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Like a lot of hiring managers, Adriane Schwager likes to ask candidates about times in their career they’ve made a mistake. Usually, it’s to get an idea of how you handle stressful situations and how you learn from previous errors.
For Schwager, the CEO and co-founder of the hiring platform GrowthAssistant with 20 years of recruiting experience, the answer can uncover a big red flag: whether the person has low ownership of their work.
In listening to the response, Schwager tells CNBC Make It that she tries to assess whether the person can own up to the mistake, or if it seems like they’re making it out to be someone else’s fault.
Take an example where someone forgot to send something important to accounting, and it cost the business $250,000, she says. If the candidate discusses how the accident was the result of someone else not sending them the right information, or their manager not helping to provide oversight, “and it turns into someone else’s fault, that shows me they have low ownership,” Schwager says.
On the other hand, she says, a better response might be: “I didn’t send something to accounting once and it cost us $250,000. I thought I was going to lose my job. So I immediately created a calendar reminder so that I send that to accounting every Tuesday.”
“I believe that all situations are co-created, and we all play a part in some of this failure,” Schwager says. “A company fails, your department fails — even if you aren’t running that department, you still played a part in it. That doesn’t make you good or bad. It just is. So be aware of your participation in that outcome, and be able to talk about the learning you had from it.”
Ultimately, Schwager says, “I need somebody who is that aware of how they participated in the outcome.”
Sometimes, she can also tell whether a candidate has low ownership based on how they describe why they left their previous job.
For example, if someone says “I left because my manager had it out for me” or “I wasn’t being managed well,” Schwager says she wants to hear about whether the candidate tried to take ownership and manage up.
Or, if they burned out at a previous job, Schwager wants to know if they learned from the situation to identify their burnout patterns, can communicate them to a boss or colleagues, and that they have acquired strategies to cope: “They recognized it, they learned from it, and they’ve applied those changes to their to experiences.”
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