# Workplace Surgery — How do I know if I'm any good at interviewing?

- **Episode:** [198](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/198.md) (2025-05-20)
- **Type:** workplace-surgery
- **Tags:** interviewing, skills, hiring, self-improvement
- **Time:** 45:32–51:11 (start 2732s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/198?t=2732](https://truthliesandwork.com/198?t=2732)

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[45:32] Leanne Elliott: They are good, aren't they? Um, I say this with love, you're probably not a very good interviewer. And that's not because you're not a good interviewer, it's because you probably haven't taken the time to understand what you're asking people about and the right questions. You're on to something brilliant with structured interviews, and that's my advice to anyone who, who doesn't really have the money to engage either a specialist recruiter or outsourced HR or somebody like me in Oxike to, to kind of talk about how to conduct an effective and fair recruitment process. is stick to structured interviews, because what you're doing then is if you ask everybody the same question, you've got a direct comparison. So person A said this, person B said this, and within that model as well, if you can either record their answers— I mean, if it's on Zoom, that's dead easy— to actually then get a transcript of what they've said and start to point out where, rather than say, you know, oh, they'd answered that question really well, didn't they? You go, why did they ask that? answer that question well? What is it specifically they said in that answer that I liked? And what you're probably going to find more likely are behavioral cues. So I really liked how they said they adjust their communication style depending on who they're speaking to. I really like that example they gave about that customer who was really angry. They managed to talk them down. You're looking for those behavioral indicators that are going to be predictive of their future job performance. And that's what interviews are. Interviews are a psychological assessment
[46:55] Rose Soffel: Yeah
[46:56] Leanne Elliott: to help us understand how well somebody is going to perform in their future job, to predict how well they're going to perform. And actually, interviews are one of the most reliable ways of predicting future job performance, much more reliable than something like personality tests, for example. So, I would say it's a really good place to start, and there might be ways that you can just even improve that structured interview process. The key is, Great recruitment starts with what we call a job analysis, and I would be surprised if 1% of the companies out there conducted a job analysis. And that's probably why recruitment is so shaky and candidate experience is so bad, and people are, you know, having constant high turnovers or low success rates with new hires. A job analysis can be really simple, and it's basically saying, what, what role do we need in our business? Not what person
[47:47] Rose Soffel: What role
[47:48] Leanne Elliott: So what's its function? What's its task? What does it need to achieve? How does it fit into our performance, our productivity, our overall mission? You know, what do we want this role to contribute, um, in terms of pushing us forward? And that is going to be very task-driven, um, in terms of what that, that role needs to do. Then you can look at, right, well, what type of person would typically be able to do this role? It might be X number of years of experience, but be slightly careful with that because sometimes, you know, the number of years doesn't always give an accurate reflection, but it will give you indicators of, okay, they're probably going to need knowledge of this type of marketing system, or they're probably going to need knowledge of this type of market or a similar type of market. They're probably going to need knowledge of recruitment processes and practices. That's basically a job analysis, and then you use that to create a job description and then go out to market. What you should get in that job analysis is what we call called core competencies, which are basically just, just groups of behaviours that probably means that somebody's going to be successful in this job. So communication, for example, or collaboration, um, and within that, the kind of behavioural indicators we'd expect to see, as the examples I gave before. So once you have that, you know how to structure your questions in your interview to hit those points. But if you're just going in with generic interview questions, then you're probably not measuring a candidate against the job that you're actually recruiting them to do. And it's this disconnect that often causes bad hires to be made. It's not your fault. Not enough people talk about it. Psychologists are really bad at expressing it in a way that makes sense. I probably massively overcomplicated it and maybe slightly confused you a little bit. My advice would be, take some time to think about the role you're recruiting for. Talk to your people as well. Your team in terms of what they want this role to do to make their lives easier, your managers, your peers, whoever it is in the organisation that is going to have a direct interaction with this role, help them to use them to understand what the role needs to achieve, and then from there, try and structure questions that are going to really tap into exactly what you want this job function Um, to look like. That alone, I'd imagine that the effectiveness of your interview capability combined with that structured, um, structured approach that we talked about, would— you'd see huge differences very quickly
[50:11] Al Elliott: Fabulous answer. Yes. And just one last thing from, from the layperson's point of view, I would look at this as— and Leanne's probably going to just be horrified by what I'm going to say— um, is I'd look at this as like it's an acquisition. So if you're going to go and buy a piece of plant or machinery or a Or a truck for your business or something like that, you wouldn't just go down the local shop and go, oh, do you know what? That guy there or that woman there, she was really nice and I really liked her, so I bought from her. You'd go, right, what does the piece of equipment have to do? How long does it have to last? Um, you know, how much, what's my budget? Uh, all that kind of stuff. And that is essentially, I'm guessing, Leanne, a job analysis, would it be? That's essentially saying the role of that piece of equipment is X, and you go and, go and buy against that role. Yeah
[50:52] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, exactly. Of course, I'm not— I don't want to make a direct comparison between people and assets, but yes, essentially you're taking the time, you're making a big investment, you're taking time to understand exactly what you need, what's going to work for you in the environment that you're in, um, and making the best possible decision you can with all the information that, that you've gathered