The Key Hiring Lesson Of the $3 Million Slap

A simple interview technique can help you prevent extremely costly, and damaging, hiring mistakes.

Can you imagine losing $3 million as a result of your behavior as an employee? Probably not. But what if you hired someone who did because you didn’t how to ask the right questions in an interview?

Geoff Smart is regarded as one of the top talent acquisition experts in the world. Smart’s work, including his book, Who, completely changed my approach to hiring. It was also Smart who got a candidate to reveal the shocking, and expensive, reason he was in the market for a new job.

After decades of studying hiring data and working with companies, Smart has come to a clear conclusion: most hiring managers really don’t know what they’re doing. That’s probably why, according to ghSMART’s research, hiring managers worldwide have a 50 percent success rate. Put another way, the world’s interviewers could flip a coin on any given hiring decision and get the same results they do now.

According to Smart, one of the biggest mistakes leaders make in the hiring process is a surprisingly simple one that you can begin to correct immediately.

Interviewers give far too much weight to candidates’ responses to hypothetical questions, rather than digging into their professional history and past actions. Plus, when they do dig, they don’t ask the right follow up questions to get the full story or give the candidate the space to answer.

This all leads to the story of the $3 Million Slap, which is a story from an interview Smart conducted himself on behalf of a client. Smart was digging through the candidate’s professional history and asked why they’d left their most recent job.

The candidate replied that he’d had a difference of opinion with his CEO over the strategic direction of the company. Sounds reasonable, right? A lot of hiring managers would hear this, imagine an amicable parting of ways, and move on. However, this is where Smart took a different approach.