Hi there and welcome to the Biz Communication Show. I’m your host, Bill Lampton, the Biz Communication Guy, bringing you tips and strategies that will boost your business. And those tips and strategies are not from me alone. They are instead from a lively and highly informative conversation I have with a business communication expert.

And today coming to us from Gainesville, Georgia, my home base, my office base, Stacey Reece. He’s a former franchise owner of Sphereon Staffing and Recruiting located in Gainesville, Georgia. Sphereon has served Northeast Georgia since 1997. Reece said he strived during his 28 year tenure as market owner to provide the job seeker with the best interview experience possible through providing individual resume design, pre-interview coaching and post-interview follow up.

Prior to opening Sphereon, Stacey Reece was a vice president with First National Bank of Gainesville for over 13 years. During his banking tenure, Reece held several positions, including branch manager as well as consumer division project manager. As division project manager, Reece was charged with creating cost cutting initiatives while improving the customer experience.

Stacey Reece received his BBA in 1987 from the University of North Georgia. And in 1992, he graduated from the UGA Georgia Banking School. Reece has served on numerous community boards and civic organizations during the past three decades. Most notably, Stacey Reece is a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives, having served from 2002 to 2007. He had a leadership role that allowed him the privilege to cast votes in 32 standing committees.

Stacey Reece continues to remain active in Georgia politics, doing grassroots advocacy for community organizations. Reece and his wife, Dr. Mandy Reece, reside in Gainesville, Georgia. They have two adult children and two grandchildren.

So I know that you’ll join me in welcoming Stacey Reece.

Hello, Stacey.

Hello, Bill. How are you today?

I’m absolutely delighted to have another conversation with you. I’ve followed your career, as you know, for three decades. And in addition to that, I’m fortunate to have a friendship with you and your wife, Mandy. So it’s could we call it old home week?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And thank you for asking me to come back. I was looking at my notes and realized we were together in 2018. And I’m like, wow, how does time fly?

Yes, time does fly for sure.

One thing that all of us know is that when we’re talking about job interviewing, there’s been a lot of attention given to the job candidate, what the job candidate should do, how they should dress, how they should sit, how they should walk, how should they talk. And yet you’re in a position to give us some information about the job interviewer. And I see a vast gap there. I know that we need that information.

Why, for example, would you say to start with is the job interviewer overlooked or neglected or not talked about?

I think, Bill, it goes back many, many decades. It goes back to where when someone was applying for a job, it was viewed that they had a need. That need was they needed a job. So the interviewer didn’t really have to sell themselves to the person that they wereinterviewing. So they could just, in most any case, just do whatever they wanted to do during the interview. But about 10 years ago, that started to change. People started to have options, and if you were fortunate enough as an interviewer to have someone apply for a role that you had open, you needed to be able to impress them as well.

Okay. These interviews, unless they are online, which many are, but let’s talk about the interviews that are live and in person, and that has become more the norm since COVID is no longer putting us in isolation. One of the first keys that an interviewer needs to think about and have good tips and strategies about is the setting itself, because we all know that places talk, places give messages just as well as people do.

What advice will you give interviewers about the setting so that it will be, let’s say, for example, welcoming and not threatening? What advice do you give along those lines?

So we always attempted to create what I call a very comfortable, neutral environment to conduct interviews in. Usually it was done in a conference room. The conference room was well lit. The furniture was modern, and we would always have at least water sitting around that we could offer the candidate that we were interviewing. I like that because then you’re not interviewing from your personal office.

And I was taught many years ago in sales classes that when you got the privilege to enter someone’s office to maybe present your services, that you should start reading the room immediately and learning as much as you can about that person. So I always preferred to be in a neutral environment, and that’s why I refer to it, Bill, as a neutral environment. Before that candidate learns about me, I want them to see me and hear me and have a conversation with me that’s very neutral.

And my office was my home away from home. I spent more time in my office than I really did here in this study or in my own living room. So I wanted my office to be decorated in a way that represented me. And I don’t always want people to know who I am right out of the gate because I have opinions of things. And often I have to first let people meet me and learn that even though our opinions may be different, I’m very open minded about their opinions, which is a great segue into what you and I have talked off a lot about some, and that is what about when interviewers and interviewees have difference of opinions that really aren’t job related?

And that’s something I have seen a lot of over the years. I would have people tell me when they interviewed one of our candidates, well, I don’t think they’re a good fit. And I’d be like, well, why? Why are they not a good fit? Well, they’re just not. And I’m like, well, I need more feedback because if you want me to recruit for your opening, I’ve got to understand where I’m missing the target on this individual. Because if they were not qualified, I wouldn’t have recommended you set up an interview. We just have difference of opinions.

And I said, well, share more about that with me. And as they began to share those differences of opinions, I’m like, okay, how does that prohibit the individual you interviewed from conducting the job that you’re wanting to hire them to do? And they’d look at me and they’d think a minute and they’d be like, well, it really doesn’t. And I said, well, then why would you not want to continue forward with this? Because it doesn’t sound like that your differences have anything to do with their capability of doing you a fabulous job. It sounds like it’s just that maybe you don’t agree with their philosophy or maybe their outlook on life.

I think that what you have just said is even more prevalent now than when you first instituted that practice, which is a very good one. Becauseif anything among the people you know and I know, there’s a lot of polarization. But does that polarization mean that somebody couldn’t do work for and with a person that they differ so much with?

And then I’d like to really commend you on that, what to me is novel and new, and that is having the interview in a neutral site. Because as you said very clearly, when the candidate comes in, the candidate, if they have any alertness at all, if they’re in your regular office, they’re going to get, as you said, a lot of clues about you.

And in my professional life, for many years, if I would get to someone’s office that I was going to have a business appointment with, and the receptionist said, well, he or she is not here yet. Would you like to stay here in the reception room? Or do you want to go into the office? I always took the choice of going into the office. Why? Because here on display would be that person’s hobbies, their families, their awards, their memberships. And so you had starting points to talk with.

But I think your approach is that you want to know more about the candidate than the candidate knows about you. Is that the way I’m seeing it?

It is, yes. Yes. I want to know what that candidate is thinking. I want to know what their qualifications are, not just what they turned in on paper. Because people can embellish on paper, but once you start having a dialogue with them, and I like to use the word as an interviewer, I’m having a dialogue. I’m not saying I’m going to ask you a series of questions. I’m going to have a discussion with you. I want to see how well you can communicate with me so that I’ll know how well you’re going to communicate with my managers or my clients or my other employees.

And I’ve always been in a role where communication is extremely important. In fact, the roles I’ve had in life, if you could not communicate well, you would not have succeeded in the roles that I’ve enjoyed over 30-plus years.

Well, you know that I say amen to that because communication has been not only my focus professionally, but to me, the interpersonal relationships we have. And when you go to networking events, don’t be there just because of what somebody might can do for you, but go there to establish relationships.

Something that you mentioned a while back to me was that the interviewer has certain legal restrictions on what can be asked of the candidate, what they can ask the candidate. And so what happens if a candidate is well-informed and knows those, what happens if a candidate finds the interviewer getting a little shady on them, maybe not asking the question that they can’t ask directly, but doing it rather subtly? How can graciously an interviewer work through that or around it?

Yeah, well, and you can