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by ThrowAway123543 3306 days ago
Have you done many interviews? The solution to "people lie sometimes" is not to rely on correlation-to-a-correlation Ouija board bullshit, it's to delve and ask for more detail until you're satisfied the person isn't bullshitting. I want to know if candidates are smart and hard-working; I don't ask them "Are you smart and hard-working", and I don't ask them what their spouse does for a living based on some cockamamie theory about how that relates to anything. I ask them to describe a project they worked on and their role in it and how it went, and I keep asking supporting questions and follow-ups until I'm pretty sure I know whether I want to hire them or not.

Candidates need to do the same thing: delve, ask for details, and keep going until they're satisfied that they know whether this is a job they want. I think those questions I posted are a good way to do that. If OP asks those questions, and then asks follow-ups, until she's pretty well convinced that this is/isn't someone she wants to work for, my suspicion is she'll very likely be right.

1 comments

Again, I don't disagree with you. I will never be in a situation like the OP is asking for, because I'm male and so "how will my manager treat women?" is not a question that is professionally relevant to me. When I do interview employers, my procedure is largely as you suggest, except focused on engineering practices, capital structure, runway, and the specific role I'll be fulfilling in the company.

But I'll point out that what you're actually building, with the procedure you suggest, is a mental model of how a candidate is likely to perform in a role, given the information that you can find out about them. It is still a model, and you make a number of assumptions in it (notably, that past performance may predict future results, and that a candidate's description of how they handled a project is actually how they handled it, and that information about how they handled it is more predictive than asking them to do a shortened project in front of you). Some of those assumptions I'd agree with, some of them I wouldn't. My point is that these two questions are ones that a couple different women I know have found predictive of how a manager will treat them, and that these women are fairly high-up in their careers and generally satisfied with them. They are not necessarily the questions I would use, but because I will never be in the situation that they or the OP is in, they are probably a lot more relevant to the OP's situation than any mental models I use.