[sublinear]

Interviews are more of an art than a science. I try to keep it conversational and open-ended.

If I sense something amiss, my opening is simply for them to tell me about themselves with no further context or direction.

Normal candidates will start asking me what I want to know as they trickle out the things they're most proud of. They'll ramble for a bit and then eventually I will pull on some threads they gave to get the ball rolling.

Bad candidates will either freeze, start reading their resume to me, not talk about work, or just start saying nonsense. Maybe all of the above. I give an extra shot to those who freeze by giving them a nudge, but I wrap it up immediately with the rest.

[kfor]

Do you worry that you risk introducing bias into your interview process with this sort of unstructured questioning? There is quite a bit of research [1] demonstrating that structured and standardized interviews across candidates are one of the most crucial ways of preventing various types of bias, conscious or not.

[1] Here's a useful summary article: https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-intervie...

[vasco]

Good interviewers have the candidate feel like it's open ended by asking open ended questions that still tick the boxes they need to tick. Meaning the interviewer has a structure and a series of things to make sure to get information about, but to a casual listener of 3 different interviews, they might not even be able to piece out what those questions are, because you can make it fully contextual to the person.

With a bit of luck and skill you can get through a whole interview and take all your notes and the candidate doesn't even feel when you switch from one question to the other. Start open ended, make sure you can tick the boxes you have to tick from your questionnaire and dig in the threads you need to dig. Some people aren't good at doing this and they need to be more led by the interviewer, in those cases you can easily "adjust down" and be more explicit, but this way you get the best of both worlds.

Standardized notes with specific topics as well as the opportunity for people to tell you about what _they_ think was interesting about those situations, which is hard to predict from just a questionnaire.

[michaelt]

You wouldn't want the entire interview to be unstructured, but because every candidate is different, I think it's more than fair to give people an opportunity to highlight their own strongest areas.

I wouldn't want to overlook a great candidate because I omitted to ask whether they invented UDP, or whatever.

[cutemonster]

Talking about their strongest areas or inventions can be part of a structured interview.

[sublinear]

Not unless you ask. Resumes omit many things due to length constraints, and the candidate might prioritize recent work over quality work if it's too long ago.

Legacy skills are important too, but those details don't always make the cut in both the resume and job description.

[cutemonster]

> Not unless you ask

Yes well that's what the interviewer is doing: asking things,

And the interviewer can have a question in their list: Ask job applicant about their strongest skills? (And maybe inform the applicant beforehand if they want to think about what to say)

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Doesn't that depend on what they're trying to accomplish?

If one is trying to determine the top-performing candidate (for the position being hired for), does bias actually interfere with that?

Especially considering the sorts of bias that are likely to be introduced (those adjacent to personality preferences), those who don't fit well are likely to poorly influence coworkers to a degree that negatively impacts total performance of a team.

[MattPalmer1086]

Is the definition of a bad candidate simply someone who doesn't interview well?

Just wondering if you have any data that supports the idea that those people would not perform well in a role, or just that it's very hard to tell anything about them in an interview!

[manquer]

Effective communication and collaborating with a team is important competency to almost every role, while a few of the candidates may have technical skills and it was hard to identify in the interview, if they severely lack basic communication skills then it is likely they will not succeed in the job.

The exceptions are when the role requires and candidate has extraordinary (i.e. 10x) skills then most other typical requirements such as communication or behavior can be relaxed, such roles are not common and handling ( and interviewing) rockstars as a manager is special skill of its own.

[sublinear]

"Interviewing well" isn't just a matter of getting along with me. I pick resumes similar enough to what we already do (as most places do). If you can describe the day-to-day of what we do without much prompting that's a very strong signal you're a good fit. You don't need data for this beyond the experience of making a few bad hires and lots of good hires.

Like I said, the interviewing process is not much of a science. I'm nowhere close to the only person who does this. I've been on the candidate side of the interview process too you know.

[MattPalmer1086]

Sure, just curious. Interviewing well is hard, on both sides of the process.

At the end of the day you have to make a decision and if someone doesn't make it easy for you to hire them, then they don't get the job mostly.

I have been overridden a couple of times and candidates were hired that I thought were poor. In both cases I was right about their weaknesses, but in one case they had strengths I did not acknowledge and they were excellent. The other one was a disaster!

[cmh89]

> If you can describe the day-to-day of what we do without much prompting that's a very strong signal you're a good fit

Why not just ask that then? "Tell me about yourself" is just a bad open-ended question. I've been in enough interviews to anticipate generic bad questions like that or "what's your biggest weakness" style questions, but not everyone has.

Hiring managers frequently can't differentiate between people who are knowledgeable and people who are just good at interviewing. I've coached many of my peers and done lots of coaching with success because at the end of the day, interviews are about taking advantage of the information asymmetry between your actual experience and what the hiring manager can actually know.

[sublinear]

> Why not just ask that then?

Because that's not all I want to know. I want to see the first things that surface in their mind and what they enjoy talking about. It's not a trick question and the only wrong answers are very clearly wrong sometimes even to those who don't work in software.

> Hiring managers frequently can't differentiate between people who are knowledgeable and people who are just good at interviewing.

I don't agree with this at all. We don't have "hiring managers". That's the problem right there. What the hell are they going to know about the position if they're not in it?

The developers have always done the interviewing of candidates at every place I've worked. We know exactly what to ask and what technical answers actually indicate they can get the job done. It's not hard to know what to ask when you actually do the job you're interviewing someone about.

[cmh89]

>I want to see the first things that surface in their mind and what they enjoy talking about. I

How does that question get to that? I'd guess most of them are thinking 'why did I get asked such a vague question and how should I answer it. Do they want me to talk about my personal life, or maybe they have some weird confirmation bias. If they wanted me to talk about my work life, they'd probably ask right? What a weird question'.

>I don't agree with this at all. We don't have "hiring managers". That's the problem right there. What the hell are they going to know about the position if they're not in it?

You are the hiring manager if you are a manager who is responsible for hiring someone.

I've worked with a lot of managers and sat on lots of hiring panels. Managers who think they are going to play some mind game to get a purer view of someone are always bad interviewers who place huge amounts of stock in some arbitrary reaction to their mind game.

[l33t233372]

I’m wondering how differentiate:

> “ start reading their resume to me […] or just start saying nonsense”

From:

> “ trickle out the things they're most proud of. They'll ramble for a bit”

Generally rambling and nonsense are similar, and resumes contain trickles of things that people are most proud of.

[sublinear]

"Reading their resume" means not giving me more info beyond what's literally in their resume.

Example: "Oh well I've worked with React before. It was an interesting project. It was for an ecommerce project. (endless silence after)"

"Start saying nonsense" means they're just making things up.

Example: "So yeah I've used git before. It's a cool programming language. It reminds me of C. I love programming."

[Aeolun]

I’m always mildly confused by the question. Makes me wonder if you read my resume.

Still, I ask the question in more or less the same way during interviews. How people respond is more interesting than what they respond with.

[sublinear]

If you're interviewing with me I definitely read the resume. Not all places are the same though.

Occasional mild confusion in a good candidate is worth stumping the bad ones often. I do feel slightly bad, and I admit it's slightly rude, but it works and the interview process is what it is.

By the end of the interview, the rough start is hopefully forgotten. If you ever get this question upfront again hopefully you understand why and roll with it.

[crystaln]

Please stop doing this. You’re making judgements on candidates for social skills that most likely have nothing to do with their job.

Sounds like you’re interviewing for a date or a roommate, not an employee.

[9dev]

I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. (Not GP, but acting the same) I'm looking for candidates I actually want to work with. That includes people with social skills sophisticated enough to freely talk about their prior work.

If a candidate can't do that, they are not a good fit for my company.

[canadianwriter]

I guess it depends on the position - if you have to work with people as a regular part of your position, social skills would be a part of the role, an important one at that.

[callalex]

Sheesh, I’m glad you’ve never interviewed me. What an odd trap to set.

[groestl]

What trap?