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niceguyanon comments on Open thread, March 17-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: David_Gerard 17 March 2013 03:37PM

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Comment author: niceguyanon 29 March 2013 07:10:27PM *  3 points [-]

What are some effective interviewer techniques for a more efficient interview process?

A resume can tell you about the person's skill, experience, and implicitly, their intelligence. The average interview process is in my opinion broken because what I find happens a lot is that interviewers un-methodologically "feel out" the person in a short amount of time. This is fine when searching for any obvious red-flags, but for somethings as important as collaborating with someone long-term and who you will likely see more of than your own family, we should take it more seriously.

I have a few ideas of my own:

  1. Disregard given references - call references and ask them who else they worked with, and call them instead.

  2. Ask specific and verifiable questions - competency is hard to fake if questions are deep.

  3. Use an actual known problem and solution related to the job and have them solve it.
  4. Plant an impersonator as an interviewee for an unrelated lowly position in the waiting room and have them interact.
  5. Test for interpersonal situation reasoning - This is the big one for me. You can't just ask "are you good with people?" The answer is too easily faked. Terrible coworkers are often arrogant, unempathetic ,and lack self-awareness and theory of mind. All the things that a resume and traditional Q and A about an interviewee's experience, can't help you answer. By presenting everyday interpersonal situations and having them reason through the positions they take, you will a better nuanced understanding.

Any suggestions?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 29 March 2013 07:39:48PM 3 points [-]

I'm fond of #3. That said, if I'm asking someone to do a substantive amount of work, I should expect to compensate them for it.

I'd be leery of #5 were I being interviewed... the implicit task is really "Figure out what the interviewer thinks the right thing to do in this situation is, then give them a response that is close enough to that" rather than "Explain what the right thing to do in this situation is." If I cared a lot about interpersonal skills, I'd adopt approach #3 here as well: if what i want to confirm is that they can collaborate, or get information from someone, or convey information to someone, or whatever, then I would ask them to do that.

Q&A mostly tells me about their priorities. I'm fond of "What would you prefer a typical workday to consist of?" for this reason... there are lots of different "good" answers, and which one they pick tells me a lot about what they think is important.

I'm also fond of "Tell me about a time when you X" style questions... I find I get less bullshit when they focus on particular anecdotes.

Comment author: satt 30 March 2013 10:39:35AM 2 points [-]

The average interview process is in my opinion broken because what I find happens a lot is that interviewers un-methodologically "feel out" the person in a short amount of time.

A related finding from I-O psychology: structured interviews are less noisy and better predict job performance than unstructured interviews (although unstructured interviews are better than nothing).

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