I think that one of the big reasons people will stay in jobs they don’t like is that the prospect of applying to hundreds of positions to hear back from a handful of them and go on a few, select interviews is even worse than staying. Job hunting sucks.
And it’s probably not much more fun for the folks doing the hiring, either. Trying to find the right person from a stacks of resumes and calling around to the various references has to be a nightmarish prospect. But it has to be done!
Job interviews are among the more stressful things we have to do in our lives.
And that can be true as much for the interviewer as the applicant. Interviews are critical for all involved — finding the right candidate is as important for a company as finding a good company to work for is for a worker.
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If the person doing the interview is terrible, you won’t want to work there.
So, ideally, that job interview should work both ways, with an applicant interviewing an potential employer as much as a boss interviewing a potential hire.
But let’s face it, the boss holds all the power in that interview room.
The interviewers always seem to know how badly you need a job, right? But hiring is a big deal, especially for startups. They have to get it right.
Bad hires mean bad business.
As Forbes reported , bad hires can hit a company’s morale and productivity harder than its bottom line, and cleaning up the damage they cause takes a long time even after they’re let go. But that bottom line can be huge, too — Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh believes that bad hires cost his company “well over $100 million.”
So it’s no wonder that a lot of hiring managers have come up with tips and tricks they use when evaluating potential employees.
Trent Innes, the managing director of Australia’s Xero, which makes accounting software, shared his go-to secret for finding people who will be a good fit for his company on the podcast The Ventures, and it’s remarkably simple.
As Trent explained, it’s all about a cup of coffee.
“I will always take you for a walk down to one of our kitchens and somehow you always end up walking away with a drink,” he said. “Then we take that back, have our interview.”
It’s what happens post-interview that really matters.
“One of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?”
Basically, if you don’t clean up after yourself, Trent’s not going to hire you.
But it’s more about what that cleanliness represents, he says. “You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup.'”
And if you’re not the kind of person who washes their coffee cup, you probably won’t be a good fit at Xero.
“If you come into the office one day inside Xero, you’ll see the kitchens are almost always clean and sparkling and it’s very much off that concept of wash your coffee cup.
It’s not REALLY about the coffee cup.
“It’s really just making sure that they’re actually going to fit into the culture inside Xero, and really take on everything that they should be doing.”
Whether you actually sink your hands in some suds to wash that coffee cup or not, it’s the willingness to do it that makes the difference for Trent.
And he says that the vast majority of people whose resumes get them to the interview stage do offer to bus their dish back to the kitchen, and the offer is what matters.
h/t The Sun
