YAST

One of my hobbies is helping people find new jobs, and ideally find ones that will make them as happy as possible. I was talking to some friends yesterday about their travails job-hunting, and a recurring theme that came up was the challenge of understanding what an organization is like from the outside so that they could make an informed decision about whether or not they’d be successful there. And I realized that all of the advice I gave them was straight from lessons I’ve picked up in post-incident reviews/learning from incidents.

There are a couple of core problems you face in reverse-interviewing a company. The people you’re talking to don’t know what’s important to you nearly as well as you do, and if you try to ask them general questions about those things they will either give you pat answers, try to sell you on the place and thus tell you what they think you want to hear, simply not be able to answer the question, or (inadvertently) lie to you (since they’ll answer based on their mental model of the org and not what actually happens in reality). These are all the same kinds of challenges you face when talking to people in the aftermath of an incident: they want to construct a story that makes sense, they have their own mental model of what happened, and they feel internal and external pressure to give a “good” answer to the questions interviewers ask. So the techniques we use to get past those barriers in post-incident reviews can help us in job hunting!

For example, one of my friends is very interested in how decisions get made in any organization they’re considering joining; certain modes and methods will work well for them, others not as well, and they want to make sure they’re set up for success before they commit. So the question they planned to ask was “how do decisions get made here?”, which has the virtue of being open-ended while pretty straight to the point. Unfortunately it’s also very easy for an aware person to shape their answer to. So my suggestion was to ask instead “Tell me about the last major decision that got made at this level. Who was involved in it? How did the process play out?” By asking a more specific question, they can get at the kind of information they’re interested in without running as much risk of triggering a sales pitch.

It can feel a little weird to ask interviewers these sorts of questions! But in the same way that post-incident interviewing plays on making people feel like an expert, asking a question like this in an interview allows the person conducting the job interview to feel like an expert in their org. And much like post-incident analysis, it may require a little more work on your part to tease out the information you really care about, but it will pay dividends in the quality of the information you get.