and delegate appropriately. I checked in frequently with my boss.” Here’s how Menkes rephrased it: “You’re in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. You cannot accomplish both. How do you handle that situation?”
“Well,” I said, “I would look at the two and decide what I was best at, and then go to my boss and say, ‘It’s better that I do one well than both poorly,’ and we’d figure out who else could do the other task.”
Menkes immediately seized on a telling detail in my answer. I was interested in what job I would do best. But isn’t the key issue what job the company most needed to have done? With that comment, I had revealed something valuable: that in a time of work-related crisis I start from a self-centered consideration. “Perhaps you are a bit of a solo practitioner,” Menkes said diplomatically. “That’s an essential bit of information.”
Menkes deliberately wasn’t drawing any broad conclusions. If we are not people who are shy or talkative or outspoken but people who are shy in some contexts, talkative in other situations, and outspoken in still other areas, then what it means to know someone is to catalog and appreciate all those variations. Menkes was trying to begin that process of cataloging. This interviewing technique is known as structured interviewing, and in studies by industrial psychologists it has been shown to be the only kind of interviewing that has any success at all in predicting performance in the workplace. In the structured interviews, the format is fairly rigid. Each applicant is treated in precisely the same manner. The questions are scripted. The interviewers are carefully trained, and each applicant is rated on a series of predetermined scales.
What is interesting about the structured interview is how narrow its objectives are. When I interviewed Nolan Myers I was groping for some kind of global sense of who he was; Menkes seemed entirely uninterested in arriving at that same general sense of me — he seemed to realize how foolish that expectation was for an hour-long interview. The structured interview works precisely because it isn’t really an interview; it isn’t about getting to know someone, in a traditional sense. It’s as much concerned with rejecting information as it is with collecting it.
Not surprisingly, interview specialists have found it extraordinarily difficult to persuade most employers to adopt the structured interview. It just doesn’t feel right. For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date. We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair. The structured interview, by contrast, seems to offer only the dry logic and practicality of an arranged marriage.
5.
Nolan Myers agonized over which job to take. He spent half an hour on the phone with Steve Ballmer, and Ballmer was very persuasive. “He gave me very, very good advice,” Myers says of his conversations with the Microsoft CEO. “He felt that I should go to the place that excited me the most and that I thought would be best for my career. He offered to be my mentor.” Myers says he talked to his parents every day about what to do. In February, he flew out to California and spent a Saturday going from one Tellme executive to another, asking and answering questions. “Basically, I had three things I was looking for. One was long-term goals for the company. Where did they see themselves in five years? Second, what position would I be playing in the company?” He stopped and burst out laughing. “And I forget what the third one is.” In March, Myers committed to Tellme.
Will Nolan Myers succeed at Tellme? I think so, although I honestly have no idea. It’s a harder question to answer now than it would have been thirty or forty years ago. If this were 1965, Nolan Myers would have gone to work at IBM and worn a blue suit and sat in a small office and kept his head down, and the particulars of his personality would not have mattered so much. It was not so important that IBM understood who you were before it hired you, because you understood what IBM was. If you walked