Latest / The Leaders Lounge - AASPA Podcast / Why Interviews Fail Before They Begin

Transcript

Why Interviews Fail Before They Begin · The Leaders Lounge - AASPA Podcast

• 0:09
  Hello and welcome to ASPA's Promising Practices Podcast Series.
• 0:13
  I'm your host, Alexis Christ, meetings coordinator with ASPA.
• 0:16
  Today we are joined by Dr.
• 0:17
  Dale Fisher, Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources at Deerfield Public School District.
• 0:22
  Welcome, Dale.
• 0:23
  Well, thank you.
• 0:24
  I'm so happy to be here.
• 0:25
  I really appreciate it.
• 0:27
  How long have you been with Deerfield Public School District?
• 0:29
  And can you share a bit about your size of the district?
• 0:32
  Sure, sure.
• 0:32
  I've been with uh Deerfield for this is my I'm in my 19th year.
• 0:37
  Um we are a K-8 elementary district in uh on the North Shore of Chicago.
• 0:43
  Um approximately 3,000 students, 400 full-time equivalency staff that are split up amongst certified staff and support staff.
• 0:55
  Our promising practice topic for today is rethinking the questions why interviews fail before they begin.
• 1:00
  Dale, tell us more about this topic and how it can help you or your district.
• 1:04
  This is one of those topics that I've been passionate about for not only my time in uh human resources, but also as a principal and even as a teacher, going all the way back to when I was doing my first interviews for my middle school science position where I started off almost 28 years ago.
• 1:24
  And um, I always walk away when I was in the interviews trying to understand like what are they getting at by asking that question?
• 1:30
  And it carried over into my administrative experience, hiring both at the assistant principal and principal level, and then really being in charge of creating the hiring protocols and designing interview questions.
• 1:43
  Um, I just find that it is an area that we all think we're experts in.
• 1:48
  And if you really step back and look at what you're trying to get out of the interview questions, um, there is tremendous room for growth if we start rethinking what it is that we're trying to get at when we ask those interview questions.
• 2:04
  What led you to the point where you started to see interview questions in the way K-12 HR leaders use them as something that really needs to be rethought?
• 2:13
  Oh, that's good.
• 2:14
  Well, honestly, it came from sitting through way too many interviews where I realized we weren't really learning what we thought we were learning.
• 2:21
  I mean, for example, I'd hear one candidate give a polished, articulate answer that sounded amazing, but really didn't reveal um anything about their actual ability.
• 2:32
  So you're really looking at the charisma that comes through.
• 2:35
  Then you get another candidate, less rehearsed, probably nervous, um, would describe real rich experiences that speaks volumes about who they really are.
• 2:46
  But the team, the other people sitting in that room didn't feel as confident about them.
• 2:52
  So that disconnect made me realize our process was flawed, not necessarily the people.
• 2:57
  And so I look at this through as a confidence versus content problem.
• 3:02
  I started seeing interview questions as tools, um, tools that, when poorly designed, measure confidence or charisma instead of competence.
• 3:12
  And that's when I began pushing in my system for HR leadership teams to rethink this entire process.
• 3:18
  Not just writing better questions, but creating systems and protocols that align everyone on what quality really looks like through the interview questions themselves.
• 3:30
  What do you mean when you say typical interview questions are poorly designed?
• 3:34
  Well, I think it really gets to like, what are you trying to measure is where the poor design comes from.
• 3:39
  And even asking the question, what are you trying to measure is different than people not realizing they should be measuring something.
• 3:46
  So a poorly constructed interview question is to me one that doesn't actually measure what it's intended to.
• 3:53
  It might be too vague or too leading, or it could be open-ended, um, so open-ended that responses really can't be compared meaningfully across candidates, which is a huge problem.
• 4:06
  For instance, that classic starter question is just a bomb if you don't realize what it is that you're trying to get at.
• 4:13
  That tell me about yourself.
• 4:15
  It gives you their personality, but there's really nothing of substance to it when it comes to proficiency.
• 4:20
  So without clarity about what the question is meant to really reveal, you're probably going to get inconsistent and reliable data because no one knows what it is that you're really trying to measure if you haven't defined it.
• 4:32
  Does that make sense?
• 4:35
  So, why do so many interviews fall into the trap of writing these kinds of questions?
• 4:39
  Well, I mean, this is an easy one for me because we we're all experts.
• 4:43
  We went through an interview at some point in time, so that must be the right way that it's done.
• 4:47
  So, my my stance on it is we we mimic how we were interviewed.
• 4:51
  So most interviewers write questions based off of their own intuition and not necessarily intention, if if you understand the difference between those two.
• 5:01
  We think I'll just ask what I'd want to know.
• 5:04
  But unless there's some type of like shared experience or shared understanding amongst the team of people who are listening to that interview question on what good evidence of a skill looks or sounds like, then each person who's in that room is probably measuring something different because it's based off of what they went through.
• 5:24
  So the result is a very subjective process that rewards comfort and charisma.
• 5:31
  I said that word a couple of times now, overcompetency, which is really like what is the person bringing to the system?
• 5:39
  And so when we look back on our interview experiences, like we think that because you were hired, that that must have been a good interview.
• 5:47
  And the reality is you may have just gotten lucky you got that job because they liked you.
• 5:52
  And so you bring good charisma to the table, but anyone in HR will tell you charisma doesn't necessarily match up with how effective you are at doing the job.
• 6:00
  Where's the competency that the charisma is based on?
• 6:04
  And so that's the trap of writing those questions is I think we just replicate how we were hired and really don't look at what it takes to have a true behavior-based interview model.
• 6:16
  What happens when a hiring team doesn't have a rubric or shared standard behind their questions?
• 6:21
  Then we're just gonna tap into our own filtering system and bring in cognitive bias into the process.
• 6:28
  You hear what you want to hear.
• 6:29
  I mean, when there's no rubric, the process is essentially a type of Rorschach test.
• 6:34
  Everyone sees what they want to see and interprets the way they want to interpret because they're running through their filter.
• 6:40
  One interview might value confidence in what they're looking for, another might value conciseness.
• 6:46
  I mean, I'm a to the point type person.
• 6:48
  There's not a lot of elaboration that's going to come out of my responses.
• 6:51
  So your first instinct is to value somebody that matches what it is that you want to see.
• 6:57
  Well, if you really put something in place that is a type of rubric that lays out what a quality response is or what it is that we're looking for in that response, now you can focus in on it.
• 7:08
  So if you don't have a defined set of criteria, the decisions will actually hinge on perception and our shared experiences.
• 7:17
  Or frankly, not necessarily shared, it's our own personal experiences and definitely not performance-based.
• 7:23
  And so, getting back to what I had mentioned a couple seconds ago, that's how bias creeps into this and um how good candidates can easily get overlooked because your own bias is now determining the rubric is being based off of your internal biases and how you're looking for responses.
• 7:45
  How can a well-constructed question make a difference in the hiring process?
• 7:49
  All right, so I'll take a step back on that.
• 7:51
  If you don't have a well-constructed question, oftentimes you'll just get the spaghetti on the wall approach, which is throw everything up there and hopefully the person that's doing the word vomit finds something that's going to stick with you.
• 8:03
  And so to me, a well-constructed question is anchored in competencies that the role truly requires.
• 8:10
  What do we want it to be?
• 8:11
  We write job descriptions.
• 8:13
  Why don't we really write descriptions on what a good response would be to that question?
• 8:18
  So if you have a well-constructed question with a great rubric that supports it and invites candidates to be more specific.
• 8:25
  And this is what I really dive into.
• 8:28
  I need to see examples, I need to see evidence, I need to see reflection in the response.
• 8:34
  Um, think of like instead of how do you handle conflict, we might ask, let's word it this way, describe a time you resolved a professional conflict.
• 8:43
  Like, give me the evidence and how you would address that instead of just the vagueness that comes with a very open-ended response.
• 8:51
  So you'd want to hear like what steps did you take?
• 8:53
  What did you learn?
• 8:55
  What evidence, how would you do it differently in the future?
• 8:58
  And that type of shift pushes responses into a behavioral realm, which is really what you should be chasing here, where you can see the patterns of thinking that lead to action, not necessarily rehearsed talking points, because we all sit in the car 30 minutes before the interview and start cranking out what we think the good response would be and forget to bring in that action piece.
• 9:18
  So if the listeners have never heard this, this is really the star model situation task, action results.
• 9:26
  It's it's a behavior-based interviewing style that really gets to demonstrating evidence and and um the ability to apply learn knowledge to situations.
• 9:38
  So ultimately you're looking for past behavior or description of how they would behave given the opportunity.
• 9:46
  What does it mean to have a shared protocol for interviews?
• 9:49
  So the shared protocol steps outside the question a little bit and um it gets more towards what's the umbrella of how you actually interview your candidates.
• 9:58
  So when I work with my teams, we talk about these two words a lot: activity versus action.
• 10:05
  Um school districts, uh especially hiring teams, are notorious for activity, which is we put together interview packets, we make wonderful nameplates, we jot down some questions that we would want to be asked, and and we all sit in a room and we make it look professional, and that is everyone has a purpose, and that's activity, but it's not action.
• 10:27
  Action is we're all driven by the same set of protocols that drive us to making quality hires.
• 10:34
  And even though everyone may have a role, we understand the bigger picture.
• 10:38
  So we do a little bit of training before every round of interviewing starts because our interview teams change with every position that we have in place.
• 10:46
  And so the action there is to make sure that we're all on the same page going forward and they understand what it is that we're trying to do, and we train them on you know, that star model, situation task, action results, interview model.
• 10:59
  And so it's that set of agreements the interview team follows about how questions are asked, what kinds of evidence count as strong responses and dismissing stuff that doesn't, and then how we're actually going to put a rating in place.
• 11:12
  Like if you get information back from your interview team and everyone has like uh on a scale of one to ten, every response was a ten, and someone else has every response was a four, that can't possibly be.
• 11:24
  That means you haven't really done your shared protocol so they understand that.
• 11:28
  Um, it's the difference between everyone doing their own thing and everyone moving in the same direction.
• 11:35
  Think of you like in a boat, everyone's got to row the same way, otherwise you're rowing in circles.
• 11:39
  And so when that protocol is clear, each person on the interview team becomes part of a collective data gathering system that everyone has a role in, and that's action going forward.
• 11:50
  Activity is we're all just doing things to make it look like we're professional and are there to be a part of something, but it usually doesn't result in anything meaningful, and it's very subjective, which I'm always trying to eliminate.
• 12:05
  How does a rubric change the way interviews listen to answers?
• 12:09
  Oh, I call this the Romeo syndrome.
• 12:12
  Um, people on interview teams, I like to say fall in love with candidates.
• 12:16
  Um, and it's it's just human nature.
• 12:18
  You want to make a connection, you're listening to a person's responses, you have no information about them before they sit down at the table.
• 12:25
  And when they start providing their input, if something matches with what it is that you personally want to hear, we end up falling in love with that candidate and thinking this is the right person because it matches your paradigm.
• 12:36
  And so our goals, our protocols are designed to avoid falling in love with candidates based on charisma and actually focuses on the analysis of data.
• 12:47
  The rubric is core to that.
• 12:49
  If you have a quality rubric that lays out what's a for us, it's a scale of one to four.
• 12:55
  What's the four rating, that high-end, high quality response specific to that question, and what's the low-end response that we'll give one point on?
• 13:04
  And so think of it like how we evaluate teachers in classrooms.
• 13:08
  Hopefully, there's some type of detailed rubric.
• 13:11
  I think a lot of systems follow Danielson's framework for teaching.
• 13:16
  Every single component of the instruction that's taking place has what a high-end attempt looks at that for that particular component, all the way down to something that is lacking and there's no evidence to support it.
• 13:28
  But you have to define that.
• 13:30
  And it that that takes a lot of work.
• 13:32
  So ultimately, if you put a rubric in place instead of reacting to the candidate's personality or delivery, the interview team is listening for evidence.
• 13:43
  Like we call them listen for's.
• 13:44
  Like, do we are we getting what we needed to hear to give that the highest rating?
• 13:48
  If we didn't get that, then that's not enough for us.
• 13:51
  It's like putting calibration glasses on so that you can really focus in, put your cheaters on.
• 13:56
  Suddenly, everyone's seeing the same qualities through the same lens instead of like my glasses gave me this, well, your glasses gave you that.
• 14:04
  We all got the same set of glasses on that focus in on what we're trying to do.
• 14:08
  So that consistency is what creates what we call inner reader reliability.
• 14:12
  And as far as we're concerned, that's the holy grail of um uh interviewing is knowing that we're all on the same page with what we think a top quality answer is, and we're on the hunt for that instead of trying to satisfy our own biases.
• 14:26
  Make sense?
• 14:28
  Yeah.
• 14:28
  Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap up here today?
• 14:32
  It's not easy.
• 14:33
  I mean, we I'm 18 years into this game now in the district, and um, it's only in the last dozen or so years where we have started to really dial this in.
• 14:44
  Um, my advice to the listeners would be don't try to take on everything at once, look at key positions, and know, all right, we're gonna create interview questions for this, we're not gonna do this willy-nilly.
• 14:56
  And when we do it, we're gonna make sure there's a rubric in place for those questions that we know what the responses are that we're trying to tackle.
• 15:04
  If you don't have that, you've got to start off with some protocols that lay these expectations out, and that's that's not easy.
• 15:10
  And it's gonna require us to rethink what I had shared earlier.
• 15:14
  Like, we all think we're experts because we aced an interview and got a job.
• 15:18
  And the reality is there's not much truth to how effective your interview may have been.
• 15:22
  You you got a little lucky that your responses matched up with what people wanted to hear.
• 15:28
  In this case, designing the protocols is instrumental because it lays out that we're all gonna follow rubric, we're all gonna rate it accordingly, we're all gonna challenge ourselves what quality responses are, and that there's input from the people on the interview team to put that rubric into place.
• 15:44
  Without that rubric and without those protocols, you're just you're you're swinging in the wind.
• 15:49
  And and um ultimately, I again don't take on too much at once, take key positions and say, all right, elementary classroom teachers, we're just gonna start with that this year.
• 15:59
  Maybe next year we'll throw in encore teachers, and after the year after that, we'll throw in support staff, and the year after that we'll do administration so that this is manageable because it can be overwhelming if you think you're gonna restructure your entire interview uh protocols, particularly the questions you're gonna ask in those interviews in a weekend.
• 16:18
  That's not gonna happen.
• 16:19
  There's a lot of um system systemic change that needs to take place for that to be effective.
• 16:25
  Thank you, Dale, for sharing your insights and promising practice with our members.
• 16:29
  We invite you to join us next month and every first Wednesday of the month for our promising practices podcast series where we will explore best practices for your district.