Re:Ask HN: What have you found the most useful interview que...
by gumby on Monday February 04, 2019 @06:00PM
(#19081546)
This is really great (as is your amusing lead-in BTW!).
I struggle with candidate responses because it's quite possible to get bad answers from great candidates due to nervousness, monetary confusion, accidental use of company-specific jargon that can be misrepresented etc. And interviews are abnormal, so you're selecting for people who do well in interviews hoping it's correlated with the skill you actually need. Yet I don't know of a good alternative to almost anything beyond a truly unskilled job.
But these examples are great because they normalize out most of the realtime "high stakes" stuff. Sure, they can stress about precisely the right phrasing to put above whatever attachment they might be sending, but that's still an easier problem.
My favorite example of "interview perspective imbalance" comes from the Allied occupation of Japan: when the first allied troops arrived (after the Japanese had signaled surrender) they were lead to a brief reception. Apparently the Japanese representatives had worried that the orange juice they set out was at the right temperature while the American troopers were worried that they might be assassinated. Quite an imbalance of expectation!
I struggle with candidate responses because it's quite possible to get bad answers from great candidates due to nervousness, monetary confusion, accidental use of company-specific jargon that can be misrepresented etc. And interviews are abnormal, so you're selecting for people who do well in interviews hoping it's correlated with the skill you actually need. Yet I don't know of a good alternative to almost anything beyond a truly unskilled job.
But these examples are great because they normalize out most of the realtime "high stakes" stuff. Sure, they can stress about precisely the right phrasing to put above whatever attachment they might be sending, but that's still an easier problem.
My favorite example of "interview perspective imbalance" comes from the Allied occupation of Japan: when the first allied troops arrived (after the Japanese had signaled surrender) they were lead to a brief reception. Apparently the Japanese representatives had worried that the orange juice they set out was at the right temperature while the American troopers were worried that they might be assassinated. Quite an imbalance of expectation!