Definitely agree with your point that some people have a gift for this kind of thing, so just genuinely curious how the 7 of 8 thing worked.
1. First, only select few interviewers with a great track-record could be a "champion".
2. If this interviewer was going against the rest of the interview panel, they could choose to be that interviewee's "champion". This means they are essentially saying "I have such a strong conviction that this person will do well that I'll put my professional reputation on the line for them." E.g. this person agreed to be that person's mentor when they started, and if things went south they would carry the burden of additional mentorship or finding the least problematic way to fire that person.
I cannot recommend a book about this topic (both because I don't know any and for the reason that I'll explain below), but have you considered that exactly because you are a consensus builder, this idea might not very well for you (i.e. it is simply not a good match for your leadership style)?
I, for example, am rather the opposite of a consensus builder. On the other hand, I typically immediately look through any bullshit claims that, for example, salesmen or business consultants tell about what they offer (seriously: a successful business consultant once told me that all the sales tricks that work well on C-level executives completely fail on me; I am a cruelingly hard sales target). How do I do that? Simple: I just think through all the logical implications that a claim has: if it is "too good to be true", it is nearly always fraud - and I want to call this fraud out. So I start questions about the logical implications that I found ... well, this typically does not turn out to be comfortable for the fraudster ...
In this sense (to answer your question and also answer why this answer likely won't work for you): you should put your thumb on the scale if the candidate is a fraudster (the huge majority of people are!). And this is exactly the reason why I don't believe this will fit your management style: you say you are a consensus builder. Calling out fraudsters in my opinion rather requires a deep will from inside to rather bring fraudsters/deceivers into jail, which is rather the opposite of building a consensus.
But if you nevertheless, despite my warning concerning your management style, want to read books and practice this skill:
- Read books about deeply scientific topics (e.g. how some theory was state of the art, then some cleverly designed experiments were done: in which sense did they make clear that this theory was wrong and to which new theory did this experiment lead?). After that download some arbirary slide decks or research studies from some business consulting company and find lots of locations in the text where they deceive the reader of things they won't be able to deliver.
- play/read the visual novel Umineko When They Cry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umineko_When_They_Cry) - it is in some high-level sense about thinking deeply about scientific explanations for what seemingly cannot be explained by science (which - in the story - "proves" that witches thus exist).
The whole point of a committee is to reach consensus. I've flipped my beliefs on many candidates before after hearing what other interviewers think. I think most of us understand that interviews aren't exactly the best way to judge a candidate - at least I think that way. So I'm pretty open to forming consensus when I'm "weak" and they are "strong" in opinion (especially if I respect their judgement).
Different groups requiring different skillsets certainly isn't unusual.
I do also agree with you that "only one person gets to decide" is a bad idea in general (and is usually a red flag for someone trying to be a dictator).
Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evidence to come in, because our radar for people is so good. We don't do it that way, because it's nonsense.
That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.
I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.
To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.
See the whole criticism section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
With the four discrete variables in MBTI, I can type people with 90% accuracy after a conversation.
The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.
Hasn't Myers Briggs been debunked as a load of pseudoscience shit?
(that doesn't mean we should do it in courts to convict people)
If we treat this kind of thing as an oracle rather than admit that it's a flawed heuristic, even a good heuristic being ultimately flawed, I think that's pretty dangerous. One has to be extremely humble at the task of evaluating people, because it's difficult and error-prone.
E.g. if the manager in this story said "no" and that person wasn't hired, how would you know she was correct?
I will say that there was a non-zero number of "she said 'no', person was hired anyway and it turned out to not be good". As sister/cousin threads have pointed out: this might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
What this manager did isn't practically different from what all interviewers do, except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. The manager is likely to have a better understanding of how the candidate bullshits (or if they do) when they're not the target of the bullshit.
[0] Used as a descriptor; e.g. "manipulating" someone to decide they should see a doctor for their toe infection isn't bad.
There's merit to this argument.
Consider people who get scammed or catfished -- it's obvious to an outside observer. You're less likely to fool yourself when you have no skin in the game.
Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?
I’ve heard of people claiming to be a good judge of character, or claiming other people are, usually without evidence and as an excuse for actions which involve disregarding objective indicia of character as it relates to the decision at hand, and very often as an excuse specifically for making decisions that seem to amount to disregarding objective criteria to favor their own and/or a generally-socially-favored race, ethnicity, subculture, etc.
Dragonwriter, now that's a good name, you'd have a shot for sure.
Not so long ago, I would have certainly agreed with you until I met this one girl.
So we started dating and, a couple months in, sometimes, as a joke, I use to say to her: "the first time I saw you, blablabla beautiful blablabla a star in the sky blablabla". I did that not only once but many many times. And every time, every time, she would have the exact same answer. She would say: "the first time I saw you, I thought 'oh bof'" (meaning she thought I was mediocre). So you know, I thought she only plays hard to get, like women do. That didnt bother me. Time passes and I kept going with my "the first time I saw you .."s. Kind of know she liked it anyway. And she kept on having the same answer.
At one point I thought something was strange. She kept on having those exact same words again and again. 'Oh bof'. Again and again. I could sense she was actually trying to tell me something entirely else.
Until I realised what she was saying. When I did realised what she was saying, I was shocked.
The first time I saw her... what I really thought was... 'Oh bof'. This is literally word for word what I thought the first time I saw her. I thought in my head: 'Oh bof'. But not only the words matched perfectly, the ton as well.
I pass on the details but let me tell you that girl knew exactly my state of mind even when I was in the next room.
Thats the time I learnt some people can tell exactly what you think just by looking at you. This is frightening. They can because they started observing people at a very young age. They love to observe people. Exactly like it is said in that pg's post: they observe.
I'd honestly be a little unnerved by this as an interviewee. I've seen interview shadowing before for people first starting to interview (and in the past have both shadowed and been shadowed), but having someone watch me like that not to learn how to interview but to just focus on monitoring me would feel very different. I definitely have an above average amount of social anxiety though, and one of the biggest things that induces it for me is not getting feedback about whether I'm communicating clearly, so maybe this is specific to me and not generally how people would react,
My past few jobs required interviewer training, which involved observing interviews. So pretty much any interview I was involved in had an observer.
INFJ: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/understanding-infj-intuitio...
I happen to be in a new leadership position and in the middle of a hiring decision.
What this article and discussion shows is less of a “some people are magic” phenomenon and more of a “a lot of evaluators and leaders have huge blindspots” phenomenon. Most all panels bias towards false negatives; there’s a lot of support for having too narrow a perspective on any given candidate.
Extraverted (E) vs Introverted (I)
“E” generally means gaining energy from other people, while “I” means people drain your batteries. This one is not always immediately obvious for people. In general "E"s talk more when with groups of people and "I"s think more. Even though I spend a lot of time at home with my wife, I'm an E - I get energy from social interactions.
Sensing (S) vs Intuiting (N)
This is about how you process new information. S people see what's actually in front of them - they think and talk more in specifics. In general, S types are better at detail oriented work.
N types intuit things, so they sometimes aren't great at focusing at what's in front of them, but are great at coming up with ideas and next steps based on what they see.
Feeling (F) vs Thinking (T)
Everyone feels and everyone thinks. A good way to judge this is people's reactions to situations. Feelers react with empathy first, thinkers react with problem solving first.
Very basic example: Your friend comes in with their arm bleeding. Is your very first reaction?
"Oh no! What happened?" - Feeler
"You should go to the hospital!" or "Let me get something to wrap that", etc etc.
In general feelers are more likely to feel empathy for someone, even if they they think they are dead wrong or disagree with them.
Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)
This is about how you make decisions. And it has nothing to do with the dictionary definitions of judging and perceiving.
Some defining traits of Js:
Achieving the goal is more important than the process.
You are comfortable making decisions with limited information.
For Ps:
Being true to your moral system is more important than achieving the goal.
You prefer to collect more information before making decisions.
The side effect of these two things means Js tend to have steadier lives with more commitment, while Ps tend to have a broader range of experiences and a bigger variety of life experiences.
---
Lastly, the temperaments:
ExxJ - Organizes people
IxxJ - Keeps systems running, also good at absorbing and teaching information.
ExxP - Collectors of experiences, achievements, pleasures, etc.
IxxP - Being true to your convictions
---
Now, people who study function stacks are going to shit on this comment, saying the letters don't mean anything, its all about functions like Extraverted Thinking, etc. But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.
What about someone who is strong intuitive, but starting the next moment they're very detail-oriented, and also the person you'd most trust for meticulous coding that had to work?
> But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.
Do we want to try to hire people who have qualities that would spanning these headshrinker buckets? If so, maybe we're dealing a lot with that missing "3%", so trying to pigeon-hole people would frequently be counterproductive?
Intuitors just start with the big picture as their basic instinct, then fill in the details. Sensors start with detail and build up to the big picture.
For example, in some empirical behavior research, person A seemed to have better snap decisions but poor at follow-though, and person B seemed to be asking about details... Has that nailed some key innate difference in how A and B actually think, or merely -- for purposes of, say, assigning military conscripts to jobs, or a huge corporate hiring machine that can't care beyond commodities -- at least it's a classification?
Maybe it's better than chance at predicting exhibited behavior (absent training), and we don't know that it reflects the actual cognitive mechanics?
As a one time sprinter, i read that, knew it totally false, and it invalidated my trust in reading further. So i wasted money buying that book.
If one publishes so carelessly, it’s sad.
Your x-ray vision manager: what (interview) questions or criteria did she use?
>she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
He advocates for teams of people handling a negotiation with the most experienced negotiator just observing.
The reason: it's incredibly difficult to be process, crafting and delivering responses in real time. If your primary goal is to observe the other side, that should be your sole focus. It's also incredibly valuable to have that observation hence why you should negotiate in teams (or at least pairs).
Just noting: that situation around that assessment can affect the outcome.
For example, hired person appreciates the opportunity/faith extended to them, or otherwise picks up on the need to rise to the occasion.
Or a manager or other staff sees/treats the person differently because of the circumstances (e.g., gives the hire more guidance because they think the hire will need it, wants the hire to succeed because a founder has blessed them, or just sees the person more favorably because they trust the opinion of someone else).
I don't think it would make sense to tell a hired person "you barely got in here, everybody hated you except for one interviewer".
"Jessica is the reason we hired you - she says you'll be great here and when she says that she's always right" technically says "we weren't going to hire you", but also "we all believe in you".
Nah, Pauls article didn't talk about results. What was Jessica's hit rate at being right?
Women and men have different degrees of this X-ray vision and it's hard to actually rank someones ability in this automatically.
Often a lot of women are just given these roles by assumption. What did Jessica do to qualify her for this position other then being Pauls romantic partner?
(And it was unfortunate that she wasn't listened to more, because a higher-ranking person would more often miss cues about customer thinking, or would come out of a meeting seeming to feel a gist biased more towards what they wanted it to be.)
For that skill/quality and others, I later tried to recruit her as a startup CEO.
I believe it was from watching the serve, but not seeing where the ball went. As someone who has played tennis for many years (but not remotely professionally), it always seemed to me that the coach could simply be reading the player's expression. When you're serving, you can typically tell based on how the contact felt, and the sound it made, whether your serve was going in. It wouldn't be surprising if that could be 'read' from your face.
A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision".
During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
Over 5 years of working with her, every single person she said we should hire turned out great. Every person she said was no good, turned out to not be great.
This was particularly fascinating to watch when she was the lone dissenter either way. e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right.
The first time I read pg's essay about Jessica, it immediately reminded me of my old manager.
It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault.
Some people have either a natural gift or their brains have picked up a set of weights for their internal neural network that make them fantastic at this kind of thing.