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.