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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#11

Post by gatsby »

Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!'

For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are:

1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and

2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses

That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the same sets of questions and have a structured process: you need to understand what a "one-star" response vs. a "five-star" response actually looks or sounds like. Training and calibrating all of the interviewers in a large company around a similar rating system is nightmarish, so most companies don't bother.

The book also outlines that pairing a work sample with a structured interview is one of the most accurate methods of hiring.

If anyone is interested in some in-depth structured interview questions or work sample ideas, feel free to email me. I've spent the last few years working on a company in the interviewing space and would love to chat.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#12

Post by anonymoushn »

rb2k_ wrote: post #5
PlaceFan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc.)?

Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least for the last 2-3 years. As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool of questions. Some of them are pretty 'open ended', but still targeted towards getting a good impression of a certain area of knowledge. That being said, I had an interview with Google at some point in the past where one of the interviewers almost seemed appall…

Recently I failed an interview at Facebook because I chose to serialize a binary tree into a list of N items, rather than a list of N items and O(N) sentinels. Most of the interview was spent convincing the interviewer that this could possibly be correct.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#13

Post by throwaway9475 »

inopinatus wrote: post #7

Articles like this - and the comments that follow - always overlook the primary value of job interviews, which to me is answering the question: "Do I want to work for this company?"

Sure, because poor management, crippling technical debt, and a toxic work environment are totally plainly presented to you in an interview. /s

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#14

Post by scarmig »

Boothroid wrote: post #9

But surely structured interviews just test a candidate's ability to improvise plausible stories? Whether they are truthful or not is a different matter..

Being able to improvise plausible stories is an important aspect of job performance, both internally and externally.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#15

Post by hobls »

PlaceFan wrote: post #4
akhilcacharya wrote: post #2

It's interesting, because I'd argue that the best companies in tech have have interviews that are very structured and predictable.

Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc.)?

People always talk about the whiteboard interview, and assume it has the greatest weight, but the other questions are just as important. There are plenty of things being measured, and technical ability is often not the one that disqualifies a candidate. The other questions do tend to come from a standardized bank of questions too; the whole thing is very structured.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#16

Post by threatofrain »

Boothroid wrote: post #9

But surely structured interviews just test a candidate's ability to improvise plausible stories? Whether they are truthful or not is a different matter..

Structured interviews improve the ability to systematically test the relationship between policy and results. Real experiments are then possible.

As opposed to a situation where your interviewers are asking off-the-cuff questions, and you're uncertain whether the questions have a systematic bias toward a bad direction -- racism, sexism, or just selecting for something idiosyncratic that adds unnecessary constraint to your candidacy pool. You also now don't know whether it's your policy that's systematically bad (or good!), or that your interviewers are systematically bad.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#17

Post by andrewmutz »

gatsby wrote: post #11

Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…

How does this work in practice?

If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#18

Post by tptacek »

rb2k_ wrote: post #3

It should probably have been titled "The Utter Uslessness of Unstructured Job Interviews", because that's the kind of interview the author criticizes. In my personal experience, structured interviews can be very helpful in determining a candidates abilities.

Are you sure you're using the same definitions as the author? In practice, across a pretty decent sample of large tech companies, I've never seen a truly structured interview outside of Matasano, where I was almost murdered by my employees for instituting them. I think we'd hear far more complaints about them if they were common.

It's possible that what you consider to be a structured interview is in fact what this author (and I) would call unstructured. Specifically: if the interviewer has any discretion about questions at all, the interview is probably fundamentally unstructured.

In a structured interview, the interview is less an interrogator than a proctor or a referee. Every candidate gets identical questions. The questions themselves are structured to generate answers that facilitate apples-apples comparisons between candidates: they generate lists of facts. The most common interview questions, those of the form "how would you solve this problem", are themselves not well suited to these kinds of interviews. It takes a lot of work to distill a structured interview out of those kinds of problems.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#19

Post by DrNuke »

It is some time we are going towards word of mouth and peer recommendations as the preferred way to hire new personnel. Cold applications are for outsiders and as such a very different market, with all the strings and the bulls.it attached.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#20

Post by tptacek »

andrewmutz wrote: post #17
gatsby wrote: post #11

Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…

How does this work in practice? If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?

This is a good and important question. Also: while I have a lot of respect for people at Google trying to innovate on hiring, make no mistake: Google's heart is in the right place, but they aren't at the forefront of structured hiring, and their hiring processes are notoriously capricious.

The reality is that generating good questions for a structured interview is difficult. You can't just pose a programming problem. As you've noted, most programming problems have multiple good answers. Differentiating between multiple good answers from different candidates re-introduces subjectivity. Your brain would rather convince you that one valid answer is less good than another, even when it's not, that to admit to you that it can't differentiate or generate a narrative for you. The part of your brain that generates narratives is incredibly powerful and does not care about how accurate your hiring process ends up being.

What we tried to do was create questions that generated lists of facts. "Spot all the errors in this code" would be an example of this approach (but none of the three we used). We went into the process wanting to embrace epistemological uncertainty, generating a historical trail of data that we could retrofit to candidate performance.

In the end, work sample testing was so much more powerful a predictor for ourselves that we never fully got around to analyzing the data. Sometimes we'd get candidates that clearly generated inferior "lists of facts"; I think there may have been 1-2 instances where that outcome actually overruled work-sample testing delivered prior (out of a few tens of engineering hires and probably ~100 interviews).

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