Job Interview Questions

Business history shows that few company founders have the skills to manage the company when it gets past a certain size. Few such managers, however, acknowledge this reality. One of your main goals in the interview, then, is to try to determine how you will be able to work with this individual and, by extension, his or her heirs, all of whom have a stake in the business. To satisfy yourself of the viability of the situation, you are entitled to a much greater degree of latitude.

Company founders and owners have tremendous pride in the success of the organizations they built. They will generally resist sharing their organizations with anyone else. The big issue, then, is how willingly the company founder or owner is prepared to adjust the company’s balance of power and, perhaps, ownership. The questions that follow are designed to give you a clue about how flexible the company founder or owner might be. The questions assume the candidate is interviewing for a senior executive position, perhaps the COO to the founder’s CEO. Use these wordings as the basis for customizing questions to your unique situation:

1. What are the success factors that will tell you that the decision to bring me on board was the right one? This question starts the conversation off on the success factors that you will bring to the organization.
2. How would you describe the company you’d like to leave your heirs in terms of sales, size, number of employees, and position in the industry? This opens the conversation about heirs and what impact they may have on the negotiations.
3. Have you considered the degree to which you want your heirs to have strategic or operational influence in the company until one of them is ready to assume the role of COO or CEO? If there is an heir waiting in the wings, this is a good way to start a conversation about it.
4. If for any reason you were unable to function as CEO, how would you like to see the company managed? Is this known, understood, and agreed to by your heirs? Is it in writing? Transition strategies, or more frequently the lack of them, derail many organizations. If a transition strategy exists in writing, you can have some confidence that the organization is relatively mature in its governance.
5. To make our working relationship successful-something we both want-we’ll need to be sure we have good chemistry together. How might we determine this, and then what action would you see us engage in to build that relationship? This question alerts the CEO that one of your success factors is the relationship between the two of you.
6. If you and I were developing some sort of philosophical difference, how would you want to go about resolving it? Here is a refreshingly candid question that goes to how inevitable differences will be resolved.