your future manager can’t give you a specific example of an employee having a great idea that improved the business, that tells you that either the manager doesn’t encourage new ideas or they don’t implement them. Either case is equally bad and should be a giant warning sign that you’re likely to be frustrated in your job (assuming you’re someone who generates good ideas).

Also, be wary of answers like, “Gosh, I really can’t give any specifics because the people here are always coming up with great ideas.” Generic and unspecific answers are just as bad as non-answers. If a manager is truly soliciting and implementing their employees’ ideas, they won’t have any difficulty finding specific examples. In fact, not only will they have examples at their fingertips, they should be eager to tell you all about the smart and creative people on the team.

There are also cases, although less common, where the manager does, in fact, implement their employees’ great ideas but selfishly takes the credit for themselves. But it doesn’t really matter why the manager won’t tell you specific examples; all of the possible reasons are bad.

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Article continued …

There is no workplace on earth where employees don’t experience frustrations. But there are plenty of companies where managers don’t listen to, or fix, those frustrations. This question provides a simple test of your future manager’s candor, transparency and willingness to hear hard truths.

If the manager can’t or won’t disclose any of the frustrations their employees undoubtedly experience, it’s likely that they won’t take meaningful steps to alleviate your frustrations once you’ve taken the job.

These two recommended questions are mild enough that a good manager should have little trouble giving you detailed answers, and that’s the point. Your goal in the interview is to quickly and efficiently discover whether your future boss is a decent leader and someone for whom you could work. There are dozens of other issues that will affect whether you accept the job, like compensation, location, hours, titles, benefits and more.

But unlike the quality of management, those issues tend to be more transparently communicated upfront. Clarify them all, of course, but the manager issues will require a bit more explicit probing with the two questions.

Forbes.com| March 18, 2022 | Mark Murphy