Shelly leads her candidates through multiple rounds of interviewing, questioning, and probing in the first screening before recommending them to the next phases of the hunt. Then search committees, senior administrators, faculty, students, and staff submit applicants to days of questioning to determine if they have the vision and fit the institution intellectually, professionally, and emotionally.
In her interviewing, Shelly cuts right to the chase. If it’s a presidential search, she asks the candidate to talk about his or her experience pursuing presidential goals—fundraising, governance, enrollment, raising academic quality. She asks for specifics. If increasing diversity is a priority, for example, she asks:
How have you pursued diversity?
Who and how many diverse candidates have you actually hired?
How did you get robust candidate pools?
How did you mentor the people you brought on board?
To tap into a candidate’s vision, Shelly asks what she calls “magic wand” questions to draw out the big ideas that leadership confers—potentially game-changing ideas that can bend an institution’s trajectory and change its culture.
If you had a magic wand here, what would you do with it?
How would you work with different constituencies?
What is your ambition for this institution and how would you achieve it?
The magic wand invites the user to skip over politics and bureaucracy and think creatively.
If red flags have come up through reference checks, Shelly asks about those, too. She asks artfully, seeking candor and reflection rather than defensiveness or evasion. Knowing that everyone on a university or college campus has an opinion and just about every leader gets criticized by someone, she might ask:
What would your detractors say about you?
A self-aggrandizing answer masquerading as self-criticism doesn’t cut it. “I work too hard and people don’t like it when I send out emails at 3 a.m.” is not what she’s looking for. She wants honesty and realism; she listens for a thoughtful response that suggests the candidate is aware of her foibles and cares about how they play with the people around her. She considers this essential because the complexity of an executive’s job requires a tapestry of relationships to build consensus.
“Self-awareness is essential to being a successful leader,” Shelly explained to me.
Look Back, Look Ahead
Job interview questions fall into two constructs: what you have done and what you will do. The first kind, behavioral questions, ask a candidate to look back on what he or she has accomplished, achieved, or attempted. These questions dig into the lessons that time and experience have imparted.
Can you provide an example of when you set a goal and a timetable and achieved them?
Give me an example of how you responded when your boss asked you for advice or asked you to do something that you disagreed with.
What’s the hardest decision you’ve had to make at work, and how did you go about it?
These questions help shed light on how a job candidate has behaved under specific circumstances. They probe for details. But more than merely revisiting the past, they explore dilemmas and decisions that reveal ethics and values. The ways a candidate confronted a difficult challenge or dealt with a setback indicates how she might deal with problems in the new job.
Because past performance does not necessarily predict future results, good interviews also include situational questions. These future-oriented questions seek to reveal how a candidate would look forward and respond to a potential decision or situation. The best questions combine the particulars of a situation with a challenging choice.
Suppose your company had a very good year. You’ve been asked how the additional profits should be spent. What would you recommend?
If you were told that all departments had to cut 5 percent in spending and you were responsible for the budget, how would you decide where to cut?
A coworker tells you that she thinks she is not being paid fairly, that other people at about the same level of work are making more than she is. Now what?
There is a project the boss believes in passionately but that you think is ill-advised and may even get the company in trouble. You have a meeting to discuss it. What do you say?
These questions help establish quality of character and how candidates can imagine their way through adversity. They ask the candidate to connect aspirations and thought process to illuminate how he or she would draw on experience, logic, integrity, and understanding of the issues to make a decision.
Finding Innovation
Interviews for management and creative jobs ask how you will imagine, lead, or innovate. It seems that every company trumpets innovation these days, so how does an interviewer bring out innovation in an applicant? How does the successful applicant answer such questions?
I thought Jean Case would be a good person to consult. She and her husband, Steve Case, helped ignite the technology revolution back in the 1990s when Steve cofounded America Online. Back then, we ponderously referred to the internet as the World Wide Web. AOL brought it into just about everyone’s home. The company became synonymous with the emerging new world of digital communication and connection. Jean was a senior executive and helped make AOL one of the world’s most recognized and transformational companies.
In the late 1990s, as AOL approached its zenith, Steve and Jean Case created the Case Foundation. I first met them when AOL bought Time Warner, which owned CNN. The merger proved to be a disaster, but the Case Foundation, run by Jean, lives on, bringing people and technology together with philanthropy and business to push for social change. The Case Foundation sees itself as a convener of innovators. I wanted to know how the Cases found the people to do the work and inspire the change they sought. What did they ask in order to assemble a creative, original, technologically dexterous team?
I met Jean for lunch at a cramped but trendy seafood place in Washington. She arrived practically at a run, with a big, broad smile and a whoosh of energy, one hand clutching her smartphone, the other outstretched in greeting. She dove into conversation.
I expected her to be data- and metrics-driven, with a predetermined list of questions that probed the applicants’ experience, asked about what they had invented, and tested their technological competence. I was wrong. Jean wants to learn as much about how people think as what they think and know.
Jean is impatient. You see that instantly. She speaks fast and about big ideas. She is active in many causes—from planetary health to brain health. She’s served on school boards and presidential commissions. She doesn’t have time to waste. So when she asks questions of a job candidate, she expects precision and speed. She wants to know if the candidate has done his homework and has something original to say. She asks:
What have we gotten right?
What haven’t we gotten right?
What’s missing?
If you were sitting in my chair, what would you have done?
She asks about decisions the candidate has made or actions he has taken that are out of the ordinary. She is listening for answers that indicate the candidate can think fast and pivot when an opportunity or a setback changes the equation. She’s looking for risk takers.
How comfortable are you with unplanned surprises that come along?
Are you bold enough to put on the table an idea that’s fearless when you don’t have the data to know it will work?