Take a candidate out for lunch or dinner. There is likely already a team of employees you trust that will have to interact with him or her every day. You are not the only person who is going to have to work with this candidate. Put the candidate in situations where they are more likely to show their true selves. Find new ways to truly understand how a person thinks. Every candidate will be prepared for commonplace interview questions. Here are three principles that can help you hire the right person: Cue that sinking feeling: You start wondering if hiring this person was a mistake.

Then, a month later, the new hire misses an important deadline or starts complaining about the work. So an offer is made, and fingers are crossed that everything works out.

The candidate seems good, and the references check out. A conference-room meeting, a pristine résumé and the standard questions: Where do you want to be in five years? What do you consider your biggest failure? What are your strengths and weaknesses?Īdd in some small talk - maybe the candidate and the interviewer have something in common, like an alma mater or an acquaintance from an earlier job - and that’s largely it. At the same time, she struggles to make sense of her relationship with her lover, a handsome but mediocre painter named Israel with a penchant for sexual perversity.A typical job interview is little more than a social call with some predictable choreography.

Suffering from crippling writer's block and fresh out of a divorce, she finds a job in a hair salon and starts recording her conversations with her friends Margaux and Sholem, both brilliant, long-suffering artists. The book chronicles Heti's struggle - sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking - to answer the seemingly simple questions: 'What was the right way to react to people? Who was I to talk to at parties? How was I to be?'īased heavily on the lives of the now-35-year-old author and her friends, How Should a Person Be? follows Heti (also the novel's narrator) as she tries to sort out where (if anywhere) her life is taking her - and whether she should try to transform herself into someone else. Few, though, have taken it to the extreme that Toronto author Sheila Heti does with How Should a Person Be? The relentlessly introspective 'novel from life' earned critical raves when it was released in Canada in 2010. The unexamined life isn't worth living, according to Socrates, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a writer who disagrees. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title How Should A Person Be? Author Sheila Heti

How should a person be