Interviewing Strategy - Knowledge Is Power

A frequently asked question during an employment interview. Savvy candidates have done their homework by sleuthing the internet for company histories and annual reports or have used search engines such as Google to find out details about organizations and organizational structures.

Having worked in the Human Resources and recruiting field for close to 25 years, I have observed significantly different levels of sophistication in the "interview process" of a number of different organizations both as a potential candidate and a recruiting professional and HR business partner. I've seen structured processes where hiring entities ask highly relevant, job related behavioral and competency based questions followed by a variety of psychometric tests. I have also encountered organizations with hiring entities that ask very broad based questions ("tell me about yourself") and had discussions that seemed very unstructured.

Consider the following:

"Because job applicants are becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is not unusual for a company to inadvertently hire an individual who makes the best impression, rather than the person who is best suited for the position."
--Users Guide, Caliper

"Most people hire people they like, rather than the most competent person. Research shows that most decision-makers make their hiring decisions in the first five minutes of an interview and spend the rest of the interview rationalizing their choice."
-- Orv Owens, psychologist, in the New York Times

As a candidate, is there anything you can do to either leverage an interviewer's cognitive bias in your favor, find a connection or position yourself to be a person that they "like?" Perhaps another important question for candidates to know the answer to is "What do you know about the person interviewing you?"

Knowledge of a hiring entity's background, interests, involvement or passions could be leveraged in an interviewing situation and could quite possibly make a difference in the outcome of an interview.

Candidates scheduled for on site interviews by a recruiter should inquire "who will I possibly be interviewing with?" Those names can be researched through internet tools such as Linkedin or Zoominfo. Most search engines fail when it comes to people search. Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related documents are stored in databases and not on static web pages, most of the higher-quality information about people is simply "invisible" to a regular search engine. You can search what is referred to as the "deep web" with Pipl.

In any case, savvy candidates are the most prepared candidates and they know that "knowledge is power." Not only will they leverage internet tools for more information, they will use the acquired knowledge in the interview, or take it a step further and perform a reference check on the people who will be interviewing them that could potentially become their new boss.