Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
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Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#2Agree 100%. Too much focus on happening to have encountered the particular skills you ask about in the technical grilling. Rather, hire smart people you'd like to work with (and who have demonstrated a capacity for learning).
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#3I sort of like the sentiment but this sort of interview, at least for me, would feel a bit too personal. Look I'm not your friend so let's not pretend that's what this or you just really want to get to know me. No. You just want to know if I can do the job so just get me to do a task which meaningfully reflects what I'd be doing day-to-day then ask me questions about it.
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#4This sounds like a cool idea, but I've seen where hiring for personality often leads towards hiring discrimination. I think it's more likely to reinforce the lack of diversity in tech than to combat it as people unlike the interviewer tend to be viewed less favorably and would be less likely to be viewed as a person who could pick up the specific knowledge he/she doesn't already know.
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#5Agree 100%. Too much focus on happening to have encountered the particular skills you ask about in the technical grilling. Rather, hire smart people you'd like to work with (and who have demonstrated a capacity for learning).
The problem with that strategy is that all too often, "smart people you'd like to work with" equates to male, white, upper-middle-class, with a fondness for beer.
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#6Agree 100%. Too much focus on happening to have encountered the particular skills you ask about in the technical grilling. Rather, hire smart people you'd like to work with (and who have demonstrated a capacity for learning).
The problem with that strategy is that all too often, "smart people you'd like to work with" equates to male, white, upper-middle-class, with a fondness for beer.
Probably depends on the interviewer.
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#7So many people have these really bizarre and outdated (by not just years but centuries) notions about how knowledge work gets done. They want to squish it into the model of factory work, but it just doesn't work that way. Knowledge work is typically creative, the right model is an art studio, a movie set, or a band. This makes hiring very difficult, which is exacerbated by the fact that engineers are innately bad at hiring other engineers without a lot of training or carefully focused self-improvement.
Knowledge workers aren't cogs, they're part of a team. You shouldn't expect that you can easily find replacement people with exactly the same skillset and propensity as someone else to make up the gap that an absence makes in a team. Nor should you expect that the proper way to grow a team is by cloning the skills of some other existing member of the team. A team works cooperatively, and their skills, talents, experience play off one another to gel together into some sort of mechanism that is capable of doing stuff. But if you change the parts, you get a different team that does different stuff, or maybe doesn't even work at all. One of the big factors here is that if you think you can replace one person with just another person you're often wrong. Best case scenario you end up with something else (maybe better), worst case scenario is you can't replace the unique factors that made the previous person successful in that role (and realistically you need a team with a different breakdown of skills, different mechanisms of interconnectedness, etc. in order to have something functional).
The band analogy really helps here a lot. Realistically when you change members of a team you don't end up with something like Steve Perry stepping into the lead singer role of Journey. What you end up with is something more like Fleetwood Mac being transformed by merging with Buckingham Nicks or Genesis changing after Peter Gabriel left. You end up with a very different thing doing very different stuff. And the higher caliber the people the bigger the difference is.
What knowledge workers actually do day to day and what it says on their job description they do are often very different things, and you ignore that at your peril. Hiring based on the idea that knowledge workers are automatons with certain functionality modules installed is one of the easiest and most common ways to completely sabotage productivity and execution.
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#8I sort of like the sentiment but this sort of interview, at least for me, would feel a bit too personal. Look I'm not your friend so let's not pretend that's what this or you just really want to get to know me. No. You just want to know if I can do the job so just get me to do a task which meaningfully reflects what I'd be doing day-to-day then ask me questions about it.
Do you not try to be friends with your colleagues?
You spend about a third of your life at work, it seems to me that you should try to make it as enjoyable as possible.
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#9I sort of like the sentiment but this sort of interview, at least for me, would feel a bit too personal. Look I'm not your friend so let's not pretend that's what this or you just really want to get to know me. No. You just want to know if I can do the job so just get me to do a task which meaningfully reflects what I'd be doing day-to-day then ask me questions about it.
Do you not try to be friends with your colleagues? You spend about a third of your life at work, it seems to me that you should try to make it as enjoyable as possible.
Being friends with colleagues can lead to less enjoyable work situations, not to mention less focused work.
Being friendly should suffice, not all of us want to get too personal with the same people we might need to have professional arguments with.
We're all different.
Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews
#10Agree 100%. Too much focus on happening to have encountered the particular skills you ask about in the technical grilling. Rather, hire smart people you'd like to work with (and who have demonstrated a capacity for learning).
The problem with that strategy is that all too often, "smart people you'd like to work with" equates to male, white, upper-middle-class, with a fondness for beer.
So all interviewers are male, white upper-middle-class with a fondness for beer?
Good to know.