Episode 66

Dr. Sönke Iwersen on Balancing Data-Driven and Gut-Feel Approaches in Data Team Hiring

TIM: Sonke Welcome to the Alooba Objective Hiring Show. Thank you so much for joining us.

DR SONKE: Yes, Tim, thanks for your thanks in your direction for inviting me. Happy to be here.

TIM: It's absolutely our pleasure, and one thing I'd love to kick off with is an observation that I've made over the years working in data and, in particular, data recruitment, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this. So I've spoken to maybe, I reckon, a thousand data leaders in the last five years, like a lot, across different countries and different industries. and what I find curious is that for data leaders who spend their day getting paid as a professional to run a data team, either in sales analytics or product analytics or operations or something, but fundamentally they are empowering their organization to make data-driven decisions in their bit of the business. and so they'll do this all day, every day, preaching about the value of data, improving data literacy, and training their team using data tools like it's just they are all in on data, but then I reckon for about 80 percent of these people, once it comes to hiring, it's almost like they remove their data cap and put on their intuition and gut feel cap and do away with even any attempts to have a data-driven hiring process and make it a lot more subjective. a lot more kind of gut feel-based, and so I'd love to get your thoughts on this: Is this an irony, or is this just a natural consequence of maybe hiring data that we have access to, or do you have any thoughts on this phenomenon, and can you explain it?

DR SONKE: I can do the very best, but of course if you talk about human beings, it's always difficult to forecast how this happens, so if you have data leaders, then of course they do the whole day driven by data, focus on data, sell data, and improve data-driven culture—all of these things. But this is pure business, so this is normally not 100 percent from the heart; it's more okay, this is my role, this is my responsibility, this is the power I have in execution, and if you go to recruiting, you sometimes easily go back and say, okay, what is what I like, what is what is an environment I would love to be loved to work in? So this makes exactly the break. You just mentioned that sometimes a human being goes back to his personal things, so breaking away with all the business things and all the data-driven-ness and KPI measurement whatsoever and then really going back to, okay, what is what is what I like, so this is sometimes the The skewed approach that you see, then it goes back to, Okay, I want to have some, some I wouldn't call it mini me but copy of myself, yeah, and if you have this in mind, then you go into the wrong direction sometimes, so I have not seen many data leads who do recruiting the same way they do the business topic or the business operations. Sometimes it's quite interesting that you have some KPI measuring points on the one side or the other, but in the end, you mentioned already the gut feeling a lot. A big share of this is gut feeling to see, Okay, the person I have here in front of me in the interview room for the interview. Is this the right fit, and can this fill a specific position? So this is quite human interaction, so it's not easy to measure via KPIs. If you have a blueprint or a template, please share it. Yeah, we'd love to see this.

TIM: My thoughts are that there's almost like a spectrum from pure data-driven to pure gut feel intuition, and maybe in some ways people are at some point on that spectrum, and you could take, I think, almost any step in the hiring process and put it on a point along that spectrum, so let's take interviews as an example. So I'd say, like, on the gut feel intuition spectrum, it would be in Australia; we call it, like, the pub test. You take them to a pub and have a few pints with them, and then at the end, after you're a little bit drunk, you decide whether or not you want to hire them. Okay, you might hear that the vibe check Are they the right vibe? there are no numbers at all; you're not even thinking about criteria. You're not trying to ask some specific questions. It's not structured; it's just getting to the end of it and making a yay or nay binary decision, but you could take that interview and make it a structured interview. Here's the 10 things we're looking for. Here's five questions we're going to ask. Here's what a good answer would look like for this question. Here's a bad answer. Here's an okay answer, and so you wrap this structure around it, even if it's still ultimately a subjective decision on what they scored, but you add some metrics around it. and so I feel like that's a way to make it more data-driven, more like a data leader might approach, for example, a product problem or an operations problem. Have you seen that process work? Have you seen it work well? Potentially you've seen some downsides of that more structured approach.

DR SONKE: I like your pub approach, but it's not possible on my end, to be honest, but it's a good idea. It's a good idea to have in mind what worked well for me in recruiting additional data leaders or data specialists, which was a mixed approach, so the CV topic is, for example, interesting, but sometimes you see very, very straight CVs that you say Oh cool I would love to see the person sometimes; you see extremely disharmonized CVs, but they have specific interesting points where I say, Whoa! It's absolutely not a data guy or a data goal, but for example, I had somebody in from who studied history. Yeah, I said, Whoa, history is so far away from computer science whatsoever. So, okay, but did tremendous hobbies with regards to data, so I said, Okay, let's talk," and so this was a starting point, so it's not really measuring, but it needs to be something where you say This is special. Yeah, this is special, and this makes it a potential fit for a specific role that you're searching for. At that point in time, I was a reporting specialist, so this is a point to go into the direction of whether you want to have a talk or not an interview. So if you pass this, then you meet a specific amount of people in the interview. It was always good to do a step approach based on my past experience. So the first topic is I'm not doing this alone; I'm doing this together with HR, so we say, Okay, we do a lot of first interviews, and for this, for me, it's extremely important to have experienced HR colleagues there to have a completely different view, so perspectives, so to have a full perspective on what is needed for the company you're recruiting for. So this works well because I have a specific amount of knowledge. Okay, what are my topics? I have a look, and HR covers a completely different part of this, so what is the cultural fit to the company? This is something I have not at heart because I'm a data guy. You know this is why I'm here, but HR brings a lot of this, so a lot of things that you can overlay And this works quite well to have a good picture in the end to then have the discussion together with the HR colleague: Is this a potential fit for the company and for the team? and this is a thing that worked out very well in the past, and it's not numbers. But it goes in this direction that you say you're not trusting your own gut feeling. Yeah, because I got very interesting discussions and very interesting remarks—things I haven't seen, yeah, vice versa. When we do this, that's always a good one who says, Okay, let's move on. So then in the second round, that worked well in the past; it was meeting parts of the team directly, so I try to avoid a situation where I say I do this on my own. It's more, is this Maybe a very, very high-skilled person, but the communication skills are not that good, and we are not going in the direction that the team needs or where the team is already. So, by the way, you're doing the expert interviews. It's always good to test, okay, is the CV correct? Yeah, so all the knowledge is in there. It needed to be a little bit askew, so normally if I get, if I send a cloud architect into an interview and he only asked for two or three points, yeah, but these are quite specific ones, for example, Yeah, so that's quite interesting, and so with this multistep approach, you have a very good picture of, okay, what does the company need? What is the team needing? What am I needing? What is HR needing? And then you have quite good feedback on this, including for me, it's very important that the candidate has a good view. Who will I work with? So the HR colleague, not so often, maybe, but not so often, but the team on a daily basis, multiple times, so it was always very, very good feedback from the candidates, I say. Hey, we already met two or three people we work with afterwards, and this is of high value for both sides because then you can easily say, Hey, maybe from my point of view, this is completely a plus. Yeah, but the team says, Yeah, but also, and then you can see, Okay, will this work? Yeah, so even this can go in both directions, so highly skilled, not so good team fit, but maybe not so super highly skilled but good, but the team says, We need this guy, so in the end, if you then say, Okay, take this." let it let this Let this go as a leader, then I learned, okay, the team afterwards is stronger than before, so it was good. Does it make sense for you?

TIM: Yeah, it does, and so I'm interested in the kind of corner cases then, so have you had candidates who you thought were amazing and your team thought were dreadful or vice versa, and if so, did you ultimately hire these people or not?

DR SONKE: Got it, so one of my big errors of the past, so long ago, I can talk about is I had either a gap and the position I needed to fill, and it was not a personal pain, but I thought, Ah, we are not moving fast enough, and so we had a candidate that was quite above average for sure. But the team says we are not sure if this is a good way to go there. I did the captain's call, hired the person, and what I wonder is if it didn't work out well, so this was a mistake. This was a mistake that I learned a lot from because it is good to have a personal opinion for sure. It can be a strong one, but it's not good. It's nearly impossible to do something against the team because at that point in time, again decades ago, I needed to fill this role in my view, but it was not the right person, and this was a very, very good example. So I hear a lot, but the team, what the team was telling me when it gets to highly specialized colleagues, again a long time ago, we had this once where we had a very, very good candidate, a cool CV, and cool leadership talk. but the team afterwards says we are not sure if this is the right person for us because he can't communicate so well, so the communicative skills were at the leadership level perfect, but on the day-to-day level it was from the team reviewed as well. It's not as good as we are today, so I mentioned before you can make a team stronger even if it's not only the highest qualified people. but at that point it was a very high profile with regards to skills, but the team says we're not—we don't trust it that this will make us stronger, so then I said, Okay, no, then it's a no-go. Yeah, so we in the end said, No, cool candidate, but in general, not the right fit. Yeah, so this is what in the end came out there, so yes, both possible experience, both

TIM: And you mentioned also having a step where HR is involved in the process, and you said that they almost gave you a company lens that you might not have had, or you mentioned that them focusing a bit more on the cultural fit of the candidate, and you said something like that's maybe not your strong suit, is you're the data expert. Is that the case, though? Are they in a position to tell you about the company culture in a way that you don't understand yourself? Do you think there is really that value add on that side of things?

DR. SONKE: I like the other perspective, so it

TIM: it

DR. SONKE: It always comes with time that you get more and more used to the company culture, so currently I'm more than four years in my company, so I know this quite well, but again, if you have HR colleagues, they not only look at culture; they look at different things. So even when I'm doing the exchange with regards to technologies, approaches, deliverables, or discussions on a more data level, they can have a view on how this goes, how is the talking between what is the impression they get during the discussion without having any clue about the data aspect of this work the other way round. I can have a look if they talk about more HR culture company-related things that are on HR's main stack, so both enable the other part to have more. It's not an outside view, but it's a neutral view. We are not always in the talk, so it's a neutral view. It's a more relaxed view that you have, and you can analyze a little bit. more And this combination is quite strong; this is my experience from the past.

TIM: It's like a wisdom of the crowd's effect almost.

DR. SONKE: Wisdom of the duo, or whatever. I have no clue how to say it directly, but it's good to not do this alone because then, as I mentioned before, decades ago, you may fall into the trap of, I like this candidate; it's quite good. Come on, let's get it; let's get him in, so I'm not doing this anymore because it doesn't make sense. So this crowd topic, as you mentioned, if two are a crowd, yes, of course, it's valid for me. For me, it's a second opinion, yeah, and in both directions, yeah, yeah, so you have the chance to go more into discussion afterwards, so with regard to the fit of the cap of the candidate you just saw, that's good. My experience

TIM: One thing I've observed over the years, especially when we've run an agency, is that the longer a hiring process goes on and the more people that are involved, the higher the likelihood is that the candidate will be rejected at some point, taking it to its extreme conclusion. 100 percent of all candidates will be rejected as long as the hiring process is long enough. It might take 11 interviews or 12 or 15, but eventually someone on some day is going to find a reason to not like them and reject them for some reason, I think, because hiring is so subjective and often It just comes down, at least partly, to how much you like the person, which is then down to how much you slept the night before. Did you get up on the right side of the bed? Have you had your coffee? Did the candidate shake your hand appropriately that day? Did they happen to support the same football team as you? Did they look like you? There's just a million reasons why our decision-making is impaired, I think, and so that If the hiring process goes on long enough, someone will say no. So my question is, are we sure that having all these different stakeholders involved is actually adding value rather than adding signal rather than noise? At some level, are there any interviewers that you'd rather actually not be involved in the process because you feel like they're almost detracting rather than adding value?

DR SONKE: It's a good one, so if I work with recruiting companies, then we have, for me, it worked out to have on a steady basis always the reflection, always searching into the right direction. Yeah, so after seeing some CVS, it's always going back, okay, what was the dislike? what was good What was bad to avoid exactly this tremendous amount of CVS that's quite a burden? I try to invest a lot of time at the beginning when really forming the profile, already talking about what we have at the company. Is it a small team? Is it a big team? Is it an engineering team? What are the technologies? What is the spirit? What was the past? Where have we come from? Where are we now? Where do we want to go? We have a wide variety of topics that a headhunter can go back with into his amount of profiles to see, Okay, what was a good fit for this company? Sometimes it worked out that even a longer relationship without searching So having a quarterly talk, just a digital coffee, okay, where's it going? Where are we now? And it was quite good because when you then go back to the headhunter one year later, he says, Okay, yes, so the last time we talked, half a year ago, three months ago, this was that. Has this changed tremendously? So if a headhunter is not just on point but really in a relationship, if you search or if you don't search, this worked out for me quite well. When you go into the recruiting process for a profile, then of course the difficulty is spending too much time, yeah, because you get quite some CVs, and how many talks do you do? So this is always the topic I try to invest in, especially for the first round, first interview, and a specific amount of time, but it's already okay if some interviews may not be helpful afterwards. Yeah, so let's say, okay, this is the potential candidate; let's have a look. I'm not the one—the person who says no. I only want to have three interviews in the first round, and then we should be done. So it's the other way around. If I see a good profile, I would like to talk to them because maybe it's a good fit, and then it's up to me: okay, do I want this or don't I? Is this a no-go on my side? Yeah, so this is a little bit always the evaluating: okay, how's it going? Normally, I'm the first round when you start. You get quite a bit of profile; it's a big amount of time, but it's absolutely worth it because then I can find out, Okay, what's currently possible if we search in this direction? Yeah, so you get back a lot of feedback. What are the profiles that are currently searching? And what is the direction? What's the demand? What's the demand? How do they want to work? Yeah, so it's worthwhile, but of course, yes, you're right, it's a lot of time you need to spend.

TIM: You mentioned something in passing there that I think is really important for people to think about, which is you said you spend quite a lot of time upfront figuring out the profile that you're going for, and I think that's a really helpful tip because I see so many hiring processes that get derailed because really they're only 50% sure they know what they're after, and there's a case of almost making the process up as they go along. Call it in Australia, maybe in other countries, moving the goalposts. So we're looking for this. We're looking for this. We're looking for this. We haven't quite thought it out, and I've seen that's where most often it fails because you'll have this process, and you're trying to manage the communication with the candidate, telling them what the company's looking for and what the steps are. and then suddenly they change, and suddenly some other person is an interviewer who's got their own things, their own criteria that they're looking for, and they come in and go, Nah, I didn't really like Joe. I didn't think they were a strong analyst because of X, Y, Z, but X, Y, Z are things that they're looking for. It has nothing to do with what we were looking for three months ago, and I feel like the more work that could be done up front, even if it seems tedious, the better, because it's just going to make the whole process more consistent and more accurate from there on, at least in my experience.

DR SONKE: and it's always helpful to do this starting with the HR colleague, yeah, because, as I said, we want to do a job ad with what's in there, and if you have not too many colleagues from HR, normally it's for tech only a specific amount of colleagues, then they know you. Yeah, so they know what you searched in the past, so they already asked, Okay, what's different? Yeah, or why is this in there? I said, Ah, okay, because it evolved. Now we have this or that technology or this or that direction more than we had the last time, and this is then the starting point of the discussion. Okay, of course, what is the right profile? What is the right person we need at that specific amount of maturity that you have in the team? Yeah, so at the beginning it's completely different, yeah, versus you hire number 10. Yeah, so it's a completely different approach with regards to skills, seniority, or maturity of business knowledge whatsoever. So this is quite interesting, and if you do this with your HR colleague, then you need to be sure, okay, what am I searching for? So you immediately need to reflect on yourself. This helped me a lot because when my colleague in HR called in the past, I said, okay, well, what is this for? I said, Yeah, it's quite good. I would like to have this. Do you have this already? I said, Ah, not really. So I said, Okay, then let's do something like innovation in that direction. So then you shape it; you shape the job ad, and you make it more tangible, and this eases up the situation for people searching because they know what to expect. Yeah, this is a good point. So if you do the normal template, okay, what we do at last time, Chuck, Chuck, just search, and you can do this. But if there are two years in between or one year in between, you should have a look. You should have a look. Is this still valid? Did the company change? Did your team change? Did you change with regards to what the needs are?

TIM: So if you've got a consistent partner you work with, one you've been working with for a while, at least they've got a bit of a head start next time you go to hire if the new role is similar in some ways to the last one, and so that process you go through with them to unpack the role actually helps in some way to clarify a little bit as well. So that the process is more smooth after that point.

DR. SONKE: Exactly, exactly.

TIM: You mentioned earlier on reflecting on some hiring mistakes you made in the past where you had to captain's call versus the team call over some people you hired. Are there any other big milestones in your hiring learning in the past that are based on some kind of mistake that you've made in the past that you could share with our audience?

DR SONKE: I think the biggest mistake I already shared with you with regards to hiring is sometimes it's a little bit the discussion or the evaluation off of the team, so I learned, so for me it was what is the arrow? The arrow was two junior colleagues in an interview. So again, decades ago, when you sent somebody into an interview, you must be prepared. If you take somebody who is ill, then you had to replace this person. The new person is junior, and you didn't have the time to prepare the colleague, so more or less, the first or second interview or so, you lose a little bit of the chance to really get to know the other side of the candidate, so this is something I try now more to point more to have focus on that. If you have, for example, two colleagues who said Hey, I have time that you have a mix and that you have quite a good mix, and at least one of these colleagues should be an experienced or senior person because otherwise you have somebody who may be more nervous than the candidate. Because, well, I'm sitting here and should do a recruiting, yeah, so, and of course, the feedback afterwards is not so helpful as you have somebody in there to assist the junior colleagues, so it's absolutely fine because for potential candidates, it's always good to see what the team is I will work with. So if you have an experience/ senior, and you have more junior than said, Okay, you are doing a dual student that jumped into the team and is now in year one, two, three, perfect. If somebody who did this for 10 years and so on, and there I don't know, I'm in the middle; I'm more experienced; it helps a lot too. Find out what is what is the team, so if you don't do this and if you say, Yeah, we need to do the call, and we didn't have the time to put the right people in, then the call, the interview, won't be good. Yeah, clear learning, yeah, and then you go back to, Okay, what perspective do you have at that point of time? Then I had the HR in my perspective; it's quite difficult to then compare this with other qualities that you get with regards to feedback, so because you have a disbalance there, you only have one chance because you have one interview where you're not participating, so this is something I said I would have done this better. Then, for example, another topic is if you work with headhunting. I'm a friend of circulating, so not only choose one recruiting company but, from time to time, try to distinguish a little bit, okay, maybe this is one that started with A, then it's B, then it's C, so that you're not only one focused because then you maybe do not cover the complete market because every network is a little bit different. And not one headhunter is covering all, especially when it gets to data people, but if you, from time to time, do a change, then you get this complete my learning, a completely different set of candidates, so it's quite interesting. I have no clue, no really reason why, but this is this experience I made. So the error, if you want to go back to this, is that if you only stick to one recruiting company, you have only a limited set, and this is not changing over time. This makes disbalance in the long run.

TIM: For the first learning you mentioned, around making sure the interviewers are well prepared and that the right people are doing the interview, I feel like that's a really underappreciated and underoptimized bit of the process. It's just interviewer quality, interview question quality, and interview process quality. I know at least for myself no one ever taught me how to interview; I just started doing it probably terribly to begin with, and I've got some evidence that it was terrible because the first two people I hired quit within the first week, so I don't think it could go any worse than that. Now, that might not have been my interview. It might not even have been me. It might've been the Excel hell environment and freak show of a company that they were coming into, but maybe I also had some say in that, but yeah, like, at no point really have I taken a course in interviewing or anything like that. I've just learned by doing over years and years and years of practice. and trial and error with the emphasis on error, so I wonder whether this is a gap, actually, and something that could be improved a lot, especially for the hiring managers or people involved in the hiring team who aren't really HR professionals but are the ones who ultimately make most of the hiring decisions. It seems like there's a bit of a weird gap. What do you think?

DR SONKE: This is absolutely on your side, I think, especially on data people. They don't focus on the recruiting part, so neither on leadership nor on level, so if you do these interviews as a potential teammate, then this is something you jump in like you just mentioned. Yeah, so at some point in time, I said, Okay, now I have to do this. Okay, good. Let's interview a person. So, hi, how are you? And I haven't seen very good training programs or something like this, or especially in the past, not many companies that are really focusing on that, that the team or the group of people who is recruiting is really trained in this. This is normally really coming by experience, coming by gut feeling. mistakes Yeah, so, to be honest, I think it would help to have some at least introductory training or at least a little bit of the interview situation, yeah, maybe as role play in between before this or something like this. I haven't done this in the past, but it's a good idea to do this. to exactly close this gap Yeah, so this is, I think, one of the topics where you could improve this, and the effort is not so high because you are not doing the interviews with the complete team, and you need to. It's not necessary to do days of trainings or whatsoever. I think to offer a little bit more the opportunity to say Hey, one, two, three hours maybe max, yeah, prepare a little bit, do a short role play, then do a feedback session, try again. This makes you make you have a relaxed situation for yourself, especially as a junior colleague, when you do the first interview, so I would recommend it. It's a good idea.

TIM: Yeah, for sure, and thinking about it now, I wonder whether the sort of cheap, lo-fi, immediate option would be a conversation with Chet Chibuti because, like, I've used that personally recently for Hey, I just want to chat with you for 10 minutes in my Spanish, so I just chat with it in Spanish and then ask for feedback at the end. Hey, how did I go? What were my main mistakes? What were my main errors? That was pretty good, and it was free, and I could do it immediately. I wonder if that would be better than nothing at all in terms of then just saying Hey, impersonate a candidate. I'm going to interview you for a data analyst role. I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions. Tell me how I went as an interview. I wonder how it would do with that task.

DR SONKE: It's a natural thing to do, yeah, especially the younger you get, the more used to it you are, or the more convenient it is. What you can't generate in this talk is really the personal relationship, so even if it's a video call or a Teams call or whatever, or really a face-to-face interview, the situation is different. So, of course, if you ask if you sit alone in front of your PC and you do this, it's a training. Yeah, it helps you. You can't generate the real situation, and especially data people, especially data experts, behave differently when it gets to personal situations on the tech. They could be 100 percent super experienced whatsoever, but if it gets to a face-to-face interview, for example, or even the video interview, they behave differently. They behave differently because it's completely new, and it has other characteristics than the normal work that you do. Of course, you can use ChatGPT, but I think it's not a full replacement right now. Yeah, so maybe in one, two, three, or five years, but maybe not now. But I think your Spanish, of course, can improve by this. but I think for interviewing Good approach, good starting point, but it's not so helpful in real life currently.

TIM: Yeah, and I wonder if the gaps at the moment would be dealing with all the body language or the emotion of the candidate. A way to make a candidate feel relaxed and calm if you realize that they're floundering and you want to just calm them down a little bit is to have the skill and experience to know how to do that, how to not butt in too often, and how to keep someone on track with their answers. So sometimes people maybe need to be redirected a little bit on how to dig as well, like how to follow up and keep going down to actually find the answers. I guess there's probably like an art of interviewing that you could never learn from an AI. What are your thoughts? Can you almost think now of what has made good interviews or a good interviewing process or a good interviewer, I should say?

DR SONKE: I think there's no clear toolbox for this, to be honest. Maybe I had in mind the topic of the training, so, for example, this training topic, you train, for example, project management, so we do this internally that we have an internal PMO training. Yeah, so why not have something like an internal recruiting topic? Yeah, so this is something you could set quite easily. When it gets to interviews, it's quite interesting because, as I said, there's no real toolbox because it's extremely spontaneous at some point because sometimes it's a half sentence. Sometimes it's a remark; sometimes the question of the candidate opens up a completely new field. I said, Oh, you're asking me this question? Okay, then let's talk about that. Yeah, so this is quite difficult; of course, it's easier when you see candidates who are relaxed or even get relaxed after some minutes. Normally, you have some emotions when you start in an interview as a candidate because the pressure situation isn't on the person recruiting, so they are sitting there quite relaxed, but this helps if If a candidate has a plan for him or her, what are the things I want to learn in this call? That's always helpful. So normally it's very good if a candidate, especially for data roles, has some specific questions, so when you come to the end of an interview, you can then go back to your list and say, Okay, is there anything I missed? Yeah, so when I do interviews, I really try to focus on time for the candidate to ask questions. It's not a one-hour talk where you say, Okay, just fire with questions from the recruiting side. No, cool, it's at some point, then, okay, now we are going back, and please, what are your topics? You need to know to find out if this is the right place for you to be as a company, as a team, as a leader, whatsoever. And this is always well appreciated because it seems not to be normal in this regard during the interview. It's quite difficult, yeah, so I think you need to have a structure, so in my case, as I said, together with HR, this is a small game plan, but it's covering four or five points. Yeah, so that's all. So just that you see, okay, in general we have in scope a specific amount of topics we need to run through, and this gives a little bit of structure. This helps because then you can share this with the candidate. The candidate has a chance to relax, to say, Okay, this is the intro, then tech, then whatever, then my question. So that's quite good, but if it really gets to the time in the interview for me, it's quite difficult to find the right toolbox because every candidate is different. Yeah, so that's, for me, not so easy to say or to explain, to be honest.

TIM: You mentioned then that you would almost lay out at the top of the call what the process will be so the candidate understands what's about to happen in the next hour. I guess that helps them relax a little bit and not get worried that they won't have an opportunity to answer or ask their own questions.

DR SONKE: Yes, this helps; this helps extremely because if you know at some point in time that it's on you to ask some questions, yeah, this always helps because on the one side, a lot of candidates prepare, and on the other side, if a candidate is after 45 minutes saying, No, I don't have a question, Then I said, Interesting, yeah, because I would have thousands into your direction, yeah, so working on what you have done with that, so this is always interesting. It's a very good topic to give this as an exercise or as an option; you name it, because a lot of candidates feel comfortable with this. and to be honest, the amount of candidates who demand this is getting higher. Yeah, so if I see the last four years versus 10 years ago, then the last four years, the candidates are better prepared, better prepared, and they have more questions than before in my experience.

TIM: What I've noticed in doing hiring is I find, like, when we get to the candidates questions, the way I would do it is I would start the call and ask candidates, Do you have any questions? To kick off with, I feel like most of the time that catches them off guard because they're not really expecting it at the start because they may be used to it at the end. So I'll ask it at the end again, but I'll ask them to start almost none of the time did they have any questions at the start; maybe sometimes after we've had the discussion, then things crop up in their mind, and then they'll ask him at the end, but I still get the sense more often than not they're almost formulaic. I feel like they're asking a question just because they know they have to ask a question rather than this is really something specific that they want to learn about, and I don't know about you, but I would look favorably upon a candidate who was asking really specific, relevant things. like it was clear that question was thought through. Oh, I watched your capital raising video here, and you mentioned X. Can you explain how this relates to your vision for the company or something like that? Because I feel like they've already gone a few levels down, and we can have a real discussion as opposed to something quite superficial? Oh, what's your tech stack? It's on the job ads you already know that you have experienced a similar feeling yourself when you've dealt with candidates questions.

DR. SONKE: Yes, so if you give the first questions to the candidates, then it may be exactly this point in the interview where they are still nervous, and then it's not a good starting point, so in general, to put away the pressure, I would start with an introduction of the company and the colleagues, then a little bit, for example, my topics, okay, what I'm doing So I give the nutshell version; it's five to 10 minutes, and so where I am, what about me, about the company, where do we come from, where are we now, where do we want to go? So this normally gives candidates the possibility to relax, so if you do this, it can work out good and not so good. Yeah, so that's both very interesting. I had this not very often; I can remember one candidate again decades ago where we changed this, so we tried to start, but then we caught a very early question from the candidate, and then the candidate was pushing, so I said, Okay, what are you doing there? Why are you doing this? This is what I see I learned there. That's what I said. Whoa, so this and there, we got away from the playbook. We said, Okay, let it run. Yeah, because this is interesting. Yeah, this is really interesting because you immediately learn that you see passion; you immediately see passion in a candidate. Extremely well prepared, so at that point in time, it was a situation where I had been on some conferences before I was on stage, so I said, Okay, you said this, you said that, so what is it now? We're talking about this, so whoa, okay, fine. Yeah, so this was really putting some pressure on us, and this was interesting. I said, Okay, this is something we need to see how this works because then you have passionate people who are well prepared who can fight for the topics because there's, Hey, this is something I want to do. Yeah, I did this, and this is the bridge, and can I do that? So if they have a clear picture of what they want to do and what they want to learn, this always helps. We had in the past some colleagues in Romania say, Hey, we haven't been in the cloud, but you do cloud; we want to do cloud. Yeah, and we learned that you are doing this, so we want to be on your team to do exactly ABC. I said, Okay, cool, that's nice, so this is happening, but not very often in case it happens. Yeah, listen, listen, listen, and answer, so this is my feedback there because it's extremely good if you have this chance to meet these candidates. It's not so often because, as I said, a lot of people are nervous. If they are now in the team, they are sometimes completely different and much more self-confident and conscious, but at the beginning of an interview, it's a specific situation.

TIM: So some candidates almost flip the script and almost take control of the narrative and conversation. That must require quite a level of assertiveness and confidence from the candidates, and maybe that's partly why not many candidates would do that. Is that an approach you would take yourself, do you think, if you were going for a job? If you were really passionate about it, could you imagine yourself really taking control of that conversation to try to flip it in your favor? DR SONKE: I could do I'm not sure if I would do it. If you're meeting as a candidate, you're meeting people you don't know before. If you have a hiring manager or a data leader who is not willing to change their script because they are used to it, then it can ruin the complete talk. If you do this, so if you are not known to the group of people you talk to, you need to test. Yeah, sometimes you say, Okay, I don't know; this is the coolest job ever. I recruited for the—I need to do something different because there are others outside, and then you need to do this, and for me personally, it's not that that approach is normally if you go to data leader topics; it's not to be disruptive. If I'm a data scientist, data governance manager, or data engineer, then it's, yeah, it can be interesting to say, Hey, I do it differently because I'm different. Yeah, so with one colleague in the team, it says, Hey, we are a bunch of unicorns. Yeah, everybody is different. Yeah, so you can play with this if you do data, but when it gets to leadership positions, I think you can do this. but it can be taught, as I just mentioned, in case you have the wrong persons on the other side. TIM: So tread carefully; perhaps it would be Yeah, and it's not so easy to act if you don't know the people. If you know the people, of course you can behave completely differently, but you don't often have the chance to be in a company and then maybe jump into a team or something like this, so sometimes when you're an internal or dual student or so, it may be different.

DR SONKE: Yeah, because then you know the team, you know the people; that's easier, but from the outside, the normal recruiting process It must fit your personality; if yes, do so; if not, don't do it.

TIM: As a candidate, when you've gone for roles, have you experienced any particularly good or particularly bad processes that really stick in your mind, and what made them particularly good or bad in your view?

DR. SONKE: It was particularly good when I was hired for Xing a few years ago. Then it was very interesting to see what the people I met in my recruiting process were like. So it was HR, it was my future manager, and other colleagues from the management board, so this was quite interesting. When you work with a lot of colleagues, later than the one level up on the C level, they take the time. to share their thoughts, to listen to a presentation I did discuss the topics, so I said, Whoa, this is a company where you want to shape leadership and where you want to shape data teams, so it was a new setup, and I made a proposal, and they started the discussion, so I said, Whoa, that's cool. because I have the opportunity to do a proposal, and then we start discussion, we're getting feedback, and then we adjust to find a good solution, so this was a very, very good example. I had on the other side a company where I had six interviews—yeah, six interviews—where I said, Whoa, this is quite a long recruiting process. So, this is something where you need to distinguish if it is worth it. Yeah, so of course now there are companies that do, I don't know, 13, 14, or so, but then they were talking about very big companies. If you are a normal company, then it makes sense to restrict it to only a specific amount of interviews. So, because at some point it's good that you have the chance to meet a lot of people, yeah, so if I meet six different people from a company I'm not working for, cool, but the planning effort, the interviewing effort, is quite high, yeah, so do you really want to do this to be really safe that you get the right candidate as a candidate? Of course it's easier if you have, I don't know, a two- or three-step process. If it gets up to more senior roles, of course there may be one additional, but I'm not sure if you need 10; for example, this would be quite many, to be honest.

TIM: Yeah, and I feel like companies should look up the research Google did years ago on this in their own hiring. They're one of the only companies in the world that would have enough data to really evaluate this, and I can't remember the number, but it felt like they found something like after the fourth interview, the marginal value was almost zero. because they weren't learning anything new about the candidates, and yeah, I think some companies put candidates through the ringer and put their own team through the ringer, and they should just have a few interviews, figure out what you need to evaluate it, and make a decision and just move on with your lives.

DR SONKE: You're right. you're right

TIM: Sonke It's been a great conversation with you today. It's been wide-ranging. I'm sure our audience will get a lot of value out of your insights, and thank you so much for sharing them with us today.

DR SONKE: Thanks for having me here. Bye.