BEFORE THE INTERVIEW
1: The day before the interview, confirm your interview attendance via email.|
2: Know your resume in terms of ...
Quality of education
Quality of work experience
Subject knowledge
Transferable cognitive skills: Communication skills, quality of judgement, problem solving skills
Transferable behavioural traits: Interpersonal skills
3: Know the ethical standards of your profession.
4: Learn about the organization: Assume that you will only be able to use 25% of your knowledge about the company, so do not force information into your interview answers.
5: Learn about the people that will interview you through the company website, LinkedIn, etc..
AT THE INTERVIEW
1: Dress professionally according to the tribal culture (e.g. journalists, programmers, field scientists, lab scientists), conservatively but not too conservatively, something that shows your personality.
2: Bring two copies of your resume to the interview, one for the interviewer(s) and one for yourself, in case you need a detail from it.
3: Greet every interviewer with a good handshake.
4: Be honest without malice. Honesty beats everything else. (And you wouldn't want to work for an organization that doesn't appreciate honesty.)
5: Have good answers for the standard questions. (If you don't know them, google "standard interview questions".)
6: Prepare three questions that you want to ask. They can be standard questions, but they must be relevant. E.g.: What does the workday/week/year look like for the holder of this position? Is there anything that I failed to address in my answers?
7: Say good-bye to every interviewer with a good handshake.
AFTER THE INTERVIEW
1: After the interview, send a genuine thank you note via email.
2: Never ask for feedback from interviewers unless they offer it.
STANDARD INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Tell us about yourself.
Why should we hire you?
What are your strengths/weaknesses?
Tell us about our organization.
Tell us about a time when you had to handle a conflict.
How do you manage work/life balance?
What is your leadership/management style?
Do you have any questions for us?
What are your salary expectations?
This last one is one annoying question. First, any organization should know the financial value of a position and have properly budgeted for it. Second, it always sounds to me as if an organization wants to see what little salary they can get away with. Third, candidates will feel that they have to underbid their competitors, when really they should be competing on merit rather than desperation. In fact, I would urge all organizations to include salary ranges in their job postings.
Still, if you are urged to give a number tell them: "Compensation is a complex utility function of responsibilities, workload, number of supervised staff, quality of supervised staff, work hours, benefits, vacation, work environment, collegiality, Pink's big three (autonomy, mastery, purpose), goals, resources, salary of supervisor, salaries of supervised staff, etc.." Then give them a range of what you think is the minimum to the maximum financial value of the position. The range may be quite large, e.g. $80,000 to 160,000, which is fine. They wanted a number, and you gave them two.
11 July 2019
On job interviews
Selection criteria in the labour market
17 January 2019
Leadership -- Nature red in tooth and claw
I am a zoologist by training, and as such my expertise lies in animal behaviour and system dynamics. I know little about the psychology of leadership, except for a couple of decades of informal observation. That's why two weeks ago I asked this question on LinkedIn:
Given that LinkedIn is so rich in leadership wisdoms -- some good, many trite -- tell me, why is the world so poor in good leaders?
The results are disappointing. In spite of 175 or so views, few tried to answer my question. But then many employees are LinkedIn with their bosses and may therefore be reluctant to attract attention to themselves(1).
In any case, I myself must give the question a shot.
PROPOSITION #1: I AM WRONG.
This is the null hypothesis, if you will, and it is always a possibility: There is nothing interesting going on, the world is in fact not poor but rich in good leaders. And it is just I who wouldn't recognize good leadership if it hit me in the face.
But why then would the world be so rich in leadership advice(2)? If good leadership is a ubiquitous phenomenon, why are people spending time writing books, developing courses, or designing websites about it. We usually don't spend intellectual effort on things that are trivial(3).
That said, one human's dream is another human's nightmare.
PROPOSITION #2: BAD LEADERS DON'T LEARN.
I have yet to meet the bad leader who doesn't think she/he is a good leader. And if you think you are good at something, you wouldn't pick up a book or take a course to teach you the basics. There are two forces at play, both revealed in a study by Kruger and Dunning in 1999(4).
First: "[T]hose with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it."
Second: "[O]ne would have thought negative feedback would have been inevitable at some point in their academic career. So why had they not learned? One reason is that people seldom receive negative feedback about their skills and abilities from others in everyday life[.]"
Promotion may lead to the delusion of infallibility. True information rarely makes it up the chain of command. How many people do you know who told their bosses that they are morons, or monsters, or marionettes?
PROPOSITION #3: GOOD LEADERSHIP IS HARD.
What is good leadership, anyway? My incomplete list is this, but make your own:
A good leader is competent and diligent in work and judgement.
A good leader is confident, self-reflective, and humble.
A good leader is honest and transparent.
A good leader is open to criticism and ideas.
A good leader is aware what is going on in the organization.
A good leader gives credit and takes blame.
A good leader is kind, and tough, and fair, and can laugh about herself/himself.
A good leader builds workplaces "where standards are high and fear is low"(5).
A good leader knows her/his subordinates and protects them when necessary.
A good leader understands hierarchy.
...
Nobody is perfect, and that is all right. It takes talent, and education, and experience to get better at leadership. None of this matters, however, if your behaviour is not genuine.
And one thing is certain: If your natural inclination is to be selfish or lazy, to lie and to hide things, to be nasty or disinterested, leadership is not for you.
PROPOSITION #4: LEADERSHIP -- NATURE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW.
The question is this: How do so many bad leaders reach and maintain their positions?
This is a problem of natural selection, or rather unnatural selection: The character traits that cause people to move up the hierarchy may be very different from the character traits that make people good leaders(6).
I will leave it to you to explore which character traits and professional skills lead to promotion at your organization -- competence/sycophancy, humility/arrogance, honesty/pretence/scheming, realism/unbridled optimism, et cetera.
It may be argued that it is half a miracle that a few good people make it to the top. Not necessarily. Good leaders will hire good people and sack bad ones. Bad leaders will hire bad people and lose good ones(7). Consequently, we should expect to see in nature two extremes, meritocracies and kakistocracies.
Does that mean that we may be condemned to suffer bad leaders(8). I am not sure. Whether they like it or not, leaders usually feel obliged to agree that leaders should be held to the highest standards.
Let's start holding our leaders to the highest standards. Accountability should scare at least the worst people.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
(1) I believe it is fair to say that in the history of humankind people were usually shot for the questions they asked, not for the answers they gave. Still, silence is golden.
(2) As of 17 Jan 2019, amazon.com lists over 60,000 books for "leadership", there are an unbelievable 23,853 groups on LinkedIn that contain the word "leadership", and a Google search on "good leadership" returned "[a]bout 4,560,000 results".
(3) One should never underestimate the capacity of universities to develop programs in about anything. As Robert A. Heinlein has his protagonist say in his 1961 novel: "But when they began handing out doctorates in comparative folk dancing and advanced flyfishing, I became too stinkin' proud to use the title. I won't touch watered whiskey and take no pride in watered down degrees." 1961, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1961.
(4) Justin Kruger and David Dunning (1999), Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77(6): 1121 - 1134
(5) "Ethical leadership … is about building workplaces where standards are high and fear is low." James Comey (2018), A Higher Loyalty: xi
(6) "But what we need is that the only men to get power should be men who do not love it[.]" Plato (ca. 375 B.C.E.), The Republic: The Simile of the Cave: 521b
(7) It is the privilege of leaders to hire their subordinates. But we can also imagine a world where the workforce elects their leader. In fact, that is what we are doing in representative democracies.
(8) Is it better to have a bad leader or none at all? With the emergence of new hierarchies where everybody is a leader and few do the actual work, something to think about.