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How I build and run behavioral interviews

benkuhn.net

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Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#21

Post by volkk »

neilv wrote: post #11

> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example…

problem with hypotheticals is most people can give an ideal way to handle a situation, but when the actual scenario presents itself, they deal with it in a non ideal way. I'd like to find out what that non-ideal way is and if the delta is small enough, then that person meets the bar. i can also add supplementary questions if i didn't get enough of a signal, such as the one you presented (i.e what do you think you could have done better)

should add that the more you dig, the better you can identify where truth/embellishments lay. a reaaaaally good liar is rare and you can somewhat tell across differing kinds of quetsions where the red flags are. just need to create a robust system of questioning. this all sounds dystopian as i write it, but unfortunately that is the nature of interviewing

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#22

Post by ryandrake »

neilv wrote: post #11

> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example…

Both yours and the author's suggestions are great, will have to give em a try.

So many candidates torpedo their own interview by doing that "Word Salad" dump when you ask them a question. It's like they have a bunch of unstructured responses prepared for any topic, and if you mention one of those topics in your question, they just unload the dump truck full of words and ramble until you tell them to stop talking. Always looking for techniques to steer candidates away from this behavior which sadly is happening more and more.

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#23

Post by fifilura »

neilv wrote: post #11

> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example…

"Say you have a situation like X; how would you approach it?"

This is the opposite to a behavioral question, as given by the context.

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#24

Post by JohnFen »

ryandrake wrote: post #22
neilv wrote: post #11

> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example…

Both yours and the author's suggestions are great, will have to give em a try. So many candidates torpedo their own interview by doing that "Word Salad" dump when you ask them a question. It's like they have a bunch of unstructured responses prepared for any topic, and if you mention one of those topics in your question, they just unload the dump truck full of words and ramble until you tell them to stop talking. Alw…

That behavior is the result of nervousness and being in the stressful and unpleasant situation of having to do interviews at all. I'm not sure there's a lot that can be done to reduce it, honestly.

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#25

Post by neilv »

ryandrake wrote: post #22
neilv wrote: post #11

> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example…

Both yours and the author's suggestions are great, will have to give em a try. So many candidates torpedo their own interview by doing that "Word Salad" dump when you ask them a question. It's like they have a bunch of unstructured responses prepared for any topic, and if you mention one of those topics in your question, they just unload the dump truck full of words and ramble until you tell them to stop talking. Alw…

That Word Salad dump sounds like something politicians will sometimes do in a media interview. In that case, I guess they want to project an image of having a response, and also hit voter emotional notes and party talking points.

In job interviews, I guess part of the problem could be that we've institutionalized "interview prep" rituals now, and people train for the rituals, including things like the "correct" answers to behavioral questions, and even the right keywords to hit.

So, people not being confident of the answer they're trying to get correct might kinda spam the Word Salad of keywords, either as panicked flailing when they think they should be talking, or because it's a conscious last-resort tactic (like the standardized test prep classes that teach you what to do when you don't know the answer but want to maximize your score anyway).

One time I remember going kinda Word Salad myself, was in a non-interview meeting, when I was escalating a serious issue through official channels, a long time ago. The official in the meeting was (unbeknownst to me, when I was going to a ton of work to get this meeting) secretly misaligned with their ostensible role, visibly very hostile to me from the start, and misunderstanding something. There was insufficient bandwidth to keep up with correcting them, and I realized that the situation had just taken a very bad turn... so I started desperately using rapid vague hand-waving generality high-level summaries. Maybe this Word Salad-ish instance has some overlap with some job interview Word Salads -- it's not necessarily always that the interviewee doesn't know the answer, but maybe the interviewer isn't getting something, or is asking a poor question, or seems negative towards the interviewee?

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#27

Post by dilyevsky »

tines wrote: post #3

> To figure out whether they’re real or BSing you, the best way is to get them to tell you a lot of details about the situation—the more you get them to tell you, the harder it will be to BS all the details. This is exactly the feature that allows people to distinguish a genuine recording from a faked one in Iain Banks' sci-fi series "The Culture"---it's impossible to fake a recording taken by a (machine) Mind becaus…

My personal experience has been that people dramatically underestimate how easy it is to bs and simultaneously overestimating their ability to tell if someone is bs’ing vs just being nervous/forgetful. Which leads to some hilariously poor outcomes…

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#28

Post by throwaway98797 »

neilv wrote: post #11

> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example…

> Say you have a situation like X; how would you approach it

everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face

that’s why you ask what happened historically vs. what you would do

if you ask me what will i do if you put a cookie in front of me when im on a diet, id say id turn it down

historically, ive never turned down a cookie

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#29

Post by VincentEvans »

Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I hear a question like “tell me about a time…” - I simply can’t remember. These routine job-related things just don’t stick out in my mind as something to catalog for some future contrived performance and disappear out of my mind together with other uninteresting and unimportant noise, like a name of the clerk at the DMV or what was advertised during the commercial break when I turned on the TV in my hotel room.

I suspect that people who readily jump in with an answer - are the ones you claim to guard against, those who drilled and trained for giving responses to these interviews.

Re: How I build and run behavioral interviews

#30

Post by slyall »

ryandrake wrote: post #22
neilv wrote: post #11

> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example…

Both yours and the author's suggestions are great, will have to give em a try. So many candidates torpedo their own interview by doing that "Word Salad" dump when you ask them a question. It's like they have a bunch of unstructured responses prepared for any topic, and if you mention one of those topics in your question, they just unload the dump truck full of words and ramble until you tell them to stop talking. Alw…

It's happening more and more because interviewers are asking these questions.

They are looking for a nice story where I had conflict with my manager I used STAR to solve it and everybody was happy.

So interviewees have to prepare such stories, remember the details and adjust things to make them look good. Because saying "I don't really remember anything like that happening recently to me" or "We sat in stunned silence for a minute and went on with the meeting" doesn't cut it during interviews.

Maybe managers ask these "personal conflict" questions so much because that is a bigger part of their job. But for ICs (mostly anyway) they are pretty uncommon.

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