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by ksaun
1154 days ago
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I'm not sure I understand your point/perspective, but maybe it's due to differing assumptions about what constitutes "interview skills." I consider refreshing one's memory about complex systems or challenges that have been experienced and absorbed to be important parts of interview preparation (from your "unintentional" list). That is, "interview skills," in my opinion, includes practice at describing one's experience, and doing this well helps the hiring manager correctly assess the candidate's practical on-the-job skills. I feel like I may be misunderstanding the point you are making. |
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I agree that doing these things is "interview skills". That's basically my original point. People spend more and more time practicing "interview skills" rather than practicing what the job actually is. This is the wasted productivity, and it means that every candidate needs to spend more and more time studying tactics to get a job, over spending time actually being good at, or even just doing, their job. If you urge all applicants to get better at interviewing, that's not going to make it easier to find qualified applicants. It's just going to make more people seem like good applicants, since bad applicants can also improve their ability to interview.
The more "interview skills" we require people to have, the more detached interviews become from actual jobs, which advantages people who practice "interview skills", which makes it harder for companies to decern good candidates from bad (since one doesn't need to be a qualified candidate to be charismatic or lie). It's at this stage that companies seem to come to the conclusion that the solution is to focus even more on "interview skills", even though it's those "interview skills" that start the chain reaction in the first place.
Back to your example interview question. After passing an interview, does one ever need to frequently spend time refreshing one's memory about complex system's they worked on in the past (and are no longer working on), on a moments notice, without references, and tell people stories about them? If so, I would yield it's probably an excellent interview question. Even without that caveat, it's probably still a good question. My main goal with that part of my comment was to point out that questions have unintended failure modes that, in my experience, tons of people aren't aware of. If one isn't aware of these failure modes, one will not be aware that they are unintentionally skipping over potentially good candidates.