Hey everyone,
I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about some of the traits I look for in a candidate. As a reminder, here they are:
Curiosity- Is this person genuinely curious about other people and organizations? Are they eager to learn, and do they ask great second and third-level questions to understand the prospect?Self Accountability- Can this person diagnose areas for improvement, design systems to help them improve, and successfully apply their system?Coachability- Can this person accept and, more importantly, apply feedback? Can they do so judiciously (i.e., can they determine what feedback is valuable and isn’t?)
I’ve enjoyed writing about how I determine and evaluate candidate traits, so I figured I’d keep it going. This week we’ll be talking about work ethic - a quality every employer loves, but very few can define, much less evaluate in an interview.
-Ben
🏋️♀️ How do you know you work hard? 🏋️♀️
Everyone wants employees that work hard. Everyone wants employees who work smart. So, let me ask you:
How do you know you work hard?
A friend and former coworker introduced me to this question, and I frequently use it in interviews. It’s excellent because the question assumes that the recipient does work hard, so they’re already starting from a position of psychological safety. Additionally, the question provides insight into how they define hard work - which, as we will see, is a crucial component many people gloss over when they talk about work ethic.
My goal with this post is to discuss how we can evaluate someone’s work ethic. But first, let’s define what we mean by “hard work.”
What is “hard work”?
Everyone says they want people on their team who work hard, but what do they mean?
For example, someone who works 16 hours every Saturday cutting their grass with scissors is undoubtedly working hard, but are they the kind of person you want working for you? They’re certainly not efficient and have awful judgment.
Conversely, someone who has automated their full-time job and works maybe two hours a week is certainly productive, but do you want them on your team? Sure they worked hard for a while, but now they’re coasting.
My point is that we think of hard work in two, sometimes opposing, ways. The first is activity - does this person do the manual tasks required to perform their job? The second is the outcome - does this person accomplish what they need to regardless of activity level?
I (and I suspect you) think of hard work as a mix of activities and outcomes - so we want people who consistently perform activities that drive better and better results. In other words, we want people who can work intelligently and frequently enough to get their job done as well as continue to improve themselves and the organization.
If we define “hard work” as the ability to consistently perform activities that generate increasingly better outcomes, that’s a good start! Now we know what we are looking for in an answer from the people we interview.
Answering the question
Because I’ve broken down the concept of hard work into two different components, I can now better understand what to look for in a candidate’s answer. Let’s take a look at the original question:
How do you know you work hard?
In my experience, the hardest working candidates have an answer that contains most of the following themes:
Social-proof
Many candidates will use social proof to benchmark their activity. For example:
I led all product managers in customer discovery sessions because I know that talking to a diverse set of prospective customers would help us build the best product.
Self-competition
Strong candidates won’t be content with social comparisons. Instead, they will compete against themselves to improve their activity and work smarter (not harder).
Consistency
Hard workers are consistent and understand the power of compounding activity. A consistent sales candidate will say, “I figured out I had to make at least five cold calls a day to reach my pipeline target.”
Return on investment orientation
Hardworking candidates work smart. They understand prioritization matters and don’t waste energy on repetitive or low-value tasks. Instead, they automate or remove those tasks so that they can work on tasks with a higher return.
Opportunism
Hard workers can’t help but work, and the good ones will look for other ways to improve their organization outside of their job title. For example, “I set up a training program with my team so that they could learn my job and I could chase bigger deals.”
Not all candidates will talk about all those themes, but they’ll often cover a couple. The real key is that they’re not content with just one proof point; they look for several indicators to prove that they work hard.
Learning how someone thinks about work
You will get a wide variety of answers to this question. Some candidates will crush it, and some will ramble. Even so, it’s one of my favorite questions because, unlike many behavioral questions, you gain insight into a candidate’s thought process - something they can’t fake. A hard-working candidate will let you know how they define hard work and provide concrete examples to support each view.
Gaining a better understanding of how a candidate thinks about their work is what you’re after, and “How do you know you work hard?” gets you there.
As always, thank you for reading!