Don’t Ask This Interview Question

Thursday, September 10th, 2015 9:02am

I haven’t heard of this one but it is intriguing:

To boost the chances of preventing that hiring misstep, there’s one easy tactic everyone should take in an interview: Stop asking candidates to evaluate their own abilities.

Here’s why. Underskilled candidates consistently overrate their abilities, and more skilled candidates consistently underrate their abilities. There’s even a name for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological research finding that the poorest performers are the least aware of their own incompetence.

So I’m immediately left questioning why? Are highly-skilled salespeople awash in humility? I don’t think so and neither does the author.

Top performers set higher standards for their own performance, so they judge themselves more harshly than low performers.

Bullseye. I couldn’t agree more with that statement. We see this effect in our objective assessments often with top performers. An interesting aspect is that they often have lower self-esteem. It isn’t that they are shrinking violets…to the contrary, they set high standards and always strive to reach higher. They have a drive that says I could have done better or I can do more. It is counter-intuitive to me and took quite some time to understand this effect.

Don’t be put-off by a sales candidate who doesn’t project a booming confidence. Trust the assessment and dig down to find out what motivates them to succeed.