I think there's been a continual refinement of both my structured and learned skills and of my gut and intuition. I tend to be more direct and probing in my questions now than I was ten years ago. I think that comes from confidence and experience that I frankly did not have ten years ago.

My style is very open. I will lay out the objectives in the interview, engage in an unstructured discussion, use some scenarios, talk about experience and ask the candidate one or two odd questions about how they handle adversity.

Have you ever had a case where you really liked somebody you interviewed but your team did not? If so, what did you do?

I had a situation like that at a previous company, but it was much more complicated. When you have a culture where mid-level management does not have the authority to say yes, they exercise their authority by saying no to everything. So if you get a candidate whom everyone is saying yes to, some of the disrupters in the group would say no just to focus the discussion on why they said no. There were disrupters who would continually vote no, not because of any principal, but because they liked the organizational attention they received when they said no to a candidate that everyone else liked.

Do you think it's good to have some dissention? Do you require unanimity on a hire?