How about: "Let me tell you about a few of my accomplishments and then I'd love to hear which one you think is most significant for the kind of work I'd do in your organization"
Interviews go both ways.
The Only Interview Question That Matters
41–50 of 185 posts
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#42"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.
On the other hand, in my experience, the question works much better when asked in person than in writing. Just seeing the face of the interviewee while you ask the question lets you understand if there is real passion for that kind of job; the answers I get in writing these days (ie by email while screening people) are unfortunately much less telling :(
Just seeing the face of the interviewee while you ask the question lets you understand if there is real passion for that kind of job;
Is this deceptively informative? I hate to cite Malcolm Gladwell but I do think Blink shows us that first impressions and fleeting impressions can be dangerous and wrong. What do we think "real passion" is? Does it really show on the face, or do we only think we know? Can being flustered or off-kilter skew the impressions we give?
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#43I don't like this question - I do a lot of things, answering this question doesn't say a lot about me. It gives a vastly incomplete picture of me. I would say that it is one of those bad generic questions.
It's hard to talk about a lot of things in an interview so the question focuses on one thing... that you get to pick. Agree that this post has a terrible title and making a hire/no hire on one question is insane, but it's a good question.
I disagree - these are the same types of questions you might see on a college application. As far as my experience goes, it's a question that has massive flaws, especially when you deal with people who has an impressive & flexible set of skills/strengths - it selects against some of the very best, since for them, it's difficult to say what is the most significant accomplishment since many accomplishments manifest as significant in different ways. To select one is to likely avoid talk on the others, and to make a snap judgment call on the implicit question of what is significant, which may end up with a flawed answer that the interviewee may not make normally.
That is why I fundamentally disagree with such a question being important for hiring. If you want to test how someone handles pressure, that can be manifested in other ways. If you want someone to discuss their accomplishments, a simple request for the person to describe some of his/her accomplishments would be less flawed (i.e. "Tell me a little about yourself and what you have done") - it would also be less confrontational.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#44I'll have a couple good accomplishments on the job every year but nothing jumps out at me as the biggest accomplishment of my life.
How should I answer? Just pick out a recent one I guess.
Does anyone else have this problem?
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#45I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…
Because some people cap at "I managed to code the most lines of code in June, 2006 among my seven colleagues, even though I was just hired on the tenth of the month and didn't know the code yet. That was quite a month."
whereas others cap at, "well, I did manage to build the world's first and largest bitcoin currency exchange and reach volumes of about a million a day before we had to shut down."
when you find out they did it by themselves, that is a huge difference. like two orders of magnitude FTE's.
it's like, if some guy spearheaded and came up with the whole idea behind the new Mac Pro, in an era of stagnant desktops, the whole mechanics and central idea (with the heat core). This question lets you know this.
a million examples, this is really just one.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#46As a senior guy who's been programming a long time, I honestly don't know what I'd pick in answer to this question. Partly because I've done loads of cool (and no so cool) things over the years and partly because I don't have the best memory in the world. How do you decide which past accomplishment is worthy of a 30 minute conversation? Usually what comes to mind when asked this question are simply the most recent th…
Yeah its very situation dependent. If I get an interview at the small motor sports place near milton keynes (its not Aston Martin -:) )
I would probably use some of the stuff I did on back at my first job working in the mathematical modeling section of a world ranked RnD organization.
If it was big data I would use my experience back in the 80's doing map reduce for British telecom - and that proves i can ship :-)
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#47I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…
Because some people cap at "I managed to code the most lines of code in June, 2006 among my seven colleagues, even though I was just hired on the tenth of the month and didn't know the code yet. That was quite a month." whereas others cap at, "well, I did manage to build the world's first and largest bitcoin currency exchange and reach volumes of about a million a day before we had to shut down." when you find out th…
So this one interview question allows you to make the decision between hiring someone who has only worked in the profession for a month and hiring someone who wrote a whole bitcoin exchange. Faint praise.
The big issue is, what does this style of interviewing do for you with a real-world candidate selection challenge --- say, 3 developers, all similar on paper?
There is no reason the best candidate necessarily has the best story. The story of your "best accomplishment" has as much to do with random chance as it does with capability. This question demands that an interview somehow de-confound the luck element and the skill element.
And to what end? Even if you got a clean reading on this question, somehow equalized between the candidates, I ask again: do you really know a lot more about how the candidate will actually perform on the job? Because that is almost the only question that matters in candidate selection.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#48I don't agree with this sentiment .. I think this is a very shallow approach to evaluating people on the basis of their past accomplishments, and also somewhat presumptuous to consider that they might 'outdo' their past accomplishments just by working for you. Therefore in my opinon the most important interview question to ask is this:
"Do you want to work here?"
.. followed up by:
"Why do you want to work here?"
If the answers to these two questions don't jive with what you need/want as an employer, then there are no further questions to ask.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#49It's all a nice way of saying:
Employer: "How low can I pay you, and how many hours will you work?"
Candidate: "I can't compete with the H1B slaves."
Employer: "Oh, okay. Then let me give you a tricky whiteboard question and reject you based on that, so you don't sue me."
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, if I had to answer "what project did you work on that most changed the life of your customers" it would be my first post-college job where I created a market space that didn't exist before. But, like you, what does that say about the next 15 years of my career? I'm a waaaaay better developer than I was at the end of my first job.
So say exactly that. It sounds like a great answer to me.
Exactly.
It is important we understand the words that we left out of the original article.
The point of the question isn't to get an impressive project. While we, the interviewee would love to say, guidance computer on Voyager or the Ray Tracer used in Toy Story; the point of the question is get to know the candidate and how they operate.