basketball anecdote part 3: advice for your next interview
The other two pieces today ask you to be the grizzled old basketball coach. In this one, you get to be the stylish young superstar.
Ben and I tend to think that the interview process is often more useful for conveying information about the firm to the candidate than about the candidate to the firm. This inverts the conventional wisdom and recasts the responsibilities of both firm and candidate.
When you’re a candidate, interviews are an opportunity to learn as much as you can about your prospective employer and colleagues. You might not get more than a few minutes or a couple email exchanges to ask questions. It’s worthwhile to choose those questions thoughtfully.
If you are a young and up-and-coming leader with a taste for innovation (like a star point guard early in her career), I think it’s good to devote one of those scarce question slots to the organization’s appetite for change and improvisation. Here are a few ways you can get at that:
What rate of change would be seen as stressful or to-be-avoided here? Some organizations only make big decisions once a year; others once a quarter; others close to every day. Where do you all fit in?
Which of my decisions will require CEO / board approval? What does that approval process look like (in practice, not just on paper or in the bylaws)?
How satisfied are you with the substance and process of this role’s work right now? How much different do you want it to be, just in terms of percentage - are you looking for 1-5% adjustment or 50% adjustment?
What does change management look like around here? Do you like the way it looks?
Imagine for a moment that a few years from now you say that I’m the best who has ever done this here. What makes that true?
It can be easy to make assumptions about a firm based on its reputation or the sector it’s a part of. These assumptions can be painfully inaccurate -- some start-ups (or founders) are process mavens who love structure. Some 100-year-old institutions have squirrelly innovators at the helm.
-eric
