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A-Player A-Players Austin Baseline Selling Brad Smart career history chris mursau Dave Kurlan EO Fame Family Fortune Fun generation Y geoff smart hire better hiring hiring manager Interview interview training job description Joe Navarro Kurlan Objective Management Group OtherInbox proactive recruiting recruit don't absorb Recruiting Reference Check Retention Scorecard smarttopgrading social networking talent acquisition Topgrading topgrading interview topgrading methodology TORC tweets Twitter unemployment unemployment rate verne harnish virtual bench who the bookWhy Hunt for Needles in Haystacks?
I’m always hunting for ways hiring managers to more accurately determine who to hire that DON’T involve the requirement of being a better interviewer. In the past I’ve suggested that you should look at obvious traits like obesity and smoking addictions. I recommended that you look at the credit history of someone to determine if they know how to stay true to their word.
With that in mind, I found the most interesting article the other day about the Ivy League Advantage. It was the summary of work completed by a young Sociologist from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. She concluded, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. Here are some of the highlights:
- “Elite professional service employers” rely more on academic pedigree than any other factor. For recruiters, it’s prestige that counts, rather than “content” like grades, courses, internships, or other actual performance. That’s because if you got into a “super-elite” school — which essentially means Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), and Stanford — you must be smart.
- Why spend effort looking for “that one needle in the haystack” at a “safety school” like the University of Michigan or, heavens forfend, Bowling Green, when the run-of-the-mill Yalie’s still a prince. Even “second-tier” Ivies like Brown, according to Rivera, are suspect for the top firms.
- While going to a super-elite gets your penny loafer in the door, that isn’t enough. Rivera says it’s leisure pursuits that seal the deal. Employers use these as “valid markers” or “proxies” of a candidate’s “social and moral worth,” all the more so for time-intensive sports that “resonate with white, upper-middle-class culture.” Think lacrosse, squash, crew, and field hockey. Skip football, basketball, and soccer. And no sport at all suggests “nerd,” which correlates to future “corporate drone.”
Tags: A-Players, hire better, hiring manager, Recruiting, talent acquisition
The Psychologist Will See You Now
As I was browsing through the Sunday paper last week there was one article in particular that really caught my eye. It was written by Paul Sullivan of the New York Times and it shared the findings of a new academic study Money Beliefs and Financial Behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory published in the current issue of The Journal of Financial Therapy.
Disclaimer: this is a heavy blog post but if you finish it I think you’ll understand why I found it compelling enough to share with you as a Hiring Manager.
The worship of money or the avoidance of it are equally as destructive
He found that some people were under stress about having too little money while others were anxious about losing what they had or felt guilty for having so much. Some people immediately disliked anyone with money, while others would spend their money immediately without regard to the future.
The Klontz study asked 422 people about 72 money-related beliefs and then analyzed correlations among the answers. This produced four broad categories that Klontz called “money scripts”: money avoidance, money worship, money status and money vigilance.
- Money Avoidance: people who may be worried about abusing credit cards. They may believe that they do not deserve to have money and may sabotage their own financial well-being. People in this group tend to have low incomes and net worth. They also tend to be younger.
- Money Worship: the opposite of those with avoidance, but their behaviors are equally destructive. They believe that an increase in income or a windfall will make everything better and love the status derived from the things money can buy. This belief also lands people in debt because they use whatever credit they have to buy things that will impress others. “They believe money will solve all of your problems,” Klontz said. “This is the money belief pattern that afflicts the majority of Americans.”
- Money Equals Status: occurs when people’s self-worth is linked to their net worth. These people often take bigger financial risks because they want to have the stories of big gains to impress their friends. (Don’t expect them to tell you when those big bets do not pay off.)
- Money Vigilance: The only affliction that did not have an overwhelmingly negative impact on people’s financial future. People with this disorder do not like to share information about their income or wealth, but they also do not spend foolishly. Still, excessive wariness about spending can keep these people from enjoying the benefits of what money can buy. On the other hand, while they did not necessarily have higher incomes, they paid off their credit card bills each month. “Maybe some anxiety and vigilance around money is good for your bottom line,” Klontz said.
As Mr. Sullivan insightfully pointed out, “Not surprisingly, the four money scripts illustrate problems that have less to do with money than with what money represents.”
Most of the people in the study identified themselves as “middle class” during their developmental years. Another common thread was how people remembered a financially traumatic moment in their life. Klontz described a case in which a family was beset by debt and about to lose its house. In one case, the grandmother bails out the family. In the other, the family figures out a way to keep the house on its own. The outcome is the same, but the takeaway can be different.
“If grandma swoops in and saves the day, you could walk away from that thinking that you don’t need to worry about money,” he said. “Or where there was a lot of talk about losing the house, that could impact you so you live your life afraid of losing everything.”
What I found most interesting for you as a Hiring Manager was this: One of the goals of the study was to use the results to create a test that therapists and financial advisers could use to quickly understand their clients’ beliefs about money. Klontz estimated that administering the test could save therapists hours of conversation and help them understand how a patient came to a particular belief about money.
Conclusion: if someone you’ve got on your team grew up in an environment where their parents demonstrated destructive behaviors but got bailed out, don’t be surprised when that employee misses deadlines and expects someone else to jump in and save them.
Tags: Credit History, hiring manager, Interview, job performance, Karl Scheible, unemployment
Let’s Go Down Together
One of my very favorite songs is called Down Together by the Refreshments. The refrain includes the lyrics, “Cars break down and people break down and other things break down too so let’s go…down together”.
I had the chance to have dinner with Chris Mursau last Tuesday night in Chicago and we were discussing the single, most important reason why companies continue to experience a 50% failure rate when it comes to hiring. His assessment: Communication Breakdown.
How does this manifest itself thousands of times a day in the US alone?
- Hiring Managers understand what their priorities are in their role and they (rarely) include hiring talent to earn their bonus. As a result they email someone in HR that says “write me a job description“
- HR, not quite sure what to put in the job description, references similar jobs the company has filled in the past and creates it to get it off of their To Do list.
- The job is posted on the Internet somewhere and the resumes that come in get screened by the HR associate who wasn’t sure about the role in the first place.
- The resumes that pass the initial muster of the HR associate are forwarded to the Hiring Manager who looks at a few and decides to interview some people (though they’re not even sure what the HR team posted on the web)
- The first candidate comes in and the Hiring Manager asks a couple of associates to interview the person too (though these associates don’t have a clue what they’re even supposed to be interviewing for).
- The Hiring Manager narrows the pool down to 2 and then calls HR to ask them to decide who the best one is (again, without providing the HR team the definition of “best”).
If this sounds remotely similar, you’re not alone!
As you’ve likely read on this blog before, I believe there are 3 reasons why a new hire doesn’t work out:
- You failed to clearly define what you needed someone to do
- You failed to clearly articulate to the new hire what you needed them to do to be successful
- You failed to gain the agreement of the new hire on what it will take to be considered successful
I completely understand if you brush off my counsel but choosing to ignore this when even Chris agrees that it’s true is a true sign of foolishness.
Tags: chris mursau, hire better, hiring manager, Interview, job description, Scorecard, smarttopgrading, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology
Attitude is [almost] Everything
Conor Neill, a close friend of mine and a prominent Entrepreneur in Spain, wrote this short story below for the Entrepreneurs’ Organization’s blog. It’s a great reminder of just how important attitude is in hiring.
Two men, Bill and Frank, begin working at a hotel the same day. They are intelligent, educated and ambitious. The manager of the hotel greets them and hands them both doorman uniforms. They are to begin opening and closing the doors, helping with bags, flagging taxis, etc.
Bill thinks “Doorman? I am worth more than this! I could manage this hotel better than the current guy.” But he doesn’t have an alternative offer and he needs the money, so he does the job anyway. He maintains a pained grimace on his face and deals with customers and other staff in a negative way because he is “better than this.”
Frank, in contrast, thinks “Okay, doorman. It’s not what I had in mind, but hey, I get to spend some time outside, get to meet the customers, and I’ll learn about how this hotel works.” He sets to work with a smile on his face and finds that he quite enjoys the small challenges he faces as a doorman at such a prestigious hotel.
After six weeks, a position at the front desk opens up, and the hotel manager immediately thinks of Frank. Frank is promoted and immediately brings his positive attitude to the front desk of the hotel. Several years later, Frank is the hotel manager. He leaves late one evening and there, opening the door with a hard-wired grimace, is Bill.
Is it luck, or is it fate? Bill will spend forever in a job that he hates and Frank will love every job that he is given. This story is such an inspiration, because it encourages me to always stay positive about my responsibilities and to find the reward in every remedial task. When hiring staff I spend more time exploring attitude and self-motivation than I do exploring capabilities. I also spend time looking to direct my employees toward challenges that are motivating for them.
When it comes to running a business, I’ve learned it’s not just about the results, but the work you put in. That’s where successful people thrive.
Tags: A-Players, career history, hire better, hire for attitude train for skill, hiring, hiring manager, Interview, proactive recruiting, Retention, talent acquisition, unemployment
Icarus Was On To Something
The story told of Icarus was his attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. He ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall to his death.
What in the world does this have to do with making better hiring decisions?
Simple: in order for Icarus’s wings to melt there had to be a sun. And in hiring, the sun means a lot more than you can possibly imagine.
I grew up in the Northeast (AuSable Chasm to be specific). Summers were exceptional! We had long days where the weather hovered around 80 degrees and the sun wouldn’t set until about 9pm. My sisters and I would play for hours in the river behind our house. I’d compete in baseball games that would start at 6 and end at 8:30 but there was never any need for the fields to be lit because the sun hadn’t set yet. The way I’m describing it you’re probably thinking to yourself, “that sounds like paradise.” For those couple of months a year, it was.
But with every ray of light there’s usually a dark tunnel.
For us, that was winter. It was dark when we woke up, dark when we got on the school bus and then dark again when we got out of school around 5pm. We’d literally never see the sun except through some windows as we walked from classroom to classroom. Add to that it was often so cold and overcast that you couldn’t go outside anyway. This kind of environment became oppressive to a lot of people (my Dad, for one). It wasn’t until just 25 years ago that people started recognizing what was happening. Wikipedia has this to say:
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression, winter blues, summer depression or summer blues, is a mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter or summer, spring or autumn, repeatedly, year after year.
Once regarded skeptically by the experts, seasonal affective disorder is now well established. Epidemiological studies estimate that its prevalence in the adult population of the US ranges from 1.4 percent (Florida) to 9.7 percent (New Hampshire).
The US National Library of Medicine notes that “some people experience a serious mood change when the seasons change. They may sleep too much, have little energy, and may also feel depressed. Though symptoms can be severe, they usually clear up.” The condition in the summer is often referred to as reverse seasonal affective disorder, and can also include heightened anxiety.
How can this knowledge help you as a Leader and Hiring Manager? Simple: Behavioral-based interviewing, when conducted properly, means you should avoid questions that allow someone to answer with their opinions. Whether or not someone has lived and thrived in “the North” or “the South” before should absolutely be part of your interviewing process. Just because someone says they’ve “Always dreamed of living in Seattle because they’ve heard great things” doesn’t mean they’ll be able to survive the lack of sun. The same goes for Austin – the summers are brutal and we don’t go outside much at all from late June until early September.
SAD is real. Accept that and use the knowledge to your advantage when making a critical hiring decision that will involve moving someone from one latitude to another.
Tags: hire better, hiring, hiring manager, Recruiting, Retention, SAD, talent acquisition
CIDS Interviews: Fair or Not?
In addition to blogging here I also contribute content to Recruiting Blogs. A slightly modified version of my recent post “How to Prepare for a Topgrading Interview” drew quite a few comments but there was one in particular that I felt deserved some additional attention.
Member Mark Bregman shared his thoughts and I think they are valid concerns. I’ll share my answers here but would welcome comments on this blog, over Twitter or on our Facebook page.
I really believe in the principles of Topgrading, and have cited it along with Brad Smart many times in my own writing, but the candidates I’ve seen subjected to CIDS interviews have NOT had wonderful or even fair experiences. I have three issues with CIDS:
1. It doesn’t apply context. The behaviors analyzed in a CIDS interview can be from 20 years ago, and don’t get asked in a way that aligns with the current goals for the position. I advocate performance objective based questions that elicit the specific skills and experience needed today from the candidate, in the context of the specific job, not in a vacuum.
2. CIDS provides too much ammunition by which to DESELECT a candidate. Not every behavior or lack of behavior from someone’s past is relevant to what is needed today.
3. CIDS interviewers are often inexperienced, and don’t know how to really use the tool to best advantage.
Here are my thoughts in response to Mark:
1. The behaviors analyzed in a CIDS interview may be from 20 years ago but it’s the interviewer’s fault if they allow the discussion to drift into conversations that don’t necessarily align with the current position. On top of that, the basic questions that are used in every position are critical information that you’d want to know about someone – regardless of if the experiences are 20 years old. Example: What was the #1 thing you regret about not accomplishing in that role?
2. At HireBetter this is a discussion that we have a lot. Recommending someone for hire takes courage. It’s nearly always easier for a Hiring Manager or outside consultant suggest that inaction is better than action. Roosevelt nailed it in 1910 when he said [paraphrasing] “It is not the critic that counts. The true credit belongs to the man in the arena.” With that said, if a Hiring Manager has done their homework, they’re clear on what they need someone to do and they conduct a proper CIDS interview, they’re going to be more prepared to make a hiring decision than with any other kind of interview that I’ve seen conducted.
3. It doesn’t take much for someone to learn how to conduct a CIDS interview. However, as I shared in my response to #2, from what I’ve witnessed a poorly conducted CIDS interview is still significantly better than an “on the fly” interview that doesn’t have a structure, purpose or plan.
Bottom line: Mark brings up some good questions and CIDS interviews do have some shortcomings but, in my opinion, there’s not much else out there that will give you a better understanding of if the person you’re interviewing is right for the role you’re looking to fill.
Tags: A-Players, Brad Smart, career history, chris mursau, CIDS, hiring manager, Interview, interview training, Topgrading, topgrading interview, topgrading methodology
The Greatest Interview Question of All Time
I’m on vacation with my family in Boston this weekend (Go Jets!) and so I thought I’d go digging for some “old fashioned” blog posts that might still have a lot of validity in today’s market.
Kacey Claiborne, our Director of Talent Evaluation at HireBetter® suggested I look into this one from Lou Adler. Things that were happening when this was written:
-The World Trade Center in NYC had its 2 towers
-We didn’t need to take out/off our laptops, belts, hats or shoes at the airport
-George Bush was sworn in as President
The year? 2001
What I found truly remarkable about this one, single post was how applicable it was back then (when no one had really heard of Topgrading®) and how it is even MORE applicable today. Enjoy!
Over the course of the past 20 years, I’ve been searching for — among other things — the single best question to ask in an interview. What I wanted to create was a One-Question Interview, a stand-alone query that would pierce through the veneer of generalizations, overcome typical candidate nervousness, minimize the impact of the candidate’s personality on the interviewer, eliminate the exaggeration which many candidates adopt as an interviewing ploy and actually determine if the candidate is competent and motivated to do the work required.
Through years of trial and error, I finally hit upon one question that did it all. If you were allowed to ask only one question during the course of the interview, this would be it: Please think about your most significant accomplishment. Now, could you tell me all about it? Imagine you’re the candidate and I’ve just asked you this question. What accomplishment would you select? Then imagine over the course of the next 5-20 minutes that I obtained the following information from you about this accomplishment:
- A complete description of the accomplishment
- The company you worked for and what it did
- The actual results achieved: numbers, facts, changes made, details, amounts
- When it took place
- How long it took
- The importance of this accomplishment to the company
- Your title and role
- Why you were chosen
- The 3-4 biggest challenges you faced and how you dealt with them
- A few examples of leadership and initiative
- Some of the major decisions made
- The environment and resources available
- How you made more resources available
- The technical skills needed to accomplish the objective
- The technical skills learned and how long it took to learn them
- The actual role you played
- The team involved and all of the reporting relationships
- Some of the biggest mistakes you made
- How you changed and grew as a person
- What you would do differently if you could do it again
- Aspects of the project you truly enjoyed
- Aspects you didn’t especially care about
- The budget available and your role in preparing it and managing it
- How you did on the project vs. the plan
- How you developed the plan
- How you motivated and influenced others, with specific examples to prove your claims
- How you dealt with conflict with specific examples
- Anything else you felt was important to the success of the project
Just about everything you need to know about a person’s competency can be extracted from this type of question. Most people would agree this type of question is very revealing. But the real issue is not the question: it’s the information that’s given in response that’s most important. Few people are able to give this type of information without additional prompting from the interviewer. This is what real interviewing is about: getting the answer to this very simple but very powerful question. Don’t spend time learning a lot of clever questions to ask during the interview: spend time learning to get the answer to just this one question. The key: understand the accomplishment, the process used to achieve the accomplishment, the environment in which the accomplishment took place and the candidate’s role.
Tags: hire better, hiring manager, Interview, lou adler, Recruiting, Topgrading, topgrading methodology
How Palms, Lips & Bellybuttons Can Make You A Better Interviewer [Part 4 of 4: Navarro]
Because of the generosity of Joe Navarro, a man who spent 25 years as a counterintelligence special agent, I’ve had the opportunity to share a lot of research and guidance about nonverbal and verbal communication with you over the last few weeks. To recap:
- Part 1: Not even those who are considered “experts” in interrogation can detect deception.
- Part 2: Guilty Knowledge manifests itself in a couple of significant ways including neck-rubbing and dis-possession
- Part 3: Indicators of Stress through nonverbal communication are the result of the Limbic Brain (or the ‘honest brain’) orchestrating behavior that relates to emotions. This is manifested most often through the feet and shoulders.
For the final installment in this Four Part Series my hope is that you’ll walk away with the most takeaway value of all. I believe that even if you haven’t read Joe’s book What Every Body is Saying you’ll be a better Interviewer and Leader after reading what he had to say.
[JDavis] Let’s break it down to basics – What are the Top 2 or 3 Nonverbal Displays that I should look for to make me a better Interviewer?
In all of the ones I’m going to share, the common theme is a sudden a change in the countenance of the person. Watch for signs that would indicate that they were comfortable and now they seem somewhat uncomfortable without any explanation. That indicates that something is bothering them (maybe your question or maybe another factor like gas from their lunch).
- I look for things like compressed lips, touching the neck, distancing behavior (pushing away) to indicate that there may be something wrong. When it comes to stress, nothing is more universal than disappearing lips. When someone presses their lips together it is as if the limbic brain is telling them to ‘shut down and don’t allow anything into the body’.
- This one is subtler: The person may “blade” their body away (called ventral denial). If they’ve been facing you and then they turn to not have their front or “belly side” pointed at you. Our ventral (front) side, where our eyes, mouth, chest, breasts, genitals, etc are located, is very sensitive to things that we like and dislike. It’s also the most vulnerable side of the body so the limbic brain has an inherent need to protect it from the things that hurt or bother us.
- They start to use objects (a woman could grab a purse and put it on her lap and use it as a barrier). A man might pick up a laptop and put it on their legs to be a barrier to protect themselves. When you witness people protecting their torsos in real time you can use it as an accurate indicator of discomfort on their part.
[JDavis] We’ve spent a lot of time talking about indicators of stress or guilt. Is there anything that a Candidate might do to show that they’re confident in answer?
The simplest guide I’ve seen that stretches across all cultures globally is the HANDS. Watch for whether they affirm statements PALM DOWN or PALM UP. Palm down with the fingers spread is positive and affirmative. PALM UP with fingers together they lack confidence (over 99% of the world’s population behaves this way).
[JDavis] What if someone unexpectedly moves their hands off the table and places them on their lap or where I can’t see them?
If someone withdraws their hands from the table it’s not enough of an indicator. That’s about as common as blinking their eyes. To simply attach one simple behavior like that just isn’t enough without looking at other body queues.
[JDavis] You’ve emphasize repeatedly in your books, your speeches and even this conversation that trying to read nonverbal behaviors can be more dangerous than it is beneficial to someone without formal training. Why is that?
When people first start looking into nonverbal communication it’s very similar to a young child learning how to read. It’s linear: left to right (i.e. Nose, Lips, Shoulders, Hands). The risk here is that many times the isolated behaviors aren’t significant enough without understanding what the whole body is doing.
At the start of my career I spent so much time looking at the face because we learned that even newborns are expressing themselves nonverbally through their facial expressions at only 3 days old. Today, I can see the whole body at once. That’s my parting shot to anyone who is going to use what they’ve learned from these posts: Relax, try to look at the whole body and don’t beat yourself up trying to look for every little queue.
For twenty-five years, Joe Navarro was an FBI counterintelligence special agent and supervisor specializing in nonverbal communications. A frequent lecturer, he serves on the adjunct faculty at Saint Leo University and the FBI. You can learn more about Joe through his website or by following him on Twitter.
Tags: Body Language, hire better, hiring manager, Interview, interview training, Joe Navarro, talent acquisition
What Can You Learn From A Terrorist? [Part 2 of 4: Navarro]
After hearing Joe Navarro speak and then reading his book What Every Body is Saying, I decided to seek him out to ask him some pointed questions about what he has learned about non-verbal communication through his 25 years as a counterintelligence special agent with the FBI. This is the second in a four part series that started with Detecting Deception (click here for Part 3 and here for Part 4). For today, I’m going to focus on something that Joe calls: GUILTY KNOWLEDGE.
[JDavis] We now understand that it’s nearly impossible to tell if someone is lying. What then, is the next best alternative?
I learned to look for INDICATORS OF STRESS. If a question causes someone stress or bothers them, dig in to find out why. As you learn to identify these indicators, you’ll realize that not everything has the same weight during questioning.
Here’s an example (using a crime suspect): If I’m questioning them about a case where someone was murdered a machete, I could ask them lots of different questions about a knife, a blade or a sharp object. What I’ve found is that they probably won’t react with the same level of guilty discomfort as if I were to ask them specifically about a machete.
[JDavis] What is the most likely indicator of discomfort that someone would show non-verbally?
For decades I kept seeing a very interesting thing happening during interrogation but this one action never showed up in research. I finally realized that researchers don’t sit in front of terrorists. They sit in front of students who are being asked to deal with made up situations.
What I observed over time was that when people were really under stress or there was insecurity, people would touch their neck. Men do it more robustly and women delicately. By studying it I realized that we rarely touch our necks UNLESS we’re uncomfortable. We so infrequently touch our neck unless there is a specific issue that we feel guilty about.
[JDavis] Could this “guilty discomfort” manifest itself through verbal cues as well?
Absolutely! I call this DIS-POSESSION. Remember, for people with “guilty knowledge”, words have weight. Here’s how it works:
Interviewer (to a suspect): Do you own a Smith & Wesson Handgun?
Suspect: Yes I do.
Interviewer: Where do you keep it?
Suspect: I keep my gun in a locked safe in my bedroom closet.
Interviewer: Were you aware that I’m investigating a murder in your neighborhood in which the murder weapon was a Smith & Wesson Handgun?
Suspect: No, I wasn’t aware of that.
Interviewer: Can you tell me where your gun is right now?
Suspect: I’m not sure where the gun is.
The subtle difference here is that as soon as the gun that the Suspect owns is tied to this murder, and because the Suspect has “guilty knowledge”, you’ll notice that he dis-possessed the weapon – changing it from “my gun” to “the gun”. If that “guilty knowledge” wasn’t present, you would have heard the Suspect continue to take ownership by most likely using the statement, “I’m not sure where my gun is.”
This happens all the time between parents - If a father shows up after work and his wife needs to share that their daughter has spilled juice on his favorite chair, she’ll say, “Guess what YOUR Daughter did?”. By not saying “Our daughter”, she’s dis-possessing herself due to guilty knowledge. The minute you hear distancing, you know something is wrong. It’s NEVER positive. For further clarification, if a mother had something she was proud of she’d likely say, “guess what OUR son did? He won first place!”
One last example of this in real life: Bill Clinton referred to Monica Lewinsky as… “That Woman”
In Part 3 I’ll share Joe’s tips on what he calls “The Most Honest Part Of Our Body.”
For twenty-five years, Joe Navarro was an FBI counterintelligence special agent and supervisor specializing in nonverbal communications. A frequent lecturer, he serves on the adjunct faculty at Saint Leo University and the FBI. You can learn more about Joe through his website or by following him on Twitter.
Tags: Body Language, dis-posession, guilty knowledge, hiring manager, Interview, interview training, Joe Navarro, topgrading interview
Detecting Deception [Part 1 of 4: Navarro]
One of the most powerful and insightful speakers that I’ve had the opportunity to hear in the past decade is Joe Navarro. He’s the author of What Every Body Is Saying (and a lot of other books too) and a 25 year veteran of the FBI as a counterintelligence special agent.
I contacted Joe and asked him if he’d share some of his expertise with you as readers of the HireBetter Blog so that you can be more effective interviewers. He was very generous with his time and the tips he shared are SO GOOD that I’ve decided to make a short 4-part series out of the information (click here for Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4).
We started our conversation at a high level and that’s what this post will focus on. In the forthcoming blog entries I’ll dig in further around certain actions that a Candidate might take that will give you clues that you can use in your evaluation process. Enjoy!
[JDavis]: There are a lot of studies out there that suggest that Body Language is the most significant aspect of our communication. However, they all seem to say something different. What percentage of what someone is saying is their Body Language versus their Tonality and the actual Words?
The simple answer: no one really knows. Body Language is clearly the most powerful and significant of the 3 you’ve mentioned but here are some examples of how it can differ:
- If you’re on a date and you’re sitting there ‘googley-eyed’ at your new lover, body language can be 98% or even more of what you’re saying
- Political Events, whether debates or press events or even just stump speeches are often scripted and very orchestrated. Even with this, very few people ever remember what someone said during the debate or speech. Yet, if I simply asked you if you remembered “The Wink” most people will immediately remember Sarah Palin.
- If someone you’re talking with is describing something technical or mathematical, body language accounts for very little of what they’re saying.
[JDavis]: Then what proof do you have that Body Language means anything at all?
When we look at studies of blind children talking with other blind children, they still use ALL of the
same body language as people who have the gift of sight. A prime example: they even cover their eyes when they hear something they don’t like yet they’ve never SEEN other people using these behaviors before!
[JDavis]: After all of your years in counterintelligence, can you tell if someone is lying to you?
With all of the TV Shows and Police Movies that are out there today, you’d think it was possible, right? In my experience NO, I can’t tell if someone is lying or not. In fact, in 1986 Paul Ekman went out and tried to figure out if people really could “Detect Liars”. He found that the very best people were only as good as a coin flip.
To follow that up, in 2004 Maureen O’Sullivan completed an exhaustive study by looking at 14,000 Police Officers, Detectives, Judges, Psychologists (all people who you’d think, because of their training, that they would be better than average at this skill).
The results? Only 33 people (0.2%) were good enough at detecting someone who was lying to receive a grade of “above random chance” (meaning they could do it at least 66% of the time).
Police Officers and others in Law Enforcement often think that they’re expert at detecting deception. What we learned was that the people they were observing or questioning were nervous from being interrogated and the stress that they were experiencing resulted in “tells” that the police officers were interpreting as deception.
In upcoming posts I’ll share Joe’s tips on how you can keep your eyes open for “tells”, what the actions of the feet, hands, face and shoulders mean and what you should do if the countenance of a Candidate suddenly changes. I look forward to sharing these with you and hearing your thoughts.
For twenty-five years, Joe Navarro was an FBI counterintelligence special agent and supervisor specializing in nonverbal communications. A frequent lecturer, he serves on the adjunct faculty at Saint Leo University and the FBI. You can learn more about Joe through his website or by following him on Twitter.
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