Today’s technical recruiting tip is my 7th magical interview question, the Mirror Question. As with all past six technical recruiting questions I shared, this is also a form of an open-ended question. Furthermore, as I also shared previously, a lot of psychological, behavioral, human resource and executive recruiting research proves that open-ended questions tend to provide more quality information for your management recruiters than other forms of interview questions.
Let me demonstrate this by an example. Let’s say that you are interviewing an engineer, scientist, R&D, IT or technical professional. Then you should ask this job candidate, “Who is your best friend?” The candidate’s response may be, “Joe.” Then should follow up by asking this candidate, “If I were to ask Joe what type of person you are, what would they tell me?”
Do you see what I did? I used the candidate’s anticipation that you might call on Joe to your advantage. Because, psychologically, this candidate believes you are going to call on Joe, they will project (or mirror) Joe’s potential response. This response will tend to be very factual. As a result, you will get a very good picture of behavioral characteristics of this candidate.
My over twenty-five years of executive recruiting experience demonstrates that most candidates will try hard to mirror that person’s (especially their best friend’s) actual response (e.g. Joe’s response). You can also plug in a wide range of people into the Mirror Question including past employers and co-workers. Regardless of whom you plug in to this interview question, this job candidate’s answers will tend to very truthful. So remember to employ the Mirror Question during your job interviews. This will energize your technical recruitment solutions and provide you a better basis to judge all of your executive recruitment candidates.
Please go to http://www.strategicsearch.com/technical-recruiting-tips/technical-recruiting-tips.php for more information on this and my other seven magical interview questions.
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