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Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

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Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#21

Post by gcb0 »

One thing i always ask on that chat before the trivia questions, is what tech news sites the candidate read. And where he usually goes to were he wants to know the correct argument order of a function he does not use too often.

That usually gives me a better grasp of how he will solve a real world problem than the trivia questions.

But when hiring for teams that need to get specific work done fast, i do not underestimate the value of the trivia questions as it will show me the ramp up time to get that work done. Of course i apply that on top of the other means to get an idea if the candidate is a good fit overall.

There is no silver bullet for hiring.

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#22

Post by wisty »

asgard1024 wrote: post #16
forktheif wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have mandatory voting with a "none of the above" option on the ballot.

And the point of such a system is? To spend more money and time of everyone?

In Australia, citizens have a duty to pay taxes, defend their country (if required to do so), serve on a jury (if their name is drawn), and vote. That's the cost of living in a democracy.

If voting was compulsory, only lunatics would vote. I wouldn't voluntarily pay taxes, sign up to fight a war, or serve on a jury either - I'm not crazy; but I think it's important that these things get done.

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#23

Post by WhitneyLand »

How about just ditching contrived interview questions because companies have no good science or data to establish the correlation with hiring the best people?

It seems past performance would be more reliable. What have you created and what was your role in it? Can you articulate your passion for the problems we are solving? Can you show that your colleagues respected your work and benefited from collaborating with you?

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#24

Post by lmkg »

I think part of this conditioning from taking tests in school. For twelve or more years of your life, in any situation where you are asked to demonstrate your knowledge, a null response is treated in the same negative fashion as an incorrect response, and getting outside help is disallowed. No wonder we try and guess, we've literally been trained for years that it's the best approach! Compounding that, an interview is the one situation in "the real world" that most resembles a testing situation from grade school, which will bring back all those bad habits.

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#25

Post by patrickyeon »

Some commenters, and possibly the author, want this advice to extend to job interviews, but the reason an interviewer is pushing you to answer a question isn't that they want you to be right or wrong. A good interviewer wants to get a look into how you think and how you approach a problem.

An even better interviewer will make that clear, by telling you "there's no trick here", "I don't know the answer myself, let's see what we can figure out", or "there's no one right answer, I just want to know what you can see here". A trick I've employed a fair bit lately to get a reserved interviewee to start working with a question is "What is the worst solution we could provide to attack this problem?" I'll even possibly go as far as offering my own horrible solution, and asking them where we fo to improve on this.

And I do mean worst. I haven't met a candidate yet who can't at least throw out ideas on how to improve my horrible solutions, and at that point the ball is rolling.

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#26

Post by m0th87 »

A good interview question should give space for exploration - it shouldn't involve esoteric questions or things that are easily google-able. Good interview questions will give you insight into the candidate's thought process, not what they've memorized beyond fundamentals. So the results of this study seem irrelevant.

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#28

Post by asgard1024 »

anonymfus wrote: post #18
asgard1024 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the point of such a system is? To spend more money and time of everyone?

When "none of the above" wins, it usually means new elections where all old candidates are banned or some other procedure to resolve complete distrust to current politicians.

But then the original point stands. Such a system doesn't fully allow you to express legitimate feeling that you don't know. If majority expresses "I don't know", it doesn't suddenly mean "I don't trust old guard" vote. That's misinterpretation of the voting result.

Also, you can express "I don't trust old guard" in the non-mandatory voting system as well. Just vote for the new candidate. So it's actually simpler system than yours and more expressive.

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#29

Post by asgard1024 »

wisty wrote: post #22
asgard1024 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the point of such a system is? To spend more money and time of everyone?

In Australia, citizens have a duty to pay taxes, defend their country (if required to do so), serve on a jury (if their name is drawn), and vote. That's the cost of living in a democracy. If voting was compulsory, only lunatics would vote. I wouldn't voluntarily pay taxes, sign up to fight a war, or serve on a jury either - I'm not crazy; but I think it's important that these things get done.

Hm, thinking about it, maybe I was wrong. Maybe you can actually express "I don't care" vote in the mandatory voting system as well, by voting for a randomly selected candidate (and these contribution will average out to same votes for all candidates). But it's rather impractical compared to simple non-mandatory voting.

Re: Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

#30

Post by dragonwriter »

asgard1024 wrote: post #8

I have long suspected this to be true. That's my argument against mandatory voting, because if people can choose not to vote, they can express they don't know and hopefully leave the result on people who feel they do know. However, it's a bit unclear how this ties together with Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy). The D-K effect would suggest that if you allow people to express…

> I have long suspected this to be true. That's my argument against mandatory voting, because if people can choose not to vote, they can express they don't know and hopefully leave the result on people who feel they do know.

Mandatory voting can include "I don't know" (and, in fact, it naturally falls out in a simple way from any use of preference ballots with a tallying system that accounts for ties and treats all unranked candidates as tied for the position immediately below all explicitly-ranked candidates.)

EDIT: Further, such a system would naturally handle the more common case where people do have known preferences, but they aren't accurately represented either as a forced preference ranking of all candidates (as with preference ballots that reject ties), or a unique most-preferred status for one candidate (as is the case with the "bullet" ballots typically used in FPTP elections.)

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