The Buffalo Bills are in the middle of a challenging search for their next head coach and they’ve made one decision already that has caused a little bit of a stir. Star quarterback and face of the franchise Josh Allen is part of the hiring process.
The worry from many is that having Josh Allen included creates conflict. Specifically, the next head coach might end up being one who could be undermined by Josh. I have a solution to that, should they turn to Buffalo Rumblings for advice…
Behavior-Based Interviewing
First and foremost,
I think it’s important to give some history when you’re shifting outside your lane. This isn’t football or food related so what are my qualifications to discuss hiring? Well, I’m not in human resources, but my full-time job has been compliance and quality assurance for a not-for-profit for a number of years. That’s included investigations (getting information I need from people), plus education and training. That latter part has included research on interviewing techniques so the rest of the organization can land good candidates.
Oh, and I’ve had to interview people for my own department here and there. So what’s my trick? Let’s talk about behavior-based interviewing for a moment first. In many positions, you need to know how a candidate will act in certain circumstances. The idea for this style of interviewing is to distill the primary components of a position, the real critical stuff, and find someone who will behave in the needed way.
This can be easier than you think sometimes. We all know the cliché questions. What would you say your biggest strength would be? Weakness? Where do you see yourself in five years? Skip those ones. Do you need someone in customer service? Ask this instead; Tell me about the most frustrating experience you can remember with a customer and how you handled it? Want to know what will keep an employee engaged? Say; Tell me about the most recent time you felt excited to be doing something, what was it and what made it exhilarating?
How can we leverage this to prevent the Bills from hiring someone who will be held under the shadow of Josh Allen? I have just the exercise. Remember how I mentioned you want to distill the key aspects of the job so you can gauge a candidate on them? A key aspect of this job is to tell Josh Allen he ****ed up — and do it in a way he listens. If the head coach can look Allen in the eye and tell him to do better, I like his odds of saying the same to everyone else.
When I’m hiring it’s been for investigators and auditors. People who have to be able to review the work of anyone in the agency and tell them their work wasn’t good enough. Anyone. We have an exercise for this. I won’t go into all the details, but the gist is that I show candidates work I’ve done. It’s deliberately a pile crap. The candidate must review the work in a roleplay scenario with me. What I’m looking for is simple. Look me in the eye and tell me what I did is crap, and do it in a way where I’d listen to the feedback. If you can look your potential future supervisor in the eye and tell him what he did sucks in a customer-focused way, you’ve gone a long way toward showing me you can do the job I need you to.
If I were making decisions for Buffalo I’d have candidates do something similar. Maybe have them review 10 plays of Allen’s. Some of them will be lowlights like the “lateral” that directly cost Buffalo three points against the Broncos. At the end of the film they have to give Allen their thoughts.
If you direct the feedback to anyone but Josh Allen you are no longer being considered for the position. If you fail to be direct with Allen on what he screwed up and what you expect from him, you are no longer being considered for the position.
Sounds easy doesn’t it? Trust me. It’s not. I’ve done a ton of interviews and I trust this exercise more than any other question or consideration I can think of. People tend to default to being themselves. That’s the trick. People who avoid conflict will avoid conflict. People who don’t see the issues won’t call you out on the issues. People who tend to try to give the answer they think you want will typically guess wrong.
I don’t need someone who can’t/won’t tell me what the problem is and how we can get better and neither do the Bills.
