In this presentation, Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ and author of Hiring for Attitude, explains the concept of answer guidelines (or answer keys) as a tool for hiring managers to distinguish strong from weak candidate responses. He walks through a real interview question—"Tell me about a time you were asked to do something you didn’t know how to do"—and a candidate’s answer that initially sounds impressive. Murphy shows why many hiring managers rate such answers highly (5‑7) by pointing out surface‑level positives like self‑directed learning, problem‑solving language, and confident statements. He then uncovers deeper issues: lack of concrete specifics, reliance on hypotheticals, vague pronoun usage, present/future tense verbs, overuse of absolutes, and filler qualifiers. Drawing on research of thousands of interview transcripts, he highlights linguistic patterns that correlate with high‑performers (first‑person pronouns, past‑tense verbs) versus low‑performers (second/third‑person pronouns, present/future tense, qualifiers). Finally, Murphy advises organizations to calibrate hiring managers by having them rate the same answer together; a clustering of high scores signals insufficient training, while a wide spread of scores indicates poor calibration. The overall message is that systematic answer guidelines and manager calibration are essential for hiring for attitude and avoiding bad‑attitude hires.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ and author of Hiring for Attitude, and I want to talk to you for a minute about one of the most crucial elements when you're going to do hiring effectively, and especially hiring for attitude, and that is an answer key, or as we call them, answer guidelines. What are answer guidelines? What is an answer key? It is essentially knowing the difference between good candidate answers and bad candidate answers, knowing how to immediately pinpoint knowing exactly what great answers actually sound like so you know whether or not you should hire somebody, and knowing exactly what are the clues that this is a bad answer and you probably shouldn't hire somebody. An answer guideline is a combination of good answers and bad answers, and I want to show you an actual example. So what I want to do is read you an interview question, a real-life interview question we designed, and then I want to show you a real-life candidate answer. Okay. The interview question: Could you tell me about a time when you were asked to do something you didn't know how to do? Here's an actual real-life candidate answer: Oh, that's easy. I was always learning on the fly at my last job, mostly because we didn't have a lot of processes in place. Patients were always complaining that our billing system was seriously flawed, and they were right. I got stuck with way more tough problems than anyone else because my boss knew that I was really good at problem solving. Reaching out to a manager is one place you can start in this situation. Or you can look for examples from how someone has solved things in the past. That can work too. I remember one time when a patient had a billing issue and my boss told me to check with my coworker Sam to see if he had any knowledge of the case. But Sam had nothing. In situations like this, I will take it upon myself to track back into the patient's records for clues, or I will call the patient to see if something was missed. In this case, I really had to go hunt to find the information that would help fix the patient's billing issue. I find that there's usually an answer if you look hard enough, but a lot of problems could be easily avoided if people would just be more accountable from the start. I've honestly never had a challenge I wasn't 100% certain I couldn't beat. I don't believe in failure. Okay, now you've got a question, you've got a real-life answer. Now, if you were to rate this answer, this candidate's answer, on a scale from 1 to 7, 1 being this is a poor fit, 7 being this is a great fit, how would you rate this candidate's answer? Now, a lot of people that typical answer is somewhere between a 5 and a 6. Why? Why do people rate this answer well? Well, there's a number of things that people usually flag as things they really liked about the answer. For example, you can see some of the text in green. I was always learning on the fly. People like people that are learning on the fly, kind of a self-directed learning sort of mindset. I was really good at problem solving. Everybody wants problem solvers, right? There's not a job where being a problem solver wouldn't be a good characteristic to have. Um, you can look for examples from how someone has solved things in the past. So talking about a particular problem-solving method: I will take it upon myself to track back into the patient's records for clues. So I'm taking responsibility. I find that there's usually an answer if you look hard enough. This notion that every problem has a solution if only we're willing to work hard enough. And things like, I've honestly never had a challenge I wasn't 100% certain I couldn't beat. I don't believe in failure. Okay, now Wonderful attitudes to have, right? Wonderful characteristics. And this is why a lot of people will rate this answer 5, 6, and there's even quite a few 7s if we're doing this in a large group. If I'm training an organization, I will see lots of 7s when people rate this answer. Now, however, what I want to point out is while a lot of these phrases sound nice, There's actually some deeper, pretty big problems in this answer that the vast majority of people miss. Let me point out some for you. Number 1, when we're listening to an answer, a candidate's answer, we need to be attuned to specifics versus generalities. So, for example, when they say, reaching out to a manager is one place you can start in this situation, or you can look for examples from how someone has solved things in the past, that can work too. That's a general answer. That is a hypothetical response to a particular question. Could you tell me about a time you didn't know how to do something? But, oh, well, where's the actual example of what they did do? I don't want to know what they could have done or what is hypothetically possible for them to do. I need to hear whether or not they actually did this thing. And you'll notice they don't indicate anything about what they specifically did. I remember one time. Now, okay, now maybe it sounds like we're going to get a specific example. I remember one time. Nope. In situations like this, I will take it upon myself. Notice it sounds like they're about to head to a very specific answer and poof, back to the hypothetical, back to the generality. That's one big problem. Another problem. When you're listening to candidate answers, you need to be attuned to the difference between problem solvers and problem bringers. Now, this person says, my boss knew that I was really good at problem solving. Okay, lovely, wonderful. Are there any specifics? Is there any evidence in here about your wonderful problem-solving capabilities? Okay, if your boss knows that you're really good at problem solving, ostensibly there should be lots of examples you could share with us here. But this is beginning to sound a lot more like hyperbole because there is no evidence of their problem-solving capabilities here to actually back this up. And when you ask a problem you ask a problem solver about a problem, they will tell you, here's the problem and here's exactly how I solved it. When you ask a problem bringer about the problem, they will tell you about the problem. Which does this sound more like to you? Problem solver or problem bringer? I'm going to say this sounds more like a problem bringer. Now let's get technical for a second. Listen for first-person pronouns. We have studied literally tens of thousands of candidate answers. We really invented the science of listening linguistically to candidates' answers and pinpointing use of pronouns, tenses, adverbs, adjectives, etc. And one of the things we've discovered is that high performers use a lot more first-person pronouns— I, me, even we— and low performers use a lot more second and third-person pronouns— you, he, she, they. Let me give you an example. Reaching out to a manager is one place you can start in this situation, or you can look for examples from how someone has solved things in the past. Now, a good answer would be I, person, first person, had a time when I reached out to a manager and I asked them the following, and they then responded blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this is what this person said. Reaching out to a manager is one place you can start, or you can look for examples of how someone solved this in the past. Notice that they're not actually giving me a specific here's what I did. Remember, the purpose of the interview is for them to showcase their accomplishments, for them to show me how their past performance is going to predict great performance in the future. But notice, by switching out the pronouns, they're actually avoiding talking about their actual personal experience. You can see it later in their answer: I find that there's usually an answer if you look hard enough. Again, we're avoiding the use of first-person pronouns, and this has been highly correlated with very bad candidate answers. Same thing goes for past tense verbs. High performers use significantly more past tense verbs. Low performers use significantly more present and future tense verbs. So take a look at this sentence: "In situations like this, I will take it upon myself to track back into the patient's records for clues, or I will call the patient to see if something was missed." Notice it's not "in a situation like this." In this specific case, what I did in the past was I called the patient and I asked. That would be all very past tense verbs. But notice what they're using here. This would be— we would call it a hypothetical future tense. I will take it upon myself to track back, or I will call the patient. Well, listen, it's hard for me to know that you will actually do this if you don't give me any evidence from the past. And then we can also listen for qualifiers. Qualifiers would be things like adverbs, waffling, negation, etc. There are ways that candidates will hedge or amp up or fluff up their answer. They also include the use of absolutes like always and never. I was always learning on the fly at my last job. Patients were always complaining. I got stuck with way more tough problems than anybody else. Notice you don't hear a lot of specifics, but what you do hear is lots of fluff and amping up. So absolutes are a danger sign because they usually represent black or white thinking. They can lead very quickly into blame. But also then the adverbs, adjectives, the waffling. These are the things that also indicate that there's not a lot of there. There. There's not a lot of detail, not a lot of specifics. And instead what we have is kind of fluffy. It sounds nice, but it's pretty darn fluffy. One of the things, regardless of where you go from here, one of the things that I would strongly encourage you to do, and this will be a great test for you as to whether or not your company actually needs an answer key, answer guidelines to be able to effectively hire. Bring your hiring managers into a room. If you've got 1,000 hiring managers, start with like 50 or 100, whoever you can get easily. Bring them into a room, play them the first part of the video before I give all that detailed explanation. Just play the part of the video where I read the question and I read the answer and then have every single hiring manager in the room write down on a piece of paper how do they rate this answer. Now, there are going to be 2 bad signs for you to watch out for. Number 1, if you're getting lots of scores that are 5s, 6s, and 7s, that tells you that lots of bad attitude candidates are sneaking into your organization because your managers just don't have the training. They— nobody's ever taught them how to pinpoint and listen for good and bad answers. The second thing that is a warning sign that indicates a problem is when you get a widespread of answers. If everybody in the— you call into the room says, oh, absolutely, this is a 2. Well, you know what? You're in great shape. But if you get people that say, yeah, I think it's a 1 or a 2, and then you get people that say it's a 5 or 6 or 7, if you get this widespread of answers, which which, by the way, is often the case, that is a problem. Because what that tells you is you are not calibrated. Calibrated means when you have everybody in your organization, every hiring manager is evaluating candidates consistently. And if all of your people are giving different answers to this interview question, to this answer, we've got a problem because that means one person is going to reject this candidate. Okay, that's fine. But then somebody else is going to hire this candidate. And that could be a real problem.
