Posts from the ‘Recruitment’ Category

Jan 21

What Drives Your People?

“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

If you’ve interviewed in the last decade or so you’re likely to have heard this question.

I’ve always I struggled with answering it because it seems to demand performance rather than honesty. How can I know where I’ll be in 5 years? At a Neko Case concert? Spending too much money on tea? Trying to salvage my last contact lens from the sink drain? These are the very few constants in my life…

I think that well-meaning interviewers and managers ask this question to try to get a sense of what someone wants. What their aspirations are. How they see the narrative arc of their professional lives unfolding.

Aug 5

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How We Fool Ourselves Into Bad Hiring

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Hiring the right person is not easy. No matter how much we’d like to think otherwise, good hiring is more art than science; and like many art forms, creative approaches abound.

A few weeks ago I happened to come across a Glassdoor tweet, linking to an article about the ‘hardest’ interview questions out there. Curious, I clicked through, and was involuntarily overcome with an acute episode of eye-rolling, due to the fact that by ‘hardest’, the writer actually meant ‘senseless’. I was further irritated to note that a former employer of mine was represented on this list, dutifully reported by the poor, unfortunate souls who had been subjected to this nonsense and lived to tell the tale. Read more