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How to hire low experience, high potential people

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Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#91

Post by kapp_in_life »

nineplay wrote: post #57
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people wh…

Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#92

Post by TehCorwiz »

kapp_in_life wrote: post #91
nineplay wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people wh…

Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.

Like the interviewer probing private traumatic experiences in a largely one-sided interrogation?

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#93

Post by trgn »

mywittyname wrote: post #56

> Disagree and commit: I hate that this is such a common thought process. This is something that makes sense for soldiers in the military. But outside of this context (being a low-information cog in a gigantic machine), it's terrible. If you can't convince domain experts that the plan is sound, then maybe it's a bad plan. Honestly, disagree and commit goes against my... > Theory for excellence.

lol

Disagree and commit is like your mom saying she'll forgive but won't forget. sounds good on the surface, but really slightly manipulative and rancorous.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#94

Post by SkyBelow »

notpachet wrote: post #18
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when the…

>You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles.

The problem is that not all pressure is considered acceptable. Others have mentioned examples of things that cause great pressure and trauma and can indicate a person is very resilient and able to recover and excel, but which would never be acceptable to bring up in an interview. While it isn't specifically the same thing as discriminating on a protected status, I see it as equally harmful form of discrimination (and a failing of law to discriminate between these groups).

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#96

Post by kayodelycaon »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #83
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…

Agree completely. This interview approach is going to lead to terrible biases coming to the forefront that have nothing to do with job performance. It also sounds like an HR nightmare in some states here in the US.

It's an HR nightmare in the entire country thanks to ADA. You really don't want to dig into someone's past and hit a mental health issue and then refusing to hire them because they didn't disclosure a disability to you.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#97

Post by yodsanklai »

bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…

Yes, this is creepy and would be a red flag for me too. People gives a lot of flak to big corps behing dehumazing and such, but at least they have standard processes and this type of BS is explicitly forbidden (well, at least where I worked).

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#98

Post by PartiallyTyped »

kapp_in_life wrote: post #91
nineplay wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people wh…

Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.

So the interviewee is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Between the need to have a job to survive, and the need to appease some self-important middle manager who took it upon them to perform a psych eval, with zero credentials, while controlling the future of the candidates, and their ability to put food on the table.

Kindly, make your self as visible as possible so that I know to avoid you.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#99

Post by nerdponx »

kapp_in_life wrote: post #91
nineplay wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people wh…

Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.

Nobody is asking anyone to do that. The bias here is that a person with a traumatic past might seem uninteresting precisely because they unlikely going to share as much detail as this interviewer might want.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#100

Post by rqtwteye »

siva7 wrote: post #46
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…

I'd quit such an interview. Those questions are going over the boundaries of a strictly professional relationship. The thing with low-experience, high-potentials is that they may be bit more insecure than seniors and therefore might think that such questions are normal which they are not.

Exactly. You are joining a company, not a cult. Basically they are filtering for people who can speak the same jargon correctly. I have heard a lot of stories about people failing DEI questions during an interview because they didn't know the "correct" phrases to use.
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