Cómo utilizar la Metodología LSP en entrevista laborales, por Omar César Bermúdez

Today, I want to share with you one fantastic experience helping one HR department with job interviews. In my +15 years of experience I participated in few job interview. I 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 answer any hiring manager is looking for. Why is LEGO Serious Play a good tool to introduce in job interviews? 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” question. I got it, but after few minutes, he/she came back and I continued with the same feeling…he/she knew what I wanted to listen. Other challenge: how can I evaluate soft skills?. I know, there is a lot of test to do that, but it takes time and it is not easy to do it for all companies and/or positions. Said this, I start to discuss about it with HR team, and I found that people with +10 years of experiences doing interviews had the same concerns. It was a that moment that I said, what can I do as facilitator to help with this? With all this in mind, 3 or 4 months ago I started to work in one possible solution (for sure it is not the only one). I found it very fast, but my challenge was how to present it to HR department. As the title says, I introduced LEGO Serious Play (aka LSP) to HR people. It took a little bit of time and few talks. Of course, I got some resistances, but I also got someone interested in this new way to do job interviews. He was not sure about it, but he really though that we could try it and evaluate results. I was more than happy. Interview Goals So, I had one goal deploying LSP in job interviews: Improve the job interview. I had also few items very clear to get with LSP: Transform your 1-to-1 interview in a “lean forward” job interview. Break the ice very fast in the interview, and avoid “prepared” answers from interviewee See interviewee “abstract” behaviors as: Creativity Issue resolving Innovation Openness Personality Leadership Collaboration Interview should not be “conducted” by someone, it should be “constructed” together…all is in one model. The process Very simple procedure. It takes between 30 min and 45 min. It consists in: Facilitator ask one question Interviewee build a model Interviewee do a story about the model to answer the question Interviewers are allowed to ask question about the model Interviewee and interviewers are not able to talk outside of the build model In the last one, after listen the feedback from hiring managers, I gave 2 question cards to each interviewer. It allows to interviewers ask 2 questions outside of the model. It works very well. I will keep it in the future. The results No prepared question at all Interviewee out of comfort zone from minute one Very natural answers Very clear soft skills appreciation Hiring managers/directors want to introduce LSP as standard HR process available in each interview Now, I will work with HR and other scrum masters/facilitators to allow the full team to run LSP in our interviews. :)