The following conversation between Steve Ciprani and Jamie Winship is an excerpt from the Leader Formula podcast hosted by Chris LaGarde and Steve Ciprani. In this unique conversation around hiring and interview processes, Jamie and Steve discuss why so many hires fail and how to create the right environment for an interview process. Jamie Winship is the founder of Identity Exchange and has decades of experience with law enforcement, FBI, CIA, bringing peaceful solutions to some of the world’s highest conflict areas including Indonesia, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine and Israel.
Jamie: When we hire we are not looking for resumes, we are looking for identities. If you think of your company or your organization as a body, which is the only real way I know how to think of it, it’s a model for how bodies, like a business or corporation that is created, can work. You have a head, you have eyes, you have these parts that are all critical and the parts of your body aren’t brought in arbitrarily, if you need a hand, you hire a hand. It’s important to think more in terms of someone’s identity and not in terms of resume, experience, etc. A true identity can cross any environment.
Steve: But I think that’s the challenge that employers have. We do interviews, typically in our company, and one recruiter might interview 8-10 people. It is typical, even in the nature of the word candidate, that you are on show, you’re on display, so if someone’s hiring, let’s call it a leg to use your analogy, the issue is every candidate is going to say, yeah, I can do that! Yes, I can be a leg.
I sometimes will do a mock interview with my teammates and when they’re new. I will play the role of executive assistant because I know what a good executive assistant might say. But I would be a terrible executive assistant based on my natural strengths, identity and personality traits. Words and deeds don’t match and that happens often in a hiring process. So what would you say about how to reveal identity through a hiring process? What should you be looking for? And so I think the first thing about this too is you really have to slow this down and bring presence to this process. But what would be some of your thoughts around revealing identity through a hiring process?
Jamie: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really important. We’ve watched as we’ve trained in this, we’ve watched HR practices change. They have to, right? They have to and there’s so many examples of this, we deal with this all the time. So typically in an interview process, you’re interviewing the person’s false identity. That’s what you’re interviewing, unfortunately, like you’re saying. You’re interviewing a person who’s trained to say what needs to be said in order to get hired, right?
So actually, this is why you make so many bad hires. It’s because you don’t actually know who you’re hiring. I mean, if police departments and all could just avoid bad hires, they would save a fortune, right? Probably a lot of companies would.
So if I think in my head, okay, when I ask this person a question, we’re going to enter into the HR hiring formula. That’s what we’re going to do. It’s not generative. It’s a formula because the scarcity mindset is we have limited time, we got to get this person, we got to, you know. The whole thing is dominated by this sense of scarcity. So we’re just going to do the best we can with this amount of time and we have these questions and these profiles.
We think of hiring like the person is coming into a confessional booth. What you want is to ask them questions that get them to truth-tell. It’s like asking a three-year-old with a crayon who just wrote on the wall, “why did you write on the wall!?” You’re putting them right into a position to lie. Or, “did you write on the wall!?” They’re immediately going to self-protect because that’s what they know how to do. So you don’t ask a three-year-old a question to a three-year-old or put someone into a position that’s actually going to falsify what they’re going to say.
What you want to do is ask for a confession, or “truth-telling,” get that person to truth-tell because the truth-telling will tell you who they really are, right? And you want the interview process to be a blessing to them. Whether they get the job or not, like, wow, I just walked through a transformative process. We’ve had people say at the end of an interview process, I want to work for this company if this is just how you talk to people in this company.
Like imagine that your HR forward face is this kind of amazing process that people just go through the interview process with that company just because of what it’ll do for you personally, whether they hire you or not. That’s what human interaction can do. Right?
And so you want to ask questions that encourage them to truth tell. And so a good question is like, “Tell me in your life how you deal with fear? A question like that. “What do you do with fear?” Just a simple question or “What’s a time in your life when you experience real joy?” These are questions that will ask the real them to speak. It’ll pull the real person out. And if they won’t come out, you don’t want that person. I don’t care what their resume looks like. You’re going to have a war with them later. Because they’re self-protecting and self-promoting deep down. And so those are the kind of questions that we ask or, “What’s the greatest burden in your life right now and how are you dealing with it?” And if they say something like, “Well, I’m an overachiever.” You know, come on.
So that’s what I’m saying is when that person leaves the interview, have they discovered things about themselves that they didn’t know? Just from, and I’m telling you, I’m talking about 20 minutes. I’m not talking about all day. 20 minutes, you can, people want to tell the truth. They want to tell the truth. They just don’t know how to do it.
Steve: I love that and that is 100% what we try to do at Ciprani Consulting. A quick follow-up question… the other piece of this that I think is so important is to create this critical conversations-relationship framework. A space that invites them in and makes the space warm enough to share the real identity. So do you have any thoughts around how to invite them into a conversation? So they don’t feel like, wow, if I share some of this, it’s not going to be used against me and disqualify me. Because really, I think what you’re saying is we are having a conversation. As a person you want to get away from the transactional nature of some of it and it will bring some of this to the head. But any thoughts on creating the environment if you are a hiring manager?
Jamie: I think that the hiring person has to truth-tell first, which we don’t do. You know, real quick, I’ll tell a story about a guy that he works with us now. He’s formerly a federal agent and was working a case. I had just met him. We had become friends. I was walking through, you know, with understanding identity. Because he’s a federal agent, it’s a cynical, bitter life ultimately because of there are certain people you can’t prosecute because they’re too rich or they’re too powerful. And he was running into all this stuff. And he, in one of the cases he’s working, he captures a guy that’s a hired assassin for a lot of different groups. He’s the first guy to ever get this guy, to catch him. And he’s got him and you can only hold him for 24 hours.
And then he’s got to release him because the way they got him was a little iffy how they got him. And they think the guy’s committed like, you know, 15 or 20 murders for hire. And so he calls me, the agent calls me, he goes, how would you talk to this guy? How would you interview this guy? Because we’re only going to get one shot at interviewing him and he’s going to be gone because we’re not going to be holding, he’s not afraid of prison. He’s not afraid of anything. We can’t threaten him. We can’t, he knows the game. He knows the dance. We have one shot at him. How would you interview him?
To find out how the story ends listen to the full episode of the Leader Formula here!
