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by blincoln
974 days ago
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I like your "tell me about a time when" approach,[1] and I've used it successfully in the past, but I've never seen a good way to formalize it. Have you ever been able to delegate that responsibility to a team of other people and get results more or less consistent with what would have happened if you'd conducted all of the interviews? My current opinion is that while it's effective, it means there's a significant bottleneck (sometimes a single person) for the hiring pipeline. i.e. you still need at least one earlier tier of interview to winnow the candidates down to a volume that's manageable for the bottleneck, and the earlier tier needs to be something more standardized that can be delegated to a larger group of people. i.e. "can this person explain common technical details A, B, and C of work in this department well enough to demonstrate solid understanding?" [1] I read years ago that border guards in some countries use a similar technique, because if someone is being deceptive, it's unlikely they can handle a random walk to an arbitrary depth of detail. |
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It’s based on the Leadership Principles at Amazon. Not that Amazon is a great place to work in practice (I just got Anazoned two months ago).
But they talk good game.
https://managementconsulted.com/amazon-leadership-principles...
I have a sticky note of the LPs I care about. A lot of times when I just ask a generic “tell me about yourself” question, they will talk about their experience and I can just ask them more details around their project that let’s me get the information I want.
Other times, I have to specifically pull out my questions. For instance, I really care about having someone who is willing to speak up in meetings and is willing to express their opinions and even someone who is willing to tell me they think I’m wrong. I speak very authoritatively about my areas of expertise. But I always try to emphasize “strong opinions weakly held”.
In LPs terms it’s called “Have backbone disagree and commit”.
My favorite question for that is “Say I’m your manager and you are in the meeting with me , the CTO and other managers and we come up with an idea that you think is completely stupid. What would you do?”
And that starts an entire conversation. I’ve given a thumbs down to people who give me an answer that I don’t think is a fit for what I’m looking for.
I love for people to give me feedback and I hire people who help my team fill in technical gaps. I need people to speak up