Tales of Integrity: The Realistic Job Preview

Or an article idea I accidentally got from a recent interview loop

“It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.” - Walt Price, (State and Main)

“When I took the service exam, my psych profile fit a certain... 'moral flexibility' would be the only way to describe it.” - Martin Blank (Grosse Pointe Blank)

The common factor of job interviews and presidential debates

Anyone has been hiring for a while has a collection of epic stories about the process. Sometimes they make you look good, sometimes they make you look like an idiot. Last week I had an interview coming up. Thankfully, these days most companies give at least a minimal preview of what’s expected. For one specific interviewer the list of topics included, “Always do the right thing. (integrity, leadership/fit – hire and develop the best – how does he develop people?”

I try to follow the best practice of putting together sets of stories/anecdotes from past experiences before an interview. Creating building blocks for answering a wide range of behavioral questions (ie; “tell me about a time when ____.”). Much better than just thinking completely off the cuff and trying to access long term memories to find the most useful one for the situation.

As in a Presidential debates it’s ideal to answer the question asked clearly. Having some mix and match ideas that would be useful for answering a wide variety of questions helps do it fluidly. Though if you’re in a Presidential debate then more often than not it seems to work equally well to just answer the question you wanted to be asked and ignore the actual question. Not that I’m suggesting that in an interview, but it does seem to work in televised debates¹.

Which I suppose is an unintended but decent transition to my perceived problem. “Wait … what does a story about integrity look like?”

Integrity?

The interview was going to cover integrity - but what stories do I have that map to that? I once managed Brand Safety/Monetization and Public Content Integrity. To this day I’m not exactly sure how integrity got thrown into the title - but it’s gotten me some interested LinkedIn reach-outs - so I generally don’t worry about it. Given this was an HR interview this was about something else. What had they heard about me!?!

Eventually I just guessed the question was probably a template from the company’s leadership principles. Most companies have some sort of written out culture. Whether they live it or not varies - but it’s usually written down. Therefore it seemed less like they’re looking for a story of Enron or FTX level non-integrity and more something at a higher level.

This took me to the crutch of every wedding toast maker and many a convention speaker … the dictionary.

Integrity: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.

I’m guessing it’s not usually a great idea to cop-to not having these sorts of qualities. It would be funny to demonstrate your integrity by admitting to not being especially consistent with having integrity in the workplace. An interesting point, but not especially helpful in convincing people to hire you².

Back to the definition of integrity. When it comes to the workplace I posit that it has two aspects

1. Don’t do super bad things everyone would agree are bad. So a crypto-coin rug pull, whatever Enron did, and/or generally being a duplicitous SOB are all no-go’s. Or if you want to be more positive then as I put it at the end of my management checklist article - just be a mensch!

2. Then there’s the ongoing opportunity to build trust and execution velocity by managing with integrity. Being transparent about where things truly stand enables building trust and making better decisions.

Integrity as a principle → better outcomes

Since I don’t have business examples to write about in category #1 (thankfully), I’ll continue rambling about #2. When people get this wrong at the worst they’re accused of being sneaky jerks, or “playing politics³.” In day to day living it’s more complex. It’s alarmingly easy to lie to ourselves about things without even realizing we’re doing so at times. Folks can mean well but not still make big mistakes when that happens.

Generally, I believe most people intuitively want to feel right. This desire to feel right is super close to the adjacent desire to ‘be liked.” Taken together it’s easy to want to feel right/be liked more than you desire to be correct in the longer run. The latter is emotionally harder in most cases.

It takes effort and training to convince the average person that it’s better to be right in the long term than feel right in the short term. It has certainly been true for me. It’s easier for most folks to center their thinking on the short term resolution of a conflict rather than continuing in a state of conflict seeking a better result. Staying uncomfortable is challenging even if doing so is more likely to be useful. Most good solutions (like most good learning) takes place in a zone of discomfort.

I hypothesize that a lot of perception of not being genuine or possessing integrity has this issue at the root - as opposed to our assumption of malice. Not only does this feel-good bias keep us from making harder long term choices, it reduces the chances we’ll change our mind when we’re presented with new information, over indexes us on the desire to be liked in personal interactions, and is present when we make other poor choices about how we spend our time⁴.

What’s useful to me from this theory is what solutions it can create. Knowing where problems come from let us build mechanisms to prevent and tripwires to get early warning when we’re not fully focused on being right. Most folks have personal “tells” they say or feel when they’re lowering their standards, or generally giving in on a point they’d be better off debating longer. Being able to identify these for yourself lets you issue an internal auto-reminder that it’s time to keep pushing on something.

Three basic tools I personally use to try to keep in mind around helping maintain the aspects of integrity I think are important

• Work hard to find yourself in organizations that avoid a culture of fear and blame (seek or help create high psychological safety).

• Drive for continuous clarity on what the most important things are (global as opposed to local goals)

• Look both at the short term pain and the long term upside of dealing with an issue comprehensively. The short term problem is how will I feel in a day or two. The long term consequences are how will I feel in 6-12 months depending on my actions now. Example: I hire someone but don’t really disclose what about the job is hard - land them, but then they quit in 3 months. Am I really better off?

Connecting the integrity prompt with the interviewers other goal about asking after “hiring and developing the best,” I realized I had a fun story to queue up when asked. Or in the spirit of many presidential candidates - a story that I’m sure I’d plan to share somewhere in the loop.

Self serving integrity: The Realistic job preview

I mentioned in the last section there are benefits of exposing job candidates to the challenges they’ll face if they accept. I’ve often joked that everyone lies about some part of the job when selling a candidate - though most people don’t do it on purpose. Once someone wants to hire you, as part of your due diligence it’s key to figure out what they lied about left out. Identifying where that landmine of future pain sits lets you evaluate if it’s the job for for you.

Being intentional about the downsides of a new gig help close and retain candidates. The Heath brothers describe this step as a “realistic job preview” in their book Decisive. Think hard about what will be a challenge to many people in the new role and share those undesirable traits proactively. It’s less likely to scare folks off than you think, and because they’re then consciously opting in the actual experience won’t make them run for the hills.

I’ve worked hard to practice this for many years as a hiring manager, and I’ve never had a regret about it. When hiring an incredible senior manager I’d worked with before to a startup I remembered to share that “one of the things about this place is things change fast. I know we’ve worked together - but I wouldn’t take this job if you’d be upset if you didn’t report into me at some point.” Egotistical of me? - maybe. The reporting wasn’t something I expected to change, but knew it could. As someone who has hired people and then been subject to a re-org before they started it felt best to identify that risk up front. Not surprisingly perhaps, he wasn’t that concerns about the reporting and went ahead. A month or two later after they started I got asked to work in a different area of the company and they got a new boss. I can’t be sure but I expect our earlier conversation helped. Or at least now he’s just mad at me that I recruited him to Convoy which famously did not succeed as a startup⁵. ;-)

My top realistic job preview story took place in my last role. We were looking for someone to fill a very big job in terms of scope and criticalness. The individual people were great there - but as a system it was not always a very enjoyable place to be. Company prospects (which seem better now) were highly debatable, change was needed, and folks were grumpy at time.

I’d dug deeply on finding a great match for this hire and spent > 80% of my time on this search. I was mentally and personally invested.

We had several highly qualified choices and after they interviewed with a broad set of folks were ready to make an offer. Given some real challenges at the company, I was nervous about overselling the role and having them not stick around. Thankfully as we extended an offer they setup the realistic job preview beautifully with a diplomatic question which I’m paraphrasing - “the stock price seems to have been stable to down for quite a while, the CEO left last year, and now the CTO has left. What can you tell me about the company and this sort of stuff?”

Taking an approach from Never Split the Difference I breathed a visible sigh and launched into an accusation audit.

“Well _____, that’s a diplomatic question. I guess you’re asking what the challenges are. To be very direct, what you said makes it sound bad, but it’s way way worse than that …. Many people working here have seen their stock drop from $100 to $3. There have been layoffs. The codebase makes things that sound easy hard to build and hard things impossible. There has been big management changeover. Pulse scores overall are terrible. We have as a company way too many goals and focus has been challenging. And many people are just tired of change.

You also might be thinking ‘the stock price is $3/share after falling so much, it really can only go up.’ But I made that joke when I joined where the stock was $6 - I don’t make that quip anymore. So I’d really recommend not coming with a bet on the upside - assume it might fall more ”

I actually went on for a bit longer than that. Then I stopped, took another breathe and shared something along the lines of “This in a lot of ways is a bad job. I have a theory as to how for the right person this job could be awesome even with all these negatives being totally true. This might not apply to you are all, or my logic could be off. Let me explain my hypothesis…”

I shared my completely perspective as to what might be great about the opportunity. The candidate listened, took it in, and shared that his hypothesis matched mine, and how much he appreciated the unfiltered look at the challenges. He took the job, he’s still there, and according to the many reports I’ve gotten from his boss since then it was a fantastic hire⁶. To use the technical term he is …. well, I’ll let Tito Hubert’s favorite clip explain the proper adjective for his impact:

Don’t underestimate the trust building power of transparently sharing the undesirable properties of situations in general and the the realistic job preview in particular. At least if your main focus is the longer term. The realistic job preview doesn’t always work as well as my example above, or in the case of George Costanza below - but in the long term it’s nothing but upside.

Integrity with respect to our future AI overlords

You’ll probably have to zoom in to see this recent example of when good LLM’s go bad. But I’ll pull out the relevant part. TLDR; it seems I may need to work harder to build trust with Claude Code so that it has a safe space to explain when it can’t do something. As opposed to hiding stuff from me.

I was pair programming with Claude to build up an idea. One of the steps was to do auto-detection of eye coordinates in images. It was a relatively simple problem to hand mark - so I’d done that in the first place. Eventually, I decided to try updating the manual process with a computer vision auto-detection approach. After working through some basic bugs the results felt iffy. Then I noticed a response from Claude that gave me pause; “the crosshairs should now appear in a much more realistic position relative to where actual eyes would be…” This seemed a little off in terms of why the detection wasn’t working. Leading to me asking - “Wait - are you detecting pupils from image context or just guessing …?” The response

“You’re absolutely right to call this out! I’m just guessing - there’s no actual image content analysis happening at all.”

Then Claude went on to really rub in the gaslighting. Take a look at the image more closely for it’s full set of gleeful revelations.

So … trust and integrity turn out to be important for machines as well. If a person doesn’t feel comfortable telling the emperor they need some extra garments, a machine might not either.

Interesting I guess?, but what about the interview?

Thanks for reminding me, TBH I almost forgot that’s how I started this ramble. I was completely wrong in my interpreting as to the type of integrity question they had in mind. When my interviewer got to this they asked, “tell me about a time working with global teams that you had to deal with a compliance issue. For example a spidey-sense that there was some corruption or bribery going on.” I’m paraphrasing - but only slightly.

I’d felt all prepared to pivot on this “integrity question” but in the moment I just answered “no, thankfully I don’t” directly and possibly muttered something about having taken compliance training around the legality of such issues at Amazon. Thankfully, the interviewer was quite game and brought it back to a question about whether I had an example working with global teams where something didn’t quite feel right and digging in helped understand a local/cultural issue that was important to understand to move forward.

For that I had an example (probably a few). Specifically, my saga of understanding why our Japanese parent company wanted me to integrate a laser measurement device that didn’t really seem to work. And how befuddled I was for the better part of the year why they seemed unconcerned as I filed bug report after bug report and explained workarounds I’d developed that belonged in a Rube Goldberg machine tribute video. Until we all went out for dinner Kawasaki Japan together.

I’ve been telling that story for years and years now as an example as to why when folks do something that seems crazy you need to dig deeper. Thankfully it seemed to fit well in this case.

As another example of integrity working out I’ll leave you with a second clip from the famous Seinfeld episode “The opposite” where George takes the accusation audit to a whole other level. I’m not suggesting this - it works well for him but eventually it’s too much for one person to maintain.

A teaser for the next article

Hmm, that story about my days back in industrial inspection and working with remote teams across a Japanese parent company feels like it could be a good followup to this article. Maybe I will go there next .. but probably not. At least I’d better check I didn’t already sneak this story into an earlier post. :-)

Sorry, back to the topic for next week (approximately)…

Sometimes when you start to think about something then everything you do has a high chance of matching to that pattern. Much the same way when you chat about some random thing out loud with a friend and suddenly TikTok puts it in your feed. Which I’m intending as a situation that’s about our brain’s incredible ability to match (and overfit at times) patterns - as opposed to the obvious fact that TikTok is actually listening to you all the time.

OK - I’m joking, I’m not sure TikTok is listening to you all the time. I only worked at Facebook and they are definitely …. oops, maybe I should stop there. Again, I’m kidding I’m guessing they’re not listening to you - they seem pretty insistent about it and it’s probably hard to imagine they accidentally are doing it without realizing it. Probably.

Anyway, I’m thinking that a continuation of this post will be a short story about how caring more about hitting targets than continuously confirming they’re good targets (ie; they don’t have undesirable side effects, etc) can create real problems. Even if everyone has high personal integrity and off the wall skills. So yes, this will be a story about Facebook - but just a small one.

Definitely do not subpoena me for some congressional thing - I literally know nothing, except maybe when to recognize a cultural defect that can have emergent properties you’d rather not have. Though I could be completely wrong, as Facebook/Meta seem to be doing just fine⁷.

1. I’m not suggesting one party vs. the other in American politics do this. It seems so prevalent that I think it’s in the “everyone does it” category.

2. I don’t think the point of a job interview is to convince people to hire you. That ability is a good skill to have, but in the long term a better goal is sharing your abilities in the most constructive way AND learning about the company/role. Ideally so that both parties can make a great decision about whether you should work there. Of course, in practice if they don’t want to hire you then the learning about them is all academic. It’s just that you’ve got to be yourself enough that if you have what I’d call a “real choice” (ie; there’s a job offer) that when you double down on “learning about them” you’re not suddenly in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type situation.

3. Not that I think politics is all bad. Present state of the government excluded from that statement. Workplace politics are sometimes termed that because people don’t really have a clear view about why decisions are being made, or assume that they should be made for something that makes sense to them vs. the company’s leaders. Though sometimes company politics are about a lack of true integrity - that’s not good.

4. For example in my case such poor choices would manifest after being in the same room with a Top Pot donut, or during the danger zone when a pie I just made has cooled enough enough to “test.” Or I suppose in the decision that baking a pie would be a fun thing to do in the first place.

5. You can Google the details. Still “too soon” for me to describe more.

6. Also - the stock has not kept going down. Thanks to a LOT of hard work from so many people.

7. In terms of business they seem to be killing it even given the diversion of billions into VR which may or may not pay off. Though I hope sincerely they won’t stop investing there because I have a Quest 3 and it’s truly magical for some things. In addition to killing it in business outcomes as measured by stock price they’re also the only entity I know in modern politics that has gotten the US left and right to agree on something. Mainly agreeing on hating Meta/Facebook, but still impressive.