[Sajarin]

Some of the claims here feel like leaps of intuition. You claim companies don't but many companies, especially ones that are not in the tech industry, do employ personality quizzes in their screening process. Even tech companies, now that I think about it, employ a personality test in the form of a "cultural" interview. I am dubious on how helpful they are but they highlight the real issue which is that there simply isn't enough signal during the interview process.

Every hiring process boils down to a risk mitigation problem and the goal is to get enough positive (or negative) signal to make a hiring decision. If that's the case, making the interview an "adversarial" process seems like an awful idea. As you pointed out, why would a candidate share information that puts them in a bad light? It creates an environment where it is hard to extract meaningful signal.

Furthermore, if there's no free lunch from analyzing personality, then why is it worth thinking about in this way? Perhaps it is more critical and effective to verify their skills and experience with the limited interview time and rely on references to validate their work habits.

[kayo_20211030]

I think that "cultural" interviews are underrated as a distinguisher; just because they seem so subjective. However, if the correct, non-domain specific, person conducts the interview, it can be a great source of information. At the most basic level, it assesses whether the candidate is a complete nut, or not; it assesses whether that individual, outside of any skills considerations, can work with others in the organization, either as a follower, peer, or leader. A competent person doing these types of interviews is essentially conducting an unstructured, informal, personality assessment and producing some very valuable insights to others later in the process. We ought not discount intuition, or "feel". A genuinely insightful person conducting a good screening interview may be the most valuable person in your hiring organization.

[Sajarin]

Great caveat, not trying to throw away the baby with the bathwater when it comes to cultural interviews or even personality based assessments. It can be done well. My personal take (which I admit is equally a leap of intuition) is that there are probably more cost-effective ways to gain more signal. Anecdotally for instance, I'm seeing an increase in pair-coding/work-along type interviews where both sides get an intuitive sense of the other's depth of technical expertise as well as a taste of what it's like to work with each other.

[vaishnav92]

Seems like you either misinterpreted or I didn't communicate as well as I should have. I'm not arguing for making interviews "adversarial" in spirit (or even in substance). I'm saying that interviews are implicitly adversarial games, inw hich the recruiter is trying to (ideally) maximize the chance of obtaining relevant signals and the interviewee isn't always aligned with that goal. Often, interviewees want jobs even if they're not a "great fit". Which is why I'm arguing for in fact a less adversarial conversation, in which you infer negatives from other positive information interviewees will excitedly share.

[throwway120385]

It's never going to not be a negotiation. All you're doing is limiting your options by arguing from personality typology. What you should be doing is asking behavioral questions and digging in on the responses you get. You'll get better information about what a candidate will do and how they reason through interpersonal problems than asking them questions like "which would you prefer on your time off -- going to a party with a lot of people, or spending time inside reading a book?" Questions like that which appear on many personality inventories are so abstract as to be almost meaningless.

Also you need to understand that if you start personality testing people you will never get any truthful information from your candidates. They do this kind of testing for many retail sales roles and every sales associate you'll ever meet knows exactly how to answer every question to maximize extraversion and minimize undesirable traits. It quickly stops being a test of whether you have what it takes, unless your intent is to test whether people are deeply aware of how fake personality testing is and exactly how to game the system to get past it.

[Sajarin]

Inferring negatives from positive information sharing seems pretty adversarial to me, both in spirit and in substance.

My comment was to question why the interview should be framed as something implicity adversarial to begin with. And why it's probably better to use something like references to validate what it would be like to work with someone rather than rely on our own dubious judgement or the positively biased judgement of the candidate's.