Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

You’ve been hiring a lot of people lately. What’s driving your
growth?
How has your digital strategy affected your retail strategy?
How do your employees translate the corporate social responsibility
you promote into their own work lives?
How are you doing with your questions and your answers? The best way to
know is to listen to yourself. So try practicing by recording your answers on

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your smartphone. Do one answer at a time. Take it from someone who has done
TV all his life—watching and listening to yourself is a sobering experience!
You’ll be your harshest critic, but the experience will allow you to modulate
your voice and fine-tune your answers so you project confidence and fluency.
If you’re the interviewer, you hope your candidates have practiced their
responses. You want them to impress you, to talk about their strengths and why
they’re the perfect fit for the job you’re filling. So you have to ask precisely and
persistently to get beyond the résumé and practiced responses. Tailor the
questions to the candidate and the job. If you’re filling a management position,
ask about how your applicant deals with people, motivates success, and handles
setbacks. If the job requires physical endurance, ask about similar work the
candidate has done and how he stayed healthy. You are asking questions that call
for tangible answers that shed light on your applicant’s talent, experience, and
personality. You want to get a sense of what will motivate her and keep her
productive. You ask about situations or experiences that illuminate intangible
characteristics, such as how the person deals with adversity or thinks creatively.
You want insight into the other person’s work ethic and professional
expectations, goals, and ambitions.
What’s the most successful project you’ve run?
What is it about this job that interests you most?
How does this job connect with your larger professional aspirations?
Both the interviewer and the interviewee have an interest in clarifying the
expectations of the workplace and establishing the qualities that each party
brings to the relationship. Both try to dig out information by using direct lines of
inquiry and by listening to words and tone. Both are asking themselves:
Will this be a good fit?
Do our skills and interests align?
Do we want the same things?
Are we compatible?
Job interview questions that look for compatibility come in some basic
shapes and sizes. They ask you to:
Introduce yourself. These questions ask who you are, what you’ve

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accomplished, what you’ve learned. They ask about background and
qualifications, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. They reveal what
makes you unique.
Share your vision. Imagine that you are already on the job and part of the team.
Take a situation, an opportunity, or a crisis and say how you would meet it.
What risks would you take? Apply your past experience and knowledge to the
new and imagined challenge.
Acknowledge setbacks and challenges. These questions go to the hard things in
life—the really tough decisions, the failures, and the conflicts. This line of
inquiry explores the human story and the adversity that calls for ingenuity,
fortitude, and resilience.
Swing at the curveball. Think fast! These out-of-the blue questions test
spontaneity and creative thought. They push people out of their prepared
responses to get to the unvarnished and the genuine. Be creative. Be genuine.
Have some fun.
Hunting the Best Heads
To get an inside perspective on the questions that job interviewers value most, I
called Shelly Storbeck, managing partner of Storbeck/Pimentel and Associates,
an executive search firm that specializes in higher education and nonprofit
recruitment. I’d met Shelly years before when I was a candidate in a search. She
is a keen judge of character and a realist about what it takes to be a leader in
academia, where every stakeholder needs to be heard. Change is difficult when
tenured faculty, defiant students, helicopter parents, and tradition-loving alumni
have a say. There can be as many constituencies on campus as there are in a
good-sized city.
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

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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: