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Hiring A-players? Forget the traditional interview playbook. Learn the new way to assess talent and make smarter hiring decisions.
In today’s episode, Sharran walks us through the modern interview process he uses to hire top talent at Acquisition.com. Ditching outdated behavioral interviews, he shares a three-part method that goes beyond scripted answers and reveals how candidates actually think and work in real-life situations.
Whether you’re hiring for your team or looking to enhance your interviewing skills, this episode will teach you the techniques to spot the true A-players.
“The most-cited meta-analysis of hiring is called the Schmidt and Hunter study. They found that work sample tests, essentially giving the candidates something to do with case studies and problem-solving simulations, like getting them to actually think through a situation, outperform every single traditional interview when it comes to predicting future performance.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
02:47 – Why traditional interviews are ineffective for modern roles
05:01 – The Reverse Consulting Method: Assessing how candidates think through real-world problems
07:05 – The power of asking for “bad ideas” to assess judgment and decision-making skills
09:18 – Giving candidates real project ownership to gauge their problem-solving abilities
10:31 – The importance of managing complexity and setting the right interview conditions to see candidates shine
11:36 – Recap of the three essential techniques for modern interviewing
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Board Member: ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Board Member: The Real Brokerage
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
– Threads
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to the Business School Podcast. And this is a quick tactical episode for you today. I interview every single person who joins acquisition.com. And if you want a player, the old interview playbook really does not work anymore ’cause the world has changed. I use a three-part process that shows me how someone actually thinks and works, and I’m gonna walk you through it step by step.
[00:00:19] Starting right now.
[00:00:27] One thing is for certain, just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how-to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand, and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:00:49] That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa, and Welcome to Business School.
[00:01:02] All right. In this episode, I’m gonna explain to you why most interviews are broken. Now, whether you interview people or not, you are probably talking to people in some way, whether you’re selling yourself or letting them sell you. Interviewing vendors, interviewing clients, interviewing customers, interviewing people for new roles.
[00:01:18] These methods that most companies still rely on are insanely outdated, and what actually works when you’re trying to hire real operators, real people, real employees, and real A players instead of people that are just scripted in today’s modern world, using AI to cheat and answer questions in a lot of ways.
[00:01:36] So I, I’m actually gonna walk you through why Goldman Sachs never relied on traditional behavioral interviews the way most people assume. I had 39 one-on-one interviews to get a job at Goldman Sachs, the interview framework. This is what I’m gonna show is what I use today, and I’m gonna show you three specific techniques that you can apply immediately to avoid, like just really simple hiring mistakes, because a hire costs you a lot of money if you make a bad hire.
[00:02:01] So here are three things I’m gonna cover. Number one, why behavioral interviews? Are not cool, and they fail in a lot of these modern roles. Number two, I’m gonna show you the reverse consulting method and why it works, and number three, I’m gonna give you three practical kinds of interview-based techniques that expose or showcase how people actually think and work.
[00:02:19] So let’s kind of get right into it, and it could be really tactical today, just for background. I interview every single person who joins acquisition.com and our portfolio companies, and we’ve had over 70% growth in the last seven months. And before that, I went, like I shared with you, I went through 39 one-on-one interviews just to get a job at Goldman Sachs.
[00:02:36] I’ve also probably sat across the table from thousands of people through sales calls or leadership interviews, and you know, operator conversations across multiple industries. And after all of that, I will tell you this, the one thing is super clear to me. Most companies are still using interview methods that were designed for a completely different economy.
[00:02:54] The world is very different right now. They ask questions like, oh, tell me about a time when you dealt with a difficult coworker. Like that is ridiculous. Nobody cares about those things. Those questions that were designed for the GEs and the Microsofts of the world were stable, slow-moving kind of companies where roles rarely changed, and you didn’t know what the next day was gonna be.
[00:03:13] Modern work, especially gig work, especially when you spend a lot of time in the cloud, it does not look like that. Modern work is amorphous. It’s ambiguous. It’s fast, it moves quickly. It has incomplete information. It has real consequences. It’s on Slack, it’s on email, it’s on text, it’s on phone, it’s on Zoom.
[00:03:29] It has real ownership and, but this is what most people don’t realize. Like, if you take Harvard Business Review, they’ve also there’s research on this. Peter, you pointed out that unstructured interviews actually one of the weakest predictors of job performance only. Mainly because they reward confidence.
[00:03:44] They reward storytelling, and kind of the feeling of this person is cool, and they’d be a good fit because any nice person is a good fit. So, I’ll tell you one more thing. The most cited meta-analysis of hiring is called the Schmidt and Hunter study. You can actually look it up, and they found that work sample tests, right?
[00:04:01] Essentially giving them something to do, or case studies and problem-solving simulations, like getting them to actually think through a situation, outperforms every single traditional interview when it comes to predicting future performance. And you gotta understand that why that matters, because whatcha trying to do, you’re trying to simulate what they will do in their job, because you’re not good at interviewing people.
[00:04:17] You just have to figure out how they can be good at their job. When the NFL tries to. Recruit people on their team. They don’t get ’em on an interview. They get ’em to do tryouts, and they get ’em to see if they can run a 40-yard dash. They get ’em to see if they can catch, you know, a pass thrown by a quarterback.
[00:04:31] That is important. The situational interviews tell you how well they do not some, how they tell you whether something you know about a time when they actually worked. So lemme give you the exact form formula that I use. So here’s number one: A players solve real problems. They have this unique ability to spot these hidden risks.
[00:04:48] They, and they love taking ownership of complex projects. And if your job is to find a-players, traditional interviews do not test any of those things. Asking someone, tell me about a timeline or about their past, it doesn’t work. You’ve gotta put them into the present in some way. And so, how do you put somebody into the present?
[00:05:03] Uh, you want to turn the interview into a working session. I call this the reverse consulting method. The idea is simple. Instead of evaluating stories like, tell me about a time when you did this or what happened in your last job. You simulate what it feels like to work together right now. Right? And there, there, I use kind of three broad parts of the first part is you turn the interview into a consulting session, which means most interviews test performance.
[00:05:24] I don’t care about the performance. I want to see the thinking. What if I actually got on a Zoom and talked to this person right there? That’s what I want to know. So instead of asking hypothetical questions, I just bring real problems. To the call or to the meeting, because I can just get free consulting problems that we’re actually dealing with.
[00:05:39] Now, I make it a little abstract and I, I anonymize things, but I use the core problem, and I make the candidate the consultant, and I play the client. So, for example, instead of asking about, oh, what’s your leadership style? I might say something like, Hey, we’re seeing, you know, 20% churn in our enterprise accounts.
[00:05:55] Do you, or, you know, you have 30 days to diagnose the issue of and present the. Options to the leadership team. Kinda walk me through how you would approach something like that. Now, I’m making that up, of course. Right? But what happens next is incredible and incredibly revealing because most people will, will, will walk you through their process, and strong candidates will not rush to the answers.
[00:06:16] They’ll ask you a ton of questions because most good work. Based on just revealing the truth, getting to the constraint, and asking the tight questions. They wanna know what the data is, where it lives, how the churn is measurable. They can actually fix what the segments are, what is affected. They will ask those questions, and they will paint the picture.
[00:06:32] They will create the map. They will show you the tea leaves before they actually read the tea leaves, and. Normally, within two minutes, you can hear how their brain works under pressure because it is not under pressure anymore. Having them actually work in a live situation, you’re not looking for this perfect answer.
[00:06:46] You’re looking for how they structure their problems. Because a lot of problem-solving is actually just structuring the problem and the pieces of the problem correctly, because when you do that, the group gets to the answer pretty quickly itself. That will tell you way more than any of the I have, you know.
[00:07:02] Tell me about a time, one questions. So here’s the second part. The second part is I love asking for bad ideas instead of good ones. So traditional interviews train people to give really polished and really scripted answers, right? So everyone learns how to sound smart. Now AI actually gives people a chance to memorize answers, or even we’ll do live answers on the screen in front of you as you’re talking to them.
[00:07:22] Very few people learn how to think clearly about risk and reward and structuring a thought process and a question. So what you wanna do is to flip the question because. You want to figure out the floor. So instead of asking what they would do, I wanna know what they would avoid, what they would not do.
[00:07:38] So, for example, I may say something like, Hey, we’re expanding into Europe next quarter making this up. Of course, we’re not expanding to Europe. Hey, I say we’re expanding into Europe next quarter. What are some bad ideas that might initially look good? You know? But when we start this process, and so now people are like, wait a minute, nobody prepares for that question.
[00:07:56] So, you know, Charlie Munger calls it inversion, right? So they’re saying. How do I get success? You ask the question, what guarantees failure? And then just don’t do those things. And a lot of strong candidates immediately start identifying where things will fail. That’s really good. They call it the pre-mortem, and you can talk about regulatory complexity or cultural assumptions, or how are you gonna hire these people, or who’s gonna be an employee of record, or what, what’s the, you know, cost structure, or who’s gonna own the entity?
[00:08:21] They think it’s second and third-order consequences, which is really good because it forces you to set up the structure right. And. Weaker candidates will struggle because they’re used to selling a lot of just step-by-step, call it positivity, optimism, I mean, sort of managing risk and downside. Most good people know how to manage risk and downside, and when they put this moat of things around, it’s very easy to actually find the right solution.
[00:08:46] I will tell you that this single question will tell you whether someone has good judgment or not. I would almost ask this of yourself, train this of yourself. When you are looking at a situation, just ask yourself, Hey, what are the things that could break start there? When you do that, then you’re able to figure out, uh, the confines or the constraints of what you can actually play with, because what we’re doing in a good employee is when someone is indispensable as an employee, a consultant, or a vendor, or who have you, is their judgment.
[00:09:11] You are, you’re hiring their judgment. ’cause when they have good judgment, you can actually release them to do the best. Work that they have. Alright, here’s the third part. And I try to give them real project ownership if at all possible. And what I mean by that is situational interviews assume that past behavior predicts future performance.
[00:09:30] And you know that that is not true. And that assumption only holds when the job does not change. So many things change when they come to a new company. They don’t have the same team, they don’t have the same structure, they don’t have the same incentives. Very rarely do things. Are things exactly the same?
[00:09:44] Are they’re homogenous, modern roles like what we have today in the gig, gig economy, they change constantly. So instead of asking kind of what someone did before, I try to give them ownership of something real, something tangible, something they can actually work with. So I may say something like, again, I’m making this up.
[00:10:01] Hey, let’s say you own our Q4 product launch. Say you have like a $2.5 million budget, and say you have a 12-person team, and you have a hard deadline. Can you help structure and walk me through how you approach it and how you manage the deliverables around it? I want a plan for this product launch, and then I just stop, and I listen.
[00:10:21] So now I’m giving them ownership of something in. I know this sounds like reverse consulting. Reverse consulting essentially means that I am the client, I’m coming to them with the problem. This is I’m giving them the ownership, and the right person will immediately start to break down all the complexity.
[00:10:34] They’ll talk about the stakeholders. They’ll actually. Paint the picture of how they actually work through all of this. They may even, like, I’ve actually done this, and the person will be like, okay, well let’s think on paper. They will, like one person just loads up their iPad, they will, or they’ll open up a Google doc or they’ll open up a brainstorming piece of software.
[00:10:50] And I like it because if they’re gonna do that live on the call with me or live on paper with me, I know that that’s how they think and that’s how they work. And they have a way to do the thing. They have a process to manage the complexity. And if you don’t have the process to manage the complexity, you won’t be able to do that.
[00:11:02] This is super important because now they also figure out what they can identify and what they could delegate, what they own personally and what they would need help with. They don’t know the answers to all of these things. So you’re watching someone manage complexity in real time, and that is the job of the interview.
[00:11:17] Not to just say, oh, okay, does do I like this person? Do I see myself getting along with them? I see myself getting along with a lot of people. I have a lot of friends who I get along great with. I would never hire most of them, and that’s. Infinitely more valuable and we’re hearing some kind of rehearse story about a tell me about a time went from five years ago, and how they like, how they know some technicalities, and lemme just kind of pull this together for you.
[00:11:38] Reverse consulting method works because it, it mirrors reality, because a lot of times you would call on someone to consult for you. You’re not guessing, right? What it feels like to work together. You’re trying to like figure out is this the live experience? Is this how it actually works? Is this how someone thinks without a script?
[00:11:52] Is this how they kind of handle ambiguity? You want to see whether they get. Energy or stress from solving real problems, or would they like it to do something in some other way? Now, if they don’t like talking about it, they will tell you. They’re like, Hey, I’m the kind of person that talks through it and writes, would you like me to kind of do that?
[00:12:09] I’ll be like, no problem. I’ll hit mute. Why don’t you stop and write while we do this? Or would you like to discuss this and then write and gimme back an answer in three or four hours? I’m okay with either, but at least I know the process that they go through. Right. The person who gets excited about solving a problem is during the interviews, is the same person who’s gonna excited about solving a problem after you hire them.
[00:12:25] That is the important part here. So we talked about three big things, right? So number one, traditional interviews are. Pretty poor predictors of per uh, of performance because this, this, the behavioral interviews have a place in how everything works. And the right people should ask those questions. You should have the HR team do that in the screening thing.
[00:12:44] They needed to answer those questions, ’cause that’s table stakes. That’s baseline. But when you turn interviews into consulting sessions, that’s how people actually think. I want the, their advice. What if I was paying them right now for consulting? And third, asking for bad ideas and giving real ownership really tells you how the person thinks it works.
[00:13:01] I will tell you, if you just do these three things, you will dramatically reduce a ton of your hiring mistakes. We grew by 70% just this year. We grew, you know, we almost like, we almost doubled the size of the business in under seven months. That’s crazy. And the goal is you don’t, you don’t wanna hire the best interviewer, you wanna hire.
[00:13:20] The best person actually is gonna help your business and help your team and help you succeed. That is the most important thing. So this is the kind of the, the, the three secrets to hacking the modern interview and getting yourself more A players. Hey, by the way, if you’d like this, can you do me a favor?
[00:13:35] Can you screenshot this and tag me that way I know that you like this and I can make more like this for you. And if you know somebody on your team or your COO or your mastermind group that is hiring, no matter who this is in, in, in any role, please share this with them. That way, they know how they can use the modern interview methods to hire as well.
[00:13:50] So if you like this, screenshot this and tag me. That way, I can make more like this for you.
[00:14:02] Hey, this is Sharran. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I’ve got a chance to build $2 billion companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you’ll love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It’s on my Substack, called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three-peat and build the next billion. So everything’s free at mynextbillion.com. Please check it out at mynextbillion.com.