The Final Interview’s Moment of Truth

How to ensure that you have retained the best candidate for the job. The reality is that most jobs come with some negative aspects. The real job for the candidate is to figure out if the positives of the job far outweigh the negatives, to make the negatives feel trivial. The trick for you is to figure out which of your final candidates is truly motivated to take on the worst that the job will have to throw at him or her, and come out triumphant and smiling.

I have conducted many interviews over the years for management and senior level leadership roles and, in my experience, the best way to determine if you have the right candidate is to get very honest about the challenges of the job. I have found that the discussion that ensues from this one comment and question can tell the interviewer much about how committed the candidates are to making their new job a success. This comment will also provide a rich context for ensuring that the candidates will be going in with their eyes wide open, while creating an opening for trust.

I have always ended my interviews with the following moment of truth comment and question, “So now, let me tell you why you don’t want this job.” Following this, I enumerate the most difficult aspects of the challenges that the person will face when leading the activities expected of their new role. In some cases, I have focused on the significant resistance that will be faced from within the organization when leading reengineering activities. In another instance, when interviewing candidates for a leadership position to create a new sales and marketing function within my corporate startup, I focused on the significant conflict that would arise with the parent organization who might want to prevent our startup from defining new guidelines for sales, marketing, and branding activities. In yet another situation, I was trying to fill a very senior role and pointed out the longs hours and very hands-on approach that the candidate would have to take as we were building a new business in a lean startup mode and with very little budget and resources available in the first year.

Each time, I would go into the details of why the role would be very challenging and how demanding I would be about expectations and commitment to team and success. I would end with a simple question, “so, do you still want the job?” The manner, tone, and level of assurance with which the candidates replied always told me a lot. The questions that the candidates would ask regarding what I said would help me assess their mindset and willingness to take up a good challenge. This brutally honest discussion also ensured that we were starting our eventual relationship on a footing of transparency and honesty. I have had some candidates withdraw, but the ones that took advantage of the opportunity generally did very well. There have been many conversations in future one-on-one meetings months into their new job, where, after telling me about the difficulties they were facing, they would add, “it’s not like you hadn’t warned me, but I just needed you to be aware.”