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By Nicholas Wiseman, Managing Partner, Stevenson Search Partners
Senior executives are usually very good at interviews. By the time they are sitting across the table from you, they know how to tell their story, connect their experience to your priorities and anticipate most of the questions they are likely to be asked.
That is simply the reality of interviewing experienced people. It also means it can be surprisingly easy to leave a meeting with a strong impression of someone without having learned all that much about how they actually think, make decisions or respond when the conversation moves off script.
That can be even harder when the interviewer, however senior and experienced, is not an expert in the specific function they are hiring for.
One way to get more from the conversation is to ask questions that are harder to anticipate.
A handful of questions can be particularly useful in getting beyond the prepared story. Not because they are designed to catch anyone out, but because they tend to produce more candid answers.
Three I particularly like are:
“What is the most important decision you have made where the prevailing view was against you, and what gave you the conviction to proceed?”
- This gets at more than whether someone is comfortable disagreeing. I want to understand what gave them conviction, how they weighed the evidence and whether they were able to execute when the prevailing view pointed elsewhere.
“Which successful decision in your career would you make differently today, and what has changed in how you think about it?”
- This separates the quality of the decision from the eventual outcome. That distinction is especially relevant in biotech, where science can succeed or fail for reasons that are not always a clean reflection of the decision making behind it.
“Where do you see the greatest risk of mismatch between what we need, what you would bring and the conditions required for you to succeed?”
- This is a more useful way of testing fit than a generic culture question. It can surface differences around mandate, authority, resources or expectations before they become problems later.
A good executive interview should still tell you something you did not already know. You should leave with a clearer view of how that person thinks, where the risks may sit and whether the fit is as strong as it first appeared. The candidate should probably have learned something about you too.
The strongest candidates are also judging the people across the table: how candidly challenges are discussed, whether different views are genuinely welcomed, whether the mandate feels real and whether this is a group they can imagine working alongside through difficult moments.
In reality, the interview is already giving both sides a pretty good indication of what working together might feel like.
