Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 410 posts

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#171

Post by johan_larson »

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.

Yes, I don't think their process is magic. Google gets a good workforce because they are generous and prestigious, which means a lot of good people apply there. And Google is willing to say no to a lot of people in their search for good people. They reject a lot of candidates who would probably have worked out just fine.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#172

Post by hobls »

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…

It's also worth noting that those students are probably very inexperienced interviewers.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#173

Post by mooreds »

bnegreve wrote: post #163
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…

Of course we should be more critical, the methodology here is far from perfect. But right now, people have much faith in interviewing, and this research suggests that this faith may not be justified. As you mentioned, this is not the only research that reaches this conclusion. There is also the work by Daniel Kahneman[1] which I find pretty rigorous and draw the same conclusions about interviewing. So obviously, the…

> ok, this is interesting, where is it mentioned

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-sc... among other places

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#174

Post by mooreds »

johan_larson wrote: post #171
throwaway71958 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I don't think their process is magic. Google gets a good workforce because they are generous and prestigious, which means a lot of good people apply there. And Google is willing to say no to a lot of people in their search for good people. They reject a lot of candidates who would probably have worked out just fine.

Or, put another way, they choose to accept a high rate of false negatives to avoid false positives.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#175

Post by johan_larson »

orless wrote: post #117
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…

Google is definitely not a benchmark for interviews. From what I experienced, they must have a huge rate on false negatives. You can only afford this if you're Google (or that level).

Yup, it was pretty common knowledge at Google that if you took all the engineers and ran them through the interview process again, it would have rejected most of them.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#176

Post by vacri »

tptacek wrote: post #40

Take a second to read about the experiments this author conducted. They included: Dummy candidates mixed in with the interview flow that gave randomized answers to questions (interviews were structured to somewhat blind this process), and interviewers lost no confidence from those interviews. Interviewers, when told about the ruse, were then asked to rank between no interview, randomized interview, and honest intervi…

The interview is also selecting for a single thing - GPA. You can be an utter arsehole and have a high GPA. You can have personal hygiene that stinks out any room you're in and have a high GPA. Basically, you can be completely impossible to work with and have a high GPA. The research they've done is suspect, because they weren't interviewing for an ongoing role, but for a single KPI.

Similarly, the people doing the prediction were other students rather than teachers who know better what to look for. The research would better fit HR people hiring for roles they know nothing about than experienced team members hiring for roles similar to what they do.

The research results are massively over-applied, and in no way whatsoever is sufficient to use the term "utter uselessness of X". Unsurprising, given it is research by a 'professor of marketing'.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#177

Post by peterwwillis »

No interview will tell you the future, so to my mind, the only thing the interview can tell you immediately is how much someone knows and whether their personality will mesh with the company's culture.

In order to ascertain this, I propose job-hiring hackathons. Have the company hold a mini-hackathon, once every 2 weeks or once a month, where all job applicants must show up and work on projects (corporate employees' presence can be optional). Just watch them complete the projects and hire the best candidates.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#178

Post by bitL »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #147
creatine_lizard wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could the performance of the lottery winners have been "environmental"? That is, they benefited from being surrounded by competent people (which was, in turn, guaranteed by those people having gone through the interview process) and "leveled up" due to that? In other words, maybe as long as you let in a small number (but only a small number) of non-performers, you're fine (which is bound to happen anyway - I'm sure t…

Yes. Getting hired by Google is only part of the deal. Actually _succeeding_ when you're already there is much more difficult. It's a high pressure environment with a lot of very smart overachievers. Because of this it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and people who don't measure up also don't feel welcome, as it were. Since performance reviews are largely derived from peer feedback, hiring mistakes tend to be s…

They are no longer amongst top choices for top people. Alphabet might be, Google isn't. That's why they are dumbing down their interviews in the past 8 years and repelling even more top people that want to change the world and not be just another cog in the machine.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#179

Post by hobls »

dlandis wrote: post #78
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…

> I actually don't think that's the most common thing we give a "no hire" for. Can you cite any of the more common things you give no hires for?

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 fail on that one.

- Not being able to give context about the "why" of what you worked on, what other options you considered, etc.

- Not thinking about the end user; "I used this technology because it sounded cool" instead of "I wanted this result for my customers." Tell us about the situation and why you made the right or wrong choices.

- Interrupting the interviewer and not asking questions. This is a weird one. We want you to do well, so sometimes if you're going down the wrong path we'll try to help. I've had candidates talk over me and just barge ahead down a totally incorrect path. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Obviously most weaknesses can be overlooked if there are serious strengths.

I've done a lot of interviewing, happy to answer questions.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#180

Post by vacri »

threatofrain wrote: post #16
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…

And yet unstructured interviewing basically works and the world keeps spinning. If 'random' truly was a better result (as the article suggests), then in a hiring round for a programmer last year, we might have discarded our candidate that won and is awesome for the one that couldn't conceptually 'get' FizzBuzz.

Or put another way: if 'random' was better than 'unstructured', you'd never have a round of hiring where there were no unsuitable candidates - one will have been chosen.

Post reply on HN