Angela Ahrendts; senior vice president, retail and online stores at Apple Inc and former CEO of Burberry gives tips on how to hire the right candidate. She has experience of over 34 years and has developed a certain pattern of interviewing candidates. She considers experience and age as great assets. Angela usually tests the employees based on four areas:
Are they team players: Angela asks them questions about family, friends, peers, interests, sports, spirituality, and community. This makes them open, as people always love to speak about themselves. She also uses motivational quotes like “When ordinary people connect, extraordinary things can happen.” or “How will you know if you are a great leader?. Turn around and see if anyone is following you.”in her conversation and asks them their views. This gives her an insight into their ego, their ability to be able to contribute as a group, their concern about individual goals vs the team’s goals.
IQ vs EQ: In this phase she asks them to describe how they would handle a certain challenging situation or optimize a certain opportunity. Angela is interested to know what impression have they left on their peers/colleagues, thus she asks them to explain how their peers would describe them. She tries to understand if they use their head or heart in making important decisions.
Left or Right Brained: Angela digs a little deeper by asking them about hobbies and more personal questions to assess if they have a more creative/analytical approach to life.
Frame of reference: Angela also likes to understand if they fall back to look at past trends while making decisions or they evolve with future trends.
She prefers to be honest with them about the outcome of the interview. So by the end of the interview which lasts about an hour she has a somewhat clear picture if she wants to meet them again or if they aren’t suitable for the opening. She likes to keep the process transparent so that the candidate leaves with respect for the company and themselves.