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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#251

Post by mafm »

Sevii wrote: post #240
andrewmutz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to present data that shows flaws with today's interviewing. It's a lot harder to present a better way of predicting candidate performance in the workplace, along with substantial data that indicates it's better than today's methods. Corporations would love more effective ways to determine effectiveness/performance before hiring. Interviewing is terrible, but that doesn't mean there is a better option.

We have had a better way for decades, its banned. What do you think all these algorithm questions are supposed to do?

What is the better way that is banned?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#252

Post by andrewstuart »

I am a recruiter. Recently, I started working with a new employer. We could not get anyone through their interview process. Eventually I asked the HR person to clarify precisely what was being asked in these interviews.

She said that, essentially, the interviews were ad-hoc, with the interviewer just coming up with whatever questions they thought relevant based on the resume - often asking the candidate to go through their career history.

I explained that the only effective approach I have found with recruiting is to have a set of pre-defined questions, and each question is specifically designed to give insight into how the candidate meets the pre-defined job requirements. Very much like software development, where test cases are related to software requirements.

I explained also that it is not critical to stick precisely to these questions, but that should mostly be the case - interviews are human interactions and some flexibility is required depending on circumstance.

The HR person then explained this to the hiring managers at the company, and worked with the hiring managers to define interview questions that give insight into the job requirements.

The next two people interviewed got the jobs, after months of no one getting through the interviews.

In the early days of software development, the business was often dissatisfied with software delivered because it simply did not meet the requirements of the business. So the software development process matured and came up with the idea of tests that can be mapped back to the requirements via a requirements traceability matrix. Thus the business has a requirement, the developers write code to meet the requirement, and a test is designed to verify that the software meets the defined requirement.

Recruiting currently has no such general understanding in place of the relationship between job position requirements and definition of quantifiable questions that identify to what extent a given job candidate meets a requirement.

Once you get your head around the idea that recruiting should be very similar to software development in this regard, then it is easy to see that ad-hoc interviews do nothing to verify in any organised way to what extent a candidate meets the requirements of a given job opening.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#253

Post by hobls »

pdimitar wrote: post #215
hobls wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some common ones: - Lack of self awareness and introspection. Not being able to give specific examples of times you've made a mistake and how you learned from it. - Shit talking old coworkers, general attitude that you're great and nothing is your fault. - Being unable to talk about YOUR specific contributions; "we did this, we did that, the project made money..." Okay, what did YOU do? Surprising amount of people fa…

> - Shit talking old coworkers, general attitude that you're great and nothing is your fault. There's a gulf between "nothing is my fault" and "some of my old coworkers were shit and they deserve the shit-talk they get from me". I don't think it's fair to judge people universally on the base if they shit-talk or not. Being 100% kind and never saying anything bad about people in your past is vastly overrated. > - Not…

> "some of my old coworkers were shit and they deserve the shit-talk they get from me

This is just such a red-flag in an interview. I have worked with some terrible people, for sure. But I would never talk about them in an interview.

> t's only their own interpretation I chose a "cool" technology over the customer needs.

Heh, I swear to god when I asked the question, "Why did you pick X technology?" they said, "Because it seemed cool." I want to hear, "because it performed faster" or "because it had X feature I wanted" or whatever. Tell me WHY it's cool. I just want to hear how you'd explain a choice to me as a coworker, I'm not looking to actually second guess old choices. I'd even take, "Well, we had a really short deadline, and I was familiar with the technology. I decided hitting the date was more important than evaluating all the choices." I want to hear about your thought process; I don't care what choice you made. "Because I thought the industry was moving that direction and wanted to be future-proof and improve our ability to hire" is a good answer too. There are a ton of good answers, but "because it looked cool" is not one of them.

> interviewers who can't seem to trace my initial line of thought and try to coax me back in it

For sure. I try really hard not to talk when a candidate is talking because I know how hard it is to get thrown off in such a stressful situation. Sometimes the candidate has just obviously misunderstood my question though. This is much more important on technical questions -- I believe a good interviewer will treat the candidate like they are a coworker, and basically solve the whiteboard problem in a fairly collaborative fashion. Obviously the person doing the interview will take the lead, but I'm SUPER happy to answer clarifying questions, and if you start to struggle the right thing to do is to ask some small questions and see if the answers help. Just sitting there banging your head against the whiteboard isn't useful.

> So overall, I believe you're over-generalizing on a few points.

For sure, I'm just trying to give some really brief summaries of bad behaviors I've seen. I've also given a "hire" to people who did one of each of the above; like I said, none of it is disqualifying.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#254

Post by hobls »

davidf18 wrote: post #41
hobls wrote: post #21

I've been a programmer for a bit over ten years. I've worked at scrappy little startups, midsized companies, now for a tech giant for a few years. The engineers I work with at the tech giant are consistently better engineers than my other coworkers have been, and I credit the very structured interview process. We're trained to ask specific questions, look for specific types of answers, and each interviewer is evaluat…

Thanks...could you please cite specific examples?

Added some above.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#255

Post by woodandsteel »

My basic problem with interviewing is you are observing behavior in one sort of situation, and on that basis trying to predict behavior in a very different sort of situation, namely job performance, which is actually a whole bundle of different types of situations.

It seems like it would be much better to instead put the job prospect in situations that model the sorts that would come up at work.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#257

Post by m-j-fox »

tianlins wrote: post #94
m-j-fox wrote: post #60

Known useless indicators: * Resumes * Skills tests (hacker rank) * Whiteboard interviews * Unstructured interviews * Employee referrals No wonder headhunters have such a good business. Not that they're more discriminating, but they can pretend to be the solution to an intractable problem.

I agree with most, but referrals are one of the most important indicators. "A hire As, B hire Cs". A known issue, however, is the workforce diverse given the heavy use of referral methods.

All my referral tells you is I have a friend who needs a job and that I want $5000. Whether my friend is any good or not is something you'll find out after I cash my check.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#258

Post by kem »

schmit wrote: post #108

I find it quite problematic that researchers get to talk about their own research and present it as facts without anyone taking a critical look. Over time I’ve become more skeptical about this kind of psychology research (as more studies fail to replicate) and, as is often the case, here the sample size is quite small (76 students, split across 3 groups), predicting something relatively noisy as GPA. It is unclear to…

There are many, many studies showing the same thing. This study is just one example. See, e.g., meta-analyses of your choice:

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/79/4/599/

They're predictive, but not very.

Structured interviews are better, but not really by much.

The problem with all of these things is they work, but not very well, and people make too much of any one thing. An interview is a very small slice of behavior, even if it's structured very well.

People make too much of them.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#259

Post by nissimk »

sirbearington wrote: post #199
nissimk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullsh*t. Seriously, these questions are all tricks. If you memorize the tricks you can win the game. Even the "really easy" questions like reverse a string involve a trick -- swapping from the ends and stopping in the middle. The interview game involves memorizing tricks and identifying which memorized trick applies to the question.

I feel like 90% of writing software is identifying which "trick" applies to the problem you're trying to solve and applying it correctly.

Yeah, but you can look them up.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#260

Post by sjg007 »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #86
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…

Don't take his word as a word of god from heaven. Google's interview process is just as shitty as anyone else's, and shittier than some I've been through. It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure, which are very often not the best workers overall. It also wastes a ton of time both on the employer and on the candidate side. Source: interviewed ~100 people in my 6+ years at Google.

I guess the issue is that even the whiteboard style interviews can be gamed?
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