Episode 95

Alexander Godjali on Transparency, Fair Play and Real-Time Feedback in Hiring

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show with Alex. Alex, thank you so much for joining us.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, thank you, and good morning.

TIM: Exactly. Good morning for you. Very early morning for you and afternoon for me. We've both got our coffees in hand, so we're pumped for a good chat. And what would be a great place to start is to hear a little bit about yourself. Who is Alex?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, of course. So on LinkedIn I just say I'm just another recruiter and my name is Alex, and this is basically who I am. I'm 31 years old. Have a family with one kid and live here in Germany. Recruiting as a Head of Talent Acquisition.

TIM: And you are based near Düsseldorf, is that right?

ALEXANDER: Yes,

TIM: And what's that bit of Germany known for? What could people expect if they went there?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, so we are in the west of Germany. So you have here cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf. I myself live in Mönchengladbach, so maybe you know the football clubs here, but you also have a lot of big cities here in the west. Yeah, this is, the football clubs and the big cities are normally typical here.

TIM: The other football certainly appeals to me. I'm sure we've had a few Australians over the years play for Borussia Mönchengladbach. None that were especially amazing, so you might not even remember them, but we have had a few.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, I'm not the real big football fan.

TIM: Okay. and we could chat about German tourism or football all day, but we should probably talk a bit more about hiring and, in particular, objective hiring. At the end of the day, that's what the podcast is all about. And I'd love to, to start with, yes, hear your general thoughts on hiring. How do we make hiring fairer? How do we make it more objective? What do you think about this problem?

ALEXANDER: I think you said the right word because it has to be fair. This is one thing that I have in my mind a lot. I work in a very hard and competitive industry because we are an audit, tax, and legal firm. So we don't have so many candidates, and we have to give them, as a recruiter, a really good service. But on the other hand, we need every piece of information. We want to really know them. And we want to be fair. So this is not an easy task for me and for our team here to get the right person, have every piece of information about them, be fair, and attract a lot of candidates in these hard markets. I think that they have to be fair and that they have to be human because when you speak about it, they have to be fair; the candidates don't have the opportunity to give us some assessments or some. Big rounds of questions or stuff like this, they can ask us everything at any time, of course. But we don't do an assessment as an employee or something like this. And so when I say it has to be fair, it has to be in the atmosphere in the interview. Where the candidate thinks, okay, I can ask everything. But I have to answer everything also. And when you dig a little bit too deep, the atmosphere changes. And this is not really easy because normally they really shut down on this moment. And this is a task that we have here. Right now. Yep.

TIM: Is it because you keep digging and digging? You're getting down to the truth. So you're almost like touching a raw nerve in a sense. Is that why candidates sometimes react a little bit hesitantly?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, maybe something like this. Or I also think that they want to present them. And when you dig deep, you don't, they, you don't give them the stage to do any show. So when you dig deep, they have to understand that why. So what I do in my interviews is I really take a lot of notes about what they say and where I have some questions, and after that I tell them, Okay, I have five more questions right now for you. Let's do it. And because you have now 10 minutes of monologue here and I just fire out my questions, but after that, when we are finished, like in the middle of the interview, I tell them what my notes say, so I tell them, Okay, you look for me like a person that, I don't know, really needs a lot of feedback. I don't know, something about in my notes, and ask them, okay, is this a picture that I draw here from you, is it fine for you, or do you have any aspect that I'm missing or that I don't understand, right? Because I want to be fair, so when I have maybe an hour and a half or maybe two hours with them and then a face-to-face interview, I don't want to end the interview and say to my colleagues, Okay, I say this person is. And don't want to give them the chance to describe a little bit more, add more details. So yeah, I dig deep, but for me, it's really important that they understand why. So I have little breaks where I describe it, the situation, why I ask it, and in the end I will tell them the result that I have from them in my notes and tell them, Okay, do you want to add something, or did I? Misunderstand something, or I don't know, and because I think this is fair when I say, okay, this is what I have here, I see some problems, this is really good for our position, and I would, or I would describe you as a person like, I don't know, it's fine, yeah, this is what I do in my interviews.

TIM: an interviewing style like that before. So I'd love to drill down a bit deeper, actually. But not so deep that it's awkward.

ALEXANDER: Oh, we can do it.

TIM: My first thought is, did you develop this style over time? Is this a certain style you've learned? Did it come about because a certain style you had didn't work in the past? Like, where did this come from?

ALEXANDER: For me, I work in different industries as a recruiter and have different people in front of me, and the outer tech and legal firms are really special because the people here are not so much open personality-wise, like I can say it's stuff like this, and what, at the first, I'm here for three years now, and at first my challenge was to get candidates at all. And after that, I say, okay, now we get the candidates; now we have to choose which person is the right one. And so on. And I really developed my—I wouldn't say this is a technique. It's my style for interviews because we say we are totally transparent in our interviews and everything that we do because we think it is important that the candidates have the opportunity to see Transcribed. What kind of team here is it that sees what type of task and so on? But when I say I want to be transparent, I have to. Tell them, Okay, this is the picture that I have, because when I don't do it, it's not transparent. And we develop a lot of things here in the recruiting. And for me, what is, it was really clear that this is the next step because we want the right person for the right position, of course, but we also want to have a really good service. They have emotional rights for the candidates because they're thinking about the change in the company, which is really emotional. And we want to be fair and show them, okay, we understand your situation. We understand you maybe. And this is a picture. We think this is good, or this is not so good for this position, because after the interview, when I call them, I have to tell them something, why it doesn't work here, or why we are the best company for them, and when I told them before what kind of information I have, they really understood that, and they said, Okay, yeah, you are totally right, you are not the right company for me, and I think it's better, just like that, yeah.

TIM: Yeah, it does. It sounds great. And I'm just trying to now put myself in your shoes and in the candidate shoes and thinking about it. I think for some interviewers it would be hard to be that open and honest at the end, especially when it's like constructive criticism and areas of where you think maybe they're not the right candidate. That might be a little bit confronting for people that don't like conflict. And also, it might be. A little bit difficult just to on the fly summarize your thoughts. Like you mentioned, you took a lot of notes. So it's really these notes. You must be a good note taker. You must be a good summarizer and be able to synthesize this live in an interview without needing time to sit down and reflect. I think that's quite an interesting skill. Did that, did you always have that, or did that develop over time?

ALEXANDER: It develops, and also we don't criticize them, because They are, I think, really good people, because we want to talk with them and maybe want to work with them. We just tell them, Okay, when you have this experience and this job and we are looking for this, we are not sure if it's the right direction that we are looking for, and we give them the chance to speak with us about our ideas for this position. And yeah, this is what I want to make clear, but yeah, the note-taking, I think I really, I'm not really like it, to write a lot, but it is necessary because when I don't speak, I write really long. Notes, because I have the time, but when I speak with the candidate and have the questions and so on, I just take one word here, one word there. It's total chaos on my paper sheet. But I don't want to lose an idea or an information or a thought that I have at this moment, so I have a lot of words some circuits and stuff like this, like a little mind map, and some little squares for hard facts and then the thoughts that I have on the other side, and Yeah, after that I can tell them, okay, I see you're really open minded, it is right, I, I hear something like, I don't know, you're a family person, you need a lot of feedback, it is right, or do I do I hear the wrong picture, and the candidates are really surprised when you start something like this, because you tell them, okay, I don't have any questions, but I want to tell you something, I argued this person that I note here, and they normally surprise, because they say they don't think that they have a completely personal analysis of the of them, but After the surprise moment, they are really happy that they have the chance to add some details, or say, okay, maybe you read this wrong, or something like this, yeah.

TIM: Yeah, it's great to give them that chance to edit. The picture, as you say, you've painted of them. I imagine if you've accurately captured who they think they are in their mind, that must be quite a positive feeling for them. Because of all this, like this person has understood me, which no matter how well the interview has gone or not, at least they have that nice feeling. And then the fact that you're giving them the chance to edit that and tweak it means they can correct anything they feel like is not fully representative. Has it ever backfired, or has anyone ever reacted quite negatively? Because I mentioned, the way you're presenting it now, I could see how it's only got a lot of upside.

ALEXANDER: No, never. I never have a situation where the candidate says, Okay, you're on the totally wrong track, or something like this. No.

TIM: Amazing. And this is out of a lot of interviews, I can imagine.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, of course, that we are so detailed, it's new, because in my first year here, we really want to have a good atmosphere. This is what we want to have; we just talk with them, have a nice chat, see, okay, what kind of person is here, and with their experiences, it's possible to have a job for them. After that, we. dig a little bit deeper so we have a long feedback for ourselves where we take every note and stuff like this, a rating system, just a small one. So we don't forget what we speak about with them because we have, for our size, a lot of people here, and we don't forget anything before the start because maybe you say, Okay, you can have an, I don't know, a laptop or something like this, and we don't have, when we don't have the notes, it's not so good because we forget things, and yeah, then we started to dig a little bit deeper and be more, maybe a little bit more professional. Yeah, and the result is that we now have more notes but also more questions and give the candidate the chance to add something. Yeah, so it developed over time here. Yeah.

TIM: Straight away. I'm thinking of note-taking apps. It's one of the probably leading use cases of A.I.S. Things like fireflies, and they do a pretty accurate job at transcribing what people say, at least in English and probably in other languages, and a reasonable job at summarizing. One thing I've always noted when I'm doing interviews is it's quite hard to take notes. Focus on what the person's saying; really listen to them. Think of the next question I'm going to ask. It's quite a cognitively difficult thing. Would you ever consider, or have you tried using, an AI note-taking app? If so, how did it compare to you taking them yourself?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, I really want to have a note-taking app or transcript app or something like this. I'm searching at the moment for it because for face-to-face interviews, it's not the standard to have something like this. And the apps on the market are normally for Teams. I don't know, Slack, Zoom, stuff like this, but not for face-to-face interviews because often you have the problem that you don't have the speaker recognition. I think it's what I don't know in the face-to-face interview because when you do it online, it's really easy for the program to say, Okay, this is user one, this is user two. But when you're in a big room with three or four people, it's not so easy for the program. But at the moment I'm looking for it. Yep.

TIM: One thing I feel would be a challenge of in-person interviews versus online is, in general, data collection. So this is okay, recording the meeting or taking meeting notes or what have you, but. I could see how we're getting to a point with interviews where probably there's going to be some kind of AI interview assistant. It's like helping you score the candidate. If a lot of companies might have a set of rubrics across which they're going to score the candidate face to face. Yeah, if we can't collect the data the same way, that's going to be. I would have thought. What do you reckon?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, I don't get the end of the question, but I think I know where you're going because, yeah, the face-to-face is for the data collection problem, but we have one opportunity, and what we can do is track the data of the past that we have. In our system, in our software, because we see, okay, we take these notes, have the ratings of the personality, of the experience, of everything else, I don't know, and you can see, okay, he starts, and this month has developed, I don't know, these scores and stuff like this, because we have data about our persons right here and what we can use, and what we want to do in 2025 right now is to screen the complete software that we have from the past, from the last two or three years, and see, okay, how we decide in this moment on this person. What is the reason that we decide he can or she can work here and how they develop after one year, after two years, after six months? Yeah. And this is what we do: the idea for 2025 is to do a big project like this, and this is why we need right now more notes, more information, because the more information that we have, the better the data, yeah, of course. And it is really good for the future then, but this is what we want to do: we want to use our data from the past three years or something like this and see what we can do.

TIM: With the basic concept being, you can figure out who you hired and became successful and find other people like your successful people. Effectively pattern match. Yeah. Yeah. And traditionally a lot of HR data was probably too messy to really do anything with, but now with AI, with LLMs in particular, it's a great task for ChatGPT to synthesize all these meeting notes and all this other stuff that. It wasn't really that quantifiable before. So that would be a really interesting project that I'd love to hear more about once it's been launched. Because yeah, that could be really cool.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, of course. Yeah, because it is when we have a little gap when we take notes and after the interview and after the feedback internally and stuff like this, we put the notes in our software, and when I am in a meeting, I don't have so much time. Maybe I don't describe the whole situation in our software. I don't describe the whole situation. I don't have all the information. And when I don't have all the information, I have not enough data or maybe bad data. And this is the problem that I saw, and in the past it was okay, but we want to get better. And when we want to get better, yeah, we have a better quality of information. And this is the normal, natural step that we have to do now. Yeah.

TIM: Yeah. That's why I personally am quite bullish on some kind of AI interview assistant that would be helping with this because I don't have a metric around this, but I imagine the vast majority of interviews that happen, even those that are online and not recorded and not summarized. There might be like a scorecard in an ATS system. There might be some, yeah, frantically written notes. But the last time I did research about this, I think a fifth of all interviewers wrote, jotted things down on a pad and paper. or with a paper and pen, I should say. So like that data's never getting anywhere, other than on that person's desk. So the upside just from the data collection, I think, yeah, will be absolutely huge. Even if the note taker isn't as perfect, even if it's not perfectly accurate, maybe it doesn't summarize in the same way that the interviewer would have. I think that's a small problem compared to the upside of having all that extra data. So be happy to see how those tools develop. With your interview process and style and technique, part of it is around, as you mentioned, making sure that it's a fair process. The person feels heard that you've accurately captured who they are. What about in terms of actually measuring things, like, are you sitting down there and trying to say, Here's the five criteria we had for this role"? I'm now going to try to score this person on this criteria. Are you quantifying things? Or is it more like a descriptive narrative around the person? And how do you think about measuring things in terms of making them fairer or not?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, you have to. You can have a fair process, but also measure everything. But maybe not in detail, because when you want to do it, you have to ask the same questions of every person, have the same rating system, and stuff like this. Then you do it right. This is the right way when you see the other studies and stuff like this. And it makes perfect sense, oh, it's perfectly fine for me normally to do this. But when you give the candidate some information. This is not the right way; when you see the studies, the less information they have, the better the quality of the answer is for you to rate it, to say, Okay, this question, they have this answer, okay, I have a ranking system like this. In my situation right now, it is enough, I would say, to be a little bit more on the fair side and have a fair process. But I really know that normally you have. To do it the other way, but it works at the end. It works out. And we have great people here, and this is why I don't want to change everything at the moment, but normally when you see all those studies, I. I do it the wrong way, and I'm lucky that it worked out here, and I have success in the recruiting and stuff like this. But it's not right when you just go on studies and stuff like that, because normally you have to ask really the same questions to all the people with a ranking system for the answer. Yeah.

TIM: Yeah, I'd be interested to see a study of your method, though, because maybe it just hasn't been done enough that we don't know how well it works relative to this kind of more structured approach.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, because, but I think you have so many different studies, and when you read them, they don't say all the same stuff, but it's really clear that when you give a person information, the candidate has the chance to use this information and change the other or change it. Own answer, because now he knows what you want to hear. And this is totally normal that you do it, because when I have new information, of course I work with this new information. I think when you want to do it well, you have to look at the whole situation. So when I ask something and add new information, what we want to have here, and they have a new answer for the same question in the whole situation, then, okay, now. I have to ask again, and I have to dig deeper because they changed the mindset or changed the information that they gave me; they changed the answer. And with, because of the new information, now I have to dig a little bit deeper because I'm not sure if this is a real answer or they want to tell me what I want to hear. And when you look at it from the. Outside and like a whole situation. You can see stuff like this. You can see, okay, wait a minute. You told me you want to do A. But I give you new information that B is really interesting for us. So now you tell me B. So tell me why B. And how do you come? Up with some sort of B. And what is A for you? And now you have to dig deep, and you can't say, Okay, you told me A, now you tell me B. I'm interested. Why? And you can't describe the situation, so you have just good feelings in the room, but you can't dig deep. But, of course, they can shut down on a different level. But this is what I do there. Is it correct? I'm not really sure. Does it work? Yes. And I'm really happy that it worked, yeah.

TIM: Yeah, I guess you could interpret the changing of the mind as either they're flexible, they update based on new data, or they're a little bit wishy-washy, giving you what you want to hear, as you said. Yeah, I'm not sure there's any right or wrong interpretation of doing that. I feel like your style and technique could it not be almost combined with a quantification or structured element? I feel like they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, like certainly at the end of your interview, which is that here's my summary of you and here's what I think. And can you adjust this? That's, I could be easily combined with a structured approach. And the rest of it, I don't feel, yeah, I don't feel like they're against each other. They're not. opposites, if

ALEXANDER: Yep. I, the review of my notes, do in the middle of the interview, not at the end, because I need a little bit more time, and after we do it and we are really clear on our side and don't have any new questions, the candidate has the chance and the opportunity to ask everything. So after that, we say, Okay, we are done. Now you get a little bit of information about the position and about our company, and you can ask everything, and we just leave this room when you are finished. Because we do it now for, I don't know. Maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour; we have to see. So now it's your time to ask us everything after you get a little bit more information about the position and then about our idea and our company, because when we are done with our questions, we can give them. All information that we have is completely transparent because they can't change the answer from the past hour. At this moment, we give them everything that we have, and they can ask us everything.

TIM: One of the problems, I think, as we were discussing before with interviews, is maybe people aren't being that honest and open, which then I think means that you're not really getting a true picture of who the candidate is or the candidate is not getting a true picture of the job. By this approach, by being very upfront and honest and also digging deep into what the candidates actually think, do you feel like you're a lot closer to the truth of who they are than you would with a more traditional approach or maybe an overly structured approach that's just ticking off the boxes? Can I say I would, because yeah, I'm closer to the candidate, I think. But when you are highly professional and have, I don't know, maybe 10 years of experience or more, these situations are totally normal for you, and an interview situation is totally normal for you, and this is where I need.

ALEXANDER: Really more time or more interviews, because normally we have one call, one face-to-face interview, and maybe after that you can see some people from the team. So we have three steps: call, interview face-to-face, and you come again, and we invite you to see the team. And when you have a lot of experience, these situations are completely normal for you. You It's, you need more time to dig deeper and to start to dig, and when you are a little bit closer, but also really. Open in your questions; you give the opportunity that they don't answer right away. And you have to ask again and again to get any answer because they are highly professional and trained. And this is why when you have persons who are professional and want to lie or maybe don't tell you everything, you need more time with them and maybe more interviews and more connections, more touchpoints, because when you don't want to tell me everything, you just can't. Lie or tell me; I don't know. So as a candidate, you always have the opportunity to not say something. And this is when I need more time with them. Yeah.

TIM: Can you give an example of what that might be? Is that them not talking about the detail, like the sensitive details of a project or a product or something? Is that the kind of thing that they would not be openly discussing that you have to dig further into? Or is it more questions about themselves, or what are they being hesitant to disclose?

ALEXANDER: It's really in different situations. In my company right now, where I have been for three years, I don't have a hard situation like this because they really enjoy the transparent, good-feeling atmosphere that we have here, because that's really not normal for an audit, tax, and law firm. So this is what they enjoy, and they start to open really fast in the interview, but in one company before that, I did interviews also; I have one management position. Okay. And I have a, yeah, I would say I have not the same style like right now, because right now I'm, I don't know how many years more in the future, but I have a style that you can, I don't know the English word at the moment, but what I want to say is I have the manager in an interview and they took time. So what he does is. He answers slowly, and because he answers slowly, he has time to think. So I give him a question and tell him, okay, You told me, I don't know; you have 20 people in your team, and everything works out. And after that, you told me a lot of things about your tasks and your job. But what about the team? Do you have anything in your past which don't work out, which is maybe a failure of you, maybe something with your team, because you don't give me a lot of. personal aspects or leader aspects in your information. And then he told me a lot of things about his team, yeah, I have 20 people, five men, 15 women, I don't know. And he really talked slow, and he had a lot of time to think about his answer, but he really didn't say anything about my question. And I give him his 10 minutes or something like this. And after that, I told him, Okay, back to my question, your team. And this is what they really don't like and want to close everything. But I have to do it. This is my job. And when I see in a second attempt that they really say anything, but. Don't give me any information. I have to interrupt them and say, Okay, back to my question. I, this is what I want to know. And this is why, so tell me something. And this is where I really dig. And really, this is really hard work for me because I can't tell them. Okay. I have my fact sheet. I have my 15, 20, and 30 questions for managers and my rating system. So give me some information. Okay. Because I want to know. The person I want to know. the story of this person. I don't need to know any private information or something like this because we are here in a business context, but I want to know who sits here with me in the interview room. And when you have highly trained persons, it's not this easy. You need more time. After the first two hours of the interview with this manager, I told my colleagues, Okay, I can't give you anything. I can't give you anything about this person. I need a second interview for maybe two or three hours again. Because when I ask him something, he doesn't answer. And when I interrupt and then say, Okay, I have a question, he doesn't answer. So I need more time. And after the second interview, I told my managers he isn't the right person. He's a great guy. Really good, but not the right person for this company where I work there. And they told me, No, I really want them on my team. And I told them, okay, when you hire him, he wants to be here for six months. And after he sees he doesn't hit his own goals that we can't give him in this structure and company, he will leave. And they told me, no, I really want him. Great guy. I say, Yes, great experience, great guy, but not for our company. And yeah, after that, I changed the company and had a lot of contacts in my old company and gave him a call after six or seven months. I don't know, and ask about this manager, and he leaves the company. So I know, okay. My style is not perfect. I know when you see the studies, you have a better way, but work and my decisions are not this one. So this is why I develop it more and more. Yeah. Because of this situation with this manager.

TIM: It's a really interesting example, and I'm trying to think about how I would have reacted interviewing this person. I find it very difficult when someone isn't answering my question very clearly. deflecting like a politician or something. I find it frankly infuriating, and my tolerance for it is so short that in my mind, if I were evaluating that candidate without knowing how you were meant to be evaluating them, I'd go with communication skills poor because they're waffling on and they're not being direct enough. So in my view of what I would look for, I go, That's a fail. I'm not going to interview that person again, but it sounds like they'd already gotten like a tick from other people. So it's almost like we want this person. Now we have to make sure we can hire them. Is that like the scenario? Wasn't the scenario? Weren't you evaluating this person? One interview, they're not the right person. Reject. It was, they'd already had some kind of seal of approval.

ALEXANDER: I don't reject people when I don't have the whole picture painted. I can't reject people when I don't paint the whole picture. What I don't do is, okay, you act like the politician; that is a really good example for it. And yeah. Like wishy-washy in your answers and stuff like this. I can reject you, of course. It's an opportunity, but we speak here about the management position, which is maybe in a position where this personality could really fit in. So when I don't have enough information to decide, I don't decide; this is what I do. Yeah, I really don't like it because I need more time, and it's not so easy. But when I can't decide, I don't do it. Yeah, so I, I don't do, after the first interview, okay, for me, he's rejected because he Maybe he isn't honest with us or telling the truth or something like this. No, I can't tell you which person is here in this room with us. So I need more time.

TIM: And is your like midway interview summarization? Do you ever tell candidates? I. I feel like you're being slightly indirect, or I don't quite have a sense of these things yet because I asked you about X, but you told me about Y. Do you ever directly tell them that? And if so, how do they generally respond?

ALEXANDER: When it is necessary, I would tell them. But normally I do something from the personality. Because this is where you, where I can be on the one side. Because when I tell them, okay. For me, you're looking like a person who, I don't know, needs a lot of small talk with the colleagues or needs a lot of feedback or can't do a lot of things alone, or I don't know, something like soft skits. So what I do in this interview is just write on soft skills because I have a manager from a company here who does. The hard facts or the technical side. So I normally, when I tell them, Okay, I have this pallet here of soft skills from you, and think, like, This person They agree, and when I tell them, Okay, here, I'm not really sure, or Here, I really need more information, we are talking about soft skills, so it's a really easy topic, and they tell them, No, you're on the right track, or something like this, and when they say something like this, I would go in a little bit deeper, because they are now open to this topic, and when I tell them, Okay, I'm not really sure how you handle failures, or, Something like this, and I say, Yeah, no, that's a topic that you can describe or write down on your notes. I said, okay, tell me a little bit more. I need a situation; I need, I don't know, because at this moment, they are open for the topic, and I can dig a little bit deeper and get more information, yeah.

TIM: Thinking about it now and having spoken to a few people over the last couple of months, interview prep for a candidate is obviously very important. And when I say interview prep, I don't mean memorizing answers to common questions and robotically coming across, but maybe almost like really thinking in detail about what you want, what you can bring to the table, what your strengths are, and what your weaknesses are. examples, what projects you've actually done, because I think for myself, if I had an interview tomorrow for some job, I would be floundering badly because I haven't organized these thoughts in any way. I may be an amazing candidate for the job, but I just, I wouldn't be able to articulate that at all. So I guess preparation is very important.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, this is the right list. You need to know what you want, really, in your future. What your last project was, what was really good for you in your past, and stuff like this, all what you said, yes, that this is really important. And. We have the candidate because, in our call, at first we asked some hard facts. Okay. When you can start stuff like this, but also, okay. What do you want to do in your future is sometimes a question that we ask already in the first call. Because normally in a tech firm like we are, they have the same job. So they don't have so many. Difference in the job description or something like this. And so I asked him, okay, why do you want to change? right now. So you need to have an idea or a wish or something like this, and this is what we have discussed in the first call for maybe five minutes. But now we have the information for the interview that we can use and ask a little bit more of the idea and the wishes and stuff like this. And so when you are not really clear in your mind about what the idea is and what you want to do and stuff like this, we help you because we have a start point for the whole journey. And, yeah, this helps a lot. need Tim chatted a lot today about interviews and interview techniques. What about this? If you could ask our next guest on this show any question about hiring, what would you want to ask them? In your industry, that's a great one. I don't know; compare is maybe the right word to each other a little bit more. See it like a race or something like this, because at the moment I'm in the industry, which is really small, and I know the other recruiters. And when I see, okay, I have in Germany, we have, it's an international, it's something like Glassdoor. And when I see, okay, some candidates give me a good. or stuff like this; sometimes I write them a message and give them a screenshot and say, Hey, and what about you? Because we are in a hot market, and yes, they want new candidates and employees, and I really wanted to, but. It's maybe something like a game a little bit between us, because we see each other really often on some events and stuff like this. And this is what makes it more fun when you see it like a game. So when you see it like a game, you can. Also say, Okay, what do I have to do or what do I need to be the best in my game? And of course you need a really good service and stuff like this, which we have to do, but what you need to be the best in your game is maybe interesting. I don't know in which industry they work at the moment. We will see, but maybe this is something.

TIM: Excellent. I will level that question at our next guest and see what they say. I'm interested to hear the answer. Alex, it's been a great conversation today. I've learned a lot, especially about interviewing. And yeah, I've heard about your technique and your style, which I hadn't necessarily heard before. So it's amazing to learn something new, especially after working in the field for so long; you feel like you've heard it all, but I've certainly gotten a new grasp on interviewing today and the next candidate In interview. We'll be getting some summarized feedback mid-interview from me. So thank you so much for sharing all of your insights and thoughts with our audience today.

ALEXANDER: Yes. Thank you for your time.