Evan Renaerts

The Art of Interviewing

October 24, 2007

The sunlight, slanting down through the oak tree outside my window, picks out the rust, orange, yellow, pale green of the leaves – like jewels overflowing their container.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing lately; interviewing clients about what is of importance to them and then watching them interview others. In most organizational interviews the purpose is to discover what is working well and what is problematic and to do that the interviewer needs to be coming in with a curious, open mind.

Something I notice is how different people tend to either over prepare or under prepare before they begin interviewing. The “over” group put time and effort into generating an extensive list of questions, while the “under” group prefer to approach their subject with a blank sheet of paper. Either of these strategies can work and either can lead the interviewer into dead ends very quickly.

In over preparing one of the big traps is for the interviewer to assume that the line of questioning that they have decided on is also important to the person they are hoping to draw out. If their assumption is wrong they may find themselves getting single syllable answers and no useful information.

What can happen in this scenario is that as we develop our list of questions we get inadvertently caught up in our own picture of what is happening in the organization or our own bias about how things need to move forward. When we begin interviewing based on our own “dream” of what is happening there can be a subtle form of manipulation going on – we are trying to coax out the answers we expect to get – and this will close down those we are interviewing.

For the personality type who likes to prepare especially well, I always suggest that they team up with at least one other person to brainstorm a list of really open questions. Generally the people being interviewed are willing to talk once they can see that someone is genuinely listening.

The under prepared interviewer is often the one who believes that they can, “just wing it.” They begin their interviews by asking people how they are and if they are happy, in the belief that if they set a tone of interest the other person will respond. What most often happens is that they get back answers and information as vague as the questions they are asking.

One key in any interview is respect for the person being interviewed. I always prepare myself by recalling that the person I am about to see is a “client,” someone I am in service of. My job is to support them to discuss what excites them, what frustrates them and most importantly, what they dream about for themselves and the organization where they spend such a large part of their life.

Time has become a scarce commodity for most people and most organizations and this poses a serious problem. People work better when their relationships are strong, and relationships take time. When people have time to talk they will usually signal, through their words, what kinds of things concern them and what they wish were different.

Organizations that take the time to interview their management and staff every few years have a much better chance of maintaining a realistic understanding of the issues, concerns and dreams within their business or service organization. Knowledge is power, and this kind of knowledge can enable an organization to address concerns before they become roadblocks. Every now and again this kind of knowledge can lead an organization to make radical and positive change.

One of the real pleasures in interviewing is watching someone’s eyes light up when they realize that, “this person is really listening.”

Evan Renaerts
604 314 0835
evan@evanrenaerts.com