Oren Trask was CEO of media conglomerate, Trask industries. He was particularly gifted in choosing great people.
Behavioral interviews are useful…to a point. It's essential to separate out people who know how to interveiw from people who know how to deliver. There are a lot of people who can figure out how things happened in retrospect. There's a smaller subset of people that can make things happen in the moment.
I've found it's essential to go beyond the initial behavioral examples someone give me in an interview to probe idea ownership. In a variation of the five levels of why, I look at levels of "How did you come up with the idea?"
[Note: This is an excerpt from the book Onboarding. Oren Trask does not actually exist. He's a character in Working Girl, written by Kevin Wade (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century-Fox, 1986). His thinking is too powerful to ignore just because he isn't real. By the way, the picture is from the same movie.]
