Lego Serious Play for a Job Interview
Today, I want to share with you a fantastic experience helping a Human Resource department with job interviews. In my years of experience I participated in a few job interviews and always had the feeling that I am getting ‘prepared’ answers. With all the information we have in the internet, it is not very difficult to find the answers that any hiring manager is looking for.
I don’t have a very traditional approach when I run interviews. With the time, I tried always to put the interviewee out of the comfort zone with some ‘crazy’ questions to get real answers. Another challenge is evaluating soft skills? There are lots of tests for that but they take time, they are cumbersome for the Human Resource departments to handle and they can also be broken by experienced interviewees.
Hence – I started to discuss about it with the Human Resource team, and I found that people with +10 years of experiences doing interviews had the same concerns. With this in mind I introduced LEGO Serious Play to improve the quality of a job interview to:
- Break the ice very fast in the interview and avoid ‘prepared’ answers
- See some abstract behaviors such as: creativity, issue resolving, innovation, openness, personality, leadership and collaboration
- Replacing the ‘conducting’ by someone with ‘constructing together’ by taking the discussion of the results to the model.
The process was simple. It takes between 30-45 minutes and consists of a series of the following activity:
- Facilitator asks a question
- Interviewee builds a model and tells a story about the model
- Interviewers asks additional questions about the model
- Neither are allowed to talk ‘outside the model’
In our case we asked the following questions:
- What are your two most important weaknesses that will not help your future team?
- What threats could destroy your ideal job position?
- According to you, what are the 3 most important characteristic of your ideal team?
- What had being the big challenges that you had confronted when you moved? (* – There was a question that was adapted to each interviewee depending on their resume.)
Interviewers could also ask two questions outside of the model. At the end of the day this approach worked very well. There were no ‘prepared’ question at all. All interviewees were out of their comfort zones from the minute one and gave natural answers, which demonstrated clear soft skills appreciation. Hiring managers now want to introduce the Lego Serious Play as part of each interview.
Here is a 5 min video excerpt of one of our 45 min Lego Serious Play job interview, enjoy it.
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Hi Omar
Thanks for great sharing. Inspired by our last partner conference in Billund, we in Trivium, have developed a recruitment proces based on the input from Laila Pawlak. We have used it our self to recruit two new partners for Trivium.
Results:
1. Two new partners out of 4 candidates through one recruitment session of 6 hours
2. A lot o positive feedback from all candidates
3. One possible close partnership with a candidate that did not become a real partner og Trivium
The Procses:
– Participants – 3 partners from Trivium and 4 candidates
– Duration – 6 hours incl. light meal and celebration with Champagne
– Beside the skills building – the Trivium partner had an active role in the process – building and sharing the key exercises.
– The strength of the process is the mutual trust and insight that is created because the process is genuine a two way process and not just “another job interview”
– also, as Laila beautifully put it, “no one can fake it for 6 hours” – and this is really true.
This process is much more effective than any job interview I ever participated in.
So thanks to Omar to sharing the idea that even a job interview can be improved a lot by LSP
br.
Jens
Hello Jens,
It is a pleasure.
I will appreciate if you could share a little bit more about the procedure to integrate new partners with a little bit of context. I am always interested in new context where LSP could be applied.
Thanks in advance.
Omar