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This is from a great interview of Steve Ballmer done by the NY Times (bolding is done by me):
Q. How do you assess job candidates? A. If they come from inside the business, the best predictor of future success is past success. It’s not 100 percent, but it’s a reasonable predictor. For an external candidate, what I’ve found is that reference checks are super-important. I didn’t used to believe so much in reference checks. You can always get somebody to say something nice about you. But the truth is, if you ask enough questions and you ask around, you can really get a profile of who’s accomplished various things and who hasn’t. And I try to figure out sort of a combination of I.Q. and passion. I just ask somebody to tell me what they’ve done that they are really proud of and tell me about it. And if it’s something you are proud of, you should be able to answer any question I can come up with, at least at a level that would satisfy my interest. I ought to be able to see your passion. It might be quiet passion; it might be bubbly passion. But I should be able to sense that you are one of those people who just sort of throws themselves into things.
Q. How do you assess job candidates?
A. If they come from inside the business, the best predictor of future success is past success. It’s not 100 percent, but it’s a reasonable predictor. For an external candidate, what I’ve found is that reference checks are super-important. I didn’t used to believe so much in reference checks. You can always get somebody to say something nice about you. But the truth is, if you ask enough questions and you ask around, you can really get a profile of who’s accomplished various things and who hasn’t.
And I try to figure out sort of a combination of I.Q. and passion. I just ask somebody to tell me what they’ve done that they are really proud of and tell me about it. And if it’s something you are proud of, you should be able to answer any question I can come up with, at least at a level that would satisfy my interest. I ought to be able to see your passion. It might be quiet passion; it might be bubbly passion. But I should be able to sense that you are one of those people who just sort of throws themselves into things.
I get asked this question all the time, particularly in forums like in Microsoft’s Ignite Your Career webcast series and I love Ballmer’s response. My answer is very similar to Ballmer’s, except I usually combine “Specialism” with “Passion”. That is, talk to me about where you’ve specialized and why. And in doing so, I should be able to get a good sense of your passion for your specialty. We’ve long recruited for passion at imason, and indeed one of our Core Values is “Be Passionate”. At imason, we’ve had interviews where we spoke at length about such things as the Sitar (we hired this person) or even medieval German Literature (the interviewee had a Masters in the field, but we didn’t hire this person). We always try to get people to talk about something they’re truly passionate about, and it doesn’t need to be work-related and in fact, it usually isn’t.
You see, the thing is that if you’re a passionate person you’re highly likely to be passionate about everything you do including your work.
It’s a great interview with Ballmer – definitely check it out! And Be Passionate!