With eight plus years working in both Google and Facebook, I have had the opportunity to interview a lot of great people, candidates to different positions varying from finance to sales and operations, professionals that come from CFOs, photographers, artists, entrepreneurs, musicians, lawyers, gamers and the list keeps going.
What is great in working for such both companies is that they look for great people regardless their background, so we focus on each one’s potential which also means the value proposition of a person in the mid and long term.
The staffing teams play a very important role here, filtering curriculums, phone screening and fine tuning the triage process. After that, interview processes begin and we seek to make the right questions to find out the right people. However, it is still hard to get to know people in depth in such short period of time, a pool of four to seven interviews lasting 30 to 45 minutes each has proved to be appropriate but it will never be 100% accurate in 100% of the time. Eventually, we can spend a lifetime trying to understand or get along with our closest ones, so imagine a stranger in an interview.
So, mistakes can happen of course, hiring process is not perfect anywhere but we need to try and learning from them.
In my personal opinion, something that I have learnt from all those +400 interviews is that one candidate’s success in an interview can be split in two halves, one is the willingness to succeed and the other is the soft and hard skills match for that particular position.
Next, I will only talk about the first half since it seams to be more subtle.It is different when a candidate comes to the interview and introduces himself with a smile in the face, keeps eye contact, has pre-formatted questions showing that they got prepared for the session, shows confidence with their body language, such as good posture and firm hands shaking, researched a minimum about the interviewers and so creates rapport faster, did the homework by studying the company’s businesses and products, expresses sentiment and excitement about that position… This list can also go on and on.
The willingness can be expressed in many forms and it never comes with one gesture alone, the candidate can act going ‘by the book’ and do what is necessary to but when all of this is genuine, an experienced interviewer can get it in the first 30 seconds and a not so experienced one will be subtly impacted as well by the candidate’s energy and momentum.
I failed more times than succeeded in hiring processes as candidate and I know now for sure that all the times that I succeeded I knew what I wanted and what was my level of energy and engagement to the process. I got excited before and after each step of the process, I wanted to tell my friends and family about every details, I used all communication channels I had to connect with my interviewer, such as asking for utilizing the whiteboard and drawing charts. I stood up, gesticulated, my body showed my excitement in a natural and genuine way just like children do.
The picture above that I chose for this article illustrates some of this, that is my son on the lane six. I have re-learnt from him that kids’ ability of engaging and deploying all of yourself to the present moment in whatever you do.
Imagine that if you are in the finals against a candidate as good as you regarding the soft and hard skills the position requires, what will make you stand out is the willingness to succeed, your level of energy perceived during all the process. You will be the one making part of my team.
Denis Caldeira de Almeida