Every great innovator has encountered failure. Like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who both famously used their failures as a bridge to enormous success. Or Thomas Edison, who said about his many failures in inventing the light bulb, “I have not failed 10,000 times; I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” Virtually every person who achieves great success has this approach to making failure work as a positive instead of a negative.

Responding to failure is critical in virtually every job. Success in sales, for example, is overwhelmingly predicted by one’s ability to successfully respond to failure. You want employees with the ability to overcome and grow from failure, but not everyone is wired like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Thomas Edison. That’s why you really have to interview for resilience.

Unfortunately, a lot of hiring managers go wrong when interviewing for resilience when they ask questions that give away the correct answer. Let’s take the question: ‘Tell me about a time you failed and what you did to resolve or fix it.”

There’s a clause at the end of that question--- “and what you did to resolve or fix it” --- that sends a clear signal that you only want to hear about a time the candidate “turned failure around.” This is called a ‘leading clause’ because it leads the candidate to their one success instead of their potentially hundreds of failures.

This interview question is a problem because you really want to know if this candidate falls apart when they fail at something. And your question basically tells them “do NOT tell me about a time you mentally cracked, hide those situations from me and only tell me your happiest stories.”

The really resilient people (like Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison) will naturally tell you their success stories, simple because they cannot think of a problem without immediately thinking of the solution. But if you give away the correct answer, you will miss all the people who aren’t resilient and who crack with failure. Because if you ask non-resilient people about a problem, they will actually tell about the problem and never think about the solution without your prompting.

So, let’s take that poorly-worded interview question and fix it to make it a non-leading question, something like: “Could you tell me about a time you tried to fix something and it just didn’t work?”

Because you’re not leading people to the answer, non-resilient people will say things like: “I never really recovered my confidence after that failure…” or “I got so frustrated by the constant failure that my boss had to bring in another team member,” or “I just gave up.” These are all really useful answers because they tell you that this candidate is NOT resilient.

Again, people who are resilient will naturally give you’re their best example anyways, because their brain is wired such that when they think of problems they just automatically think of solutions. These folks may answer you by saying: “It was a mess when my solution didn’t work, and I had my work cut out for me, but it was great when I saw how I could apply my failure to another project which led to a giant success.”

Of course, knowing the right interview questions is great, but asking the right questions is just the start to effectively interviewing for resilience. In our upcoming webinar called Hiring the Go-Getter Personality (of which resilience is one of 5 essential traits, I’ll explain what good and bad answers sound like so you can immediately tell if a candidate is truly resilient.

Be sure to check out next week's webinar called "Hiring the Go-Getter Personality". There are only a few seats left!

Upcoming Leadership IQ Webinar:
Hiring the Go-Getter Personality

In this 60-minute webinar, you'll learn:

​The 5 attitudinal characteristics that define the “go-getter personality”…

​—Proactive (they don’t wait to be told to take action)
—Adventurous (they’re willing to step outside their standard role)
—Resilient (they bounce back quickly when things go wrong)
—Optimistic (they believe that there’s always a solution to every problem)
—Growing (they’re always bettering themselves professionally)

​10 specific interview questions that assess each of the go-getter personality characteristics
How to expand and customize these questions even further to adapt them to any new situations you face in your unique company & industry

Answer Guidelines that contain excerpts of good and bad answers to those go-getter interview questions, so you know how to consistently and accurately grade the answers you hear from candidates
How to structure team and group interviews to assess the characteristics

A structured form for assessing and evaluating all of your candidates on these go-getter characteristics
Test to measure your skills and how accurately you can identify the go-getter personality from real interview answers

6 words that most people add to the end of interview questions that ruin their effectiveness
Interview questions that you should NOT ask when you’re conducting interviews to assess the go-getter personality

Recruiting messages, including sample copy, designed specifically to attract the go-getter personality
Learn more about next week's webinar called Hiring the Go-Getter Personality

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