It’s important to understand that these questions are just the starting point of a conversation to understand how a person thinks and acts. It’s impossible to make things up with a good recruiter because there’s no way you know beforehand how deep and where he will go with his follow-up questions
- Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work?
And on and on, always drilling down on their answers. It's close to impossible to come up with BS on the fly at that speed and pressure.
This really splits the wheat from the chaff and pure talkers and "team players" who didn't actually contribute anything to their teams' success stand there naked.
I would probably fold under this style of questioning even when describing a completely true and even interesting project that stands apart from the random grunt work I usually do. When interviewing other people myself, my style is borderline diffident while asking the candidate, to reduce the chance of nervousness/anxiety influencing their answers.
That being said, I love Justwatch, so clearly your techniques are throwing up some good candidates. All the best! :)
Happened to me about three times during way more than 300 interviews.
About ten times more candidates actually thanked me for the nicest and most informative interview with actionable feedback they ever had with a company. YMMV.
Looks like I was triggered a bit by parent, it‘s always interesting how much more unbalanced any nuance comes across in writing.
Other than that, I stand by my technique, but it‘s mainly a question of tone. The first whole paragraph of my carefully A/B tested script solely concerns itself with making a candidate comfortable, as interviews prefer natural extroverts.
90% of that time, this question actually ends up in a mutuably enjoyable conversation.
Yeah - because the other people would simply prepare for their interview, be it bullshit or not.
If I were to come to your interview and were to bullshit you - I would have spent enough time in front of the mirror trying various ways of copying the behaviour of people who did all the work for me. It's not that hard to build up a story once you know where to start from.
>> Other than that, I stand by my technique, but it‘s mainly a question of tone. The first whole paragraph of my carefully A/B tested script solely concerns itself with making a candidate comfortable, as interviews prefer natural extroverts.
I don't know. There are loads of issues I had to deal with and I don't remember how I did that any more. There are even more issues which I would completely agree were "dumb decisions" but be absolutely logical if I looked back and realised were political decisions. Now, if you allowed me to look back at my IM history/code comments and see why I did what I did.
>> 90% of that time, this question actually ends up in a mutuably enjoyable conversation.
So basically what you're testing your interviewees for is how much they have prepared for interviewing with you (they're happy because they were preparing for your questioning/you're happy because they made the right answers). The question is whether their ability at being interviewed correlates with their ability to excuse themselves from doing the job.
No. All I'm asking them is to come up with a single interesting project within the last three years that they did, be it professional or even a fun one and have some conversation over it. If they didn't do any remotely interesting work or can't talk about it at a high level, how could I possibly expect them to come up with own ideas or communicate about them in the future?
Other than that, you'd be extremely surprised at how little candidates actually prepare on average, even if I tell them in advance exactly what happens in the interview and what I'll be looking for (which I do).
So I do respect your points, but I don't really get them. You may be right. I'm getting the results I want and my teams are happy and productive.
Here's a mail from an interviewee last week:
> Thank you so much for the response! I would have loved to work with you guys, but I do understand. The experience was very helpful to me anyways, [...] Thanks again, and maybe we will work together in the future!
Please note I'm not trying to make a personal attack here, my interview style has pretty much always been to keep things simple, straight, and to-the-point. Additionally, most of my interviews are technical, so sorting out behaviors is usually secondary, and the technicality is usually enough information to select candidates on.
This is again pretty easy to BS. Most people aren't going to completely make something up. Rather, they'll tell a 10% lie where they make up the most critical bits, then fill the rest with "truthful" content based on how things actually work on their company.
Let me turn the tables:
- What's your hit rate? (Detected an actual bullshitter) - What's your false alarm rate? (Labelled someone a bullshitter who wasn't) - How did you arrive at these numbers?
- What's your hit rate? (Detected an actual bullshitter)
All of them, I definitely had a few bad hires, but never due to underestimating capability, also most of them were from the early days.
- What's your false alarm rate? (Labelled someone a bullshitter who wasn't)
I see no way to come up with any good number for that, but I think at ~10% hiring rate from the interview I'd call myself pretty average from a perspective of selectiveness at that part in the funnel.
> This is again pretty easy to BS.
This is not the point of the question, I could care less whether 10% are slightly beautified. My focus with this questions and the follow ups are whether candidates can reproduce insights, learnings, hacks and fulfillment of business objectives in a logical and coherent way. If the story is fabricated, it usually falls apart when I ask "why" and "how did you actually do it?"
It's hard to fake expert knowledge about the stability of current sources when I drill down on the details of a candidates' recent Arduino project.
It's almost as if you have absolutely no clue how good you actually are at catching bullshitters.
That means they supported their conclusion where they made one, and refrained from a definite conclusion where they couldn't make one.
Actually, it's worse. The claimed 100% hit rate implies classifying everybody as a bullshitter.
What a wonderful way to phrase talking about interviewing your potential future co-workers. You must be a very pleasant person to work for.
I would argue that your style and attitude would make quality candidates question why they would want to work for someone who views interviews as a full contact sport. Is "ripping people to shreds" part of the culture at Justwatch(your profile states your CEO and Cofounder) then?
The ability to answer such questions often comes down to how good of a storyteller someone is, rather than the actual value of their experiences. One of my close friends hate BS answers, and will never use tangential experiences to structure an appropriate answer to such questions.
I do not know the degree to which you go in depth with, but a couple of follow up questions is no biggie.
So much opportunity for confabulation here. It is ENTIRELY possible to have the brain come up with faux-rationalisations and half-truths. We're literally wired for it. You'll end up biasing towards people who can accurately discern what you're optimising for and mould their words to suit.
I was there, I was breathing, I was on the payroll.
This one made me laugh out loud.
Most of the problems I solve are along the lines of 'some edge condition that wasn't accounted for in the code, often by someone else, and I spent a day figuring it out and fixing it' and there's not generally a lot of complexity or depth to it. I'm from a systems engineering background, so most of what I do is preventing large headaches in the first place. I've worked for large companies, so we hit stupid platform bugs, you won't believe this: we actually had dev and stage environments where we caught most things. Most of the problems were 'developers new application version is crap, please fix what we broke' type of stuff.
The other limiting factor to working on large orgs is you generally have actual support contracts with vendors. Oh, my packets are leaving the interface but not arriving at the destination? Well, network team looks into that, cause you know, there's an actual network team. And then when they determine everything is setup right, they forward to the vendor. And then Cisco is like 'looks like these network cards are crap, buffer overflow, new firmware' and then it's problem fixed.
Anyway, writing all this has motivated me to construct something fancy about metrics and latency.
Probably next time I am going to interviews I'll grab a few lists like this of questions and prepare answers. Not lies but some cues and reminders that I don't have to search for under stress.
That's so funny, I read these question's and though I could consolidate them into a single question:
"How well can you bullshit and talk about things entirely immaterial to work?"
Seems a lot of people are chiming in to say how great question #3 is (how do/did you solve a problem at work)...I've gotten this in interviews and told them the Mad Men/Don Draper story of needing a new ad for my client "Lucky Strike" because the attorney General was going to prohibit our existing ads, complete with the pitch how I convinced the client its the greatest opportunity in marketing, asked them how they make their product....stopped them in their tracks, said that's it: "Its Toasted". Interviewers seem to love that story, and if they have seen Mad Men they seem to love it even more. Other times I told them about selling Mangos when I was a child...they love that one too, nothing more bullshitters love than other bullshitters.
My take is that you need to project the image of a professional, match your resume experience, don't be combative and basically show that you can be a valuable drone. Even the fact that you can bullshit this with a straight face and not go candid on the interviewer is a positive data point, as that's basically 80% of working in a corporation. But again, the hiring manager can cherry pick positives/negatives based on what he actually wants to do.
For example, a SWE will write this type of blurb:
"I asked the candidate to tell me about a time when he dealt with an unresponsive or slow responsive co-worker. He told me he leveraged the project tracking tools to assign bugs/tasks with ETA deadlines after following up offline and explaining the dependency and urgency, then set up meetings and when he was ignored and everything failed, escalated to management and used plan B to work around the dependency"
I want to hire the guy: "He definitely has bias for action, removing obstacles and using all tools at his disposal. He seems to have a no-nonsense approach to getting stuff done"
I don't want to hire the guy: "Seems like a yellow flag, doesn't demonstrate influencing skills which are critical for a senior engineer. I don't believe he works well with others"
etc..
It's the same with the Amazon leadership principles. They are often used as a tool for fucking someone over in office politics warfare.
The target audience for this is small to medium businesses, not corporations or competitive startups, who would be potential customers. It's more of a starting place for people who do not think about this much.
My guess is that HN is not the target audience for this blog post, so take what the simplicity of what is said with a huge grain of salt.
Noise might not contain information but the presence or absence of noise does.
Someone says "X" and it doesn't tell you a thing about whether "X" is the case, but it always tells you they wanted to tell you "X" for some reason.
You might find it telling that Google is censoring word "bullshit" on YT as of yesterday : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHvkEPL7mVA
People with a reputation for getting results get to skip this step, the bottom line matters more than your character. But any company will hold up a boundary at the door to make sure you fit the mould, or at least don't sink the ship.
The fundamental problem of bringing the unknown into the known has to have some boundary, what that is that makes sense usually just rides a trend wave. Character and behavioural stuff is all the rage right now. It'll pass onto other things soon enough.
1.) In terms of a daily schedule, on a scale from 1-10 how much are you a creature of habit?
2.) If you need a quick answer from a person 20 ft. away, do you send an email or walk over?
3.) What strategies do you have for completing tasks you don't like doing?
From my perspective interviews can be super biased.
Skill set aside, I think we naturally want to hire someone who answers our questions in the same way we would.
IMHO.
"The 4th Interviewer was really bad. Sat there lobbing obscure questions about XYZ to prove he was smarter than me"
and subject of the post is something like "Why I'll never work for Google".
They are talking about you.
You don't understand. I don't want the job because that would mean having to interact with you.
Eh - none of my good jobs had this style of interviewing. I'm not sure I'm missing out on anything.
I am gauging the interviewer from a human perspective, and you're exhibiting behavior that I cannot respect. In general, I advise people not to work in teams if they don't respect their coworkers, and never if they don't respect their manager.
I like discussing these topics in interviews, as long as it's not a one way discussion. For the last job I interviewed, I got loads of interrogation style behavioral questions from all the interviewers (you can likely guess which company). Yet none of my interviewers could answer a simple question adequately:
"What are the reasons people leave the team/company?"
Very tempted to have acted like you did when they gave lame answers.
Edit: I think my comment doesn't convey my thoughts well, so I'll give another stab at it.
In general, if you want people to be open with you, there needs to be some kind of reciprocity. Playing psychological games causes people to raise their guards, and the natural response is not to give you what you want or be evasive. In an interview setting, that doesn't look good - so the next natural response is deception. Your style of questioning (I'm guessing here as you didn't give details) does a good job of eliciting the behavior you are trying to weed out. And then as a result, you get confirmation because you think you've caught out a guy trying to deceive you. Yet your behavior is likely a serious contributing factor.
Getting a useful signal is as much about the interaction as the questions, and if you're acting like a jerk then the most appropriate response for a strong culture fit is for the candidate to not want to work with you. Which is probably not something you're capturing very well.
> It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions. This stacks the deck massively in my favor.
You don't know this. Your candidate doesn't necessarily have a job on the line. They may have several offers in hand, and they may only be screening to get more offers into the mix. They may know that it's a candidate's market right now, but it doesn't mean they don't have good alternatives, and it doesn't mean that you aren't permanently leaving a bad impression on the candidate you're interviewing, one that will follow you even if you don't remain at the company you're at. You're slowly poisoning the pool of candidates in your extended network, and while it may not bite you immediately, there's a fair chance that by the time you see the ramifications of your actions, it will be too late.
In particular, you treating this like a "game" or a "playing field" to be outmaneuvered speaks volumes to the low level of professionalism you place on the interviewing process, and it makes you a real liability to the company. This is the cultural brand that you're communicating to folks being introduced to your company, and it's not a competitive one. In a large company, the relative effect may end up being significantly small and diluted, so much that while negative, it never ends up being a problem for your direct manager. On the other hand, if some kind of feedback loop ever emerges that connects this kind of pattern of behavior to you that your hiring manager looks at, I wouldn't be surprised if you receive a stern conversation and expectation for change. Of the engineers I've managed over the years, this sort of behavior is a huge red flag. It's an unforced error and a huge liability, and this sort of behavior when you think there are no repercussions tells you a lot about someone. This kind of personality is usually the first to go or that I manage out, because it's not great raw material for building the culture and collaboration I want to see.
As I recall Joseph Campbell once highlighted, the Japanese have a have a distinct tense in describing what they do as roughly equivalent to the English phrase "to play at." The idea isn't to make what you do overly templatized or rigid. When I talk about approaching an interaction as a "game," what I mean is that I try to stay fluid and engage in a non-formulaic manner.
Like it or not, candidates will almost always try to present a perfect image of themselves. However there's a "real story" under every veneer, and it's always a challenge to figure out what that real story is. I know plenty of interviewers who complain about never getting any real signal from their culture fit interviews, and when I dig deeper on why, it's because they came in with a set of questions, asked those questions verbatim, and wrote down the responses verbatim (as another reply to my comment suggested is the "right" approach). Most of the time, the candidate gave a guarded and carefully filtered narrative to all the questions. Nothing genuine makes it onto the table.
My argument is that the less effective results tend to come from a failure to "play at" interviewing! And it can be done completely respectfully and tactfully, leaving the candidate with a sense of having really connected with the interviewer.
> It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions"
Yes, I do think I can diagnose your effectiveness and contribution at least when it pertains to hiring in so far as this attitude is 99.9% of the time an extreme liability. If you work at big tech companies, it won't matter because you've never had to own the results of that mistake, but if you ever run your own company, you'll learn this lesson the hard way really quickly.
What you don't seem to understand is that interviewing is just as much a sales process as it is a measurement. Your argument that candidates try to present a perfect image of themselves is just that, an argument. Have you ever interviewed a candidate that candidly admitted their unvarnished struggles because they know that showing the strength and fortitude to admit that indicates a level of maturity and security that they want to communicate? Would it surprise you if I told you that these candidates tend to be the ones that have multiple offers?
It's around the same time that you realize how much expanding the team by a single engineer can add to the bottom line of the company (and conversely what the lost opportunity cost is) that you stop thinking like this. Frankly, I don't mind if you do this because very selfishly, as a hiring manager, your loss is my gain. If all of my competition wizened up over night and stopped making unforced errors like this, it would make it slightly harder for me to hire. But given that this is HN, in good faith, I do feel like it's worth giving you the warning here -- what you're doing is not a great strategy.
Like play "psychological games" with prospective hires?
Go into more detail. What questions/techniques do you typically reach for to do this?
And yet I'm guessing you don't own the company where you are exhibiting this sociopathic behavior. If so why do you feel it's acceptable to represent someones else's company like this? You sound like the person whose been at the same place for too long but rather than searching out new challenges elsewhere just stays put and creates toxicity.