[simonholroyd]

Good candidates should prepare for interviews. Interviews typically require that a candidates are able to reflect on previous successes and failures and provide insights so a hiring team can review their candidacy. Failure to do show shows either:

1. lack of understanding of professional working environments (ie. interview structure)

2. lack of preparation for the interview

3. lack of ability for self-reflection

4. actual lack of any experience with which to construct even a lame story.

[Iftheshoefits]

Or, failure could show that the candidate has an understanding that how he handled "previous successes" and "previous failures" is almost certainly irrelevant to the job being applied for. Unless the new company's line of business is substantially similar to the previous company's, a candidate's experiences, success, failures, and how he handled them are at best useful as an aggregate measure of "stuff he's done." When the line of business is substantially similar, the candidate's prior experience at the similar company is only marginally more applicable, because actual differences in the internal operations figure more prominently. It doesn't indicate, necessarily, any thing at all about his personality, how he will do his job with the new company, or really anything else other than that "candidate has worked places."

Human interactions are complicated, stochastic things and I can't help but think that interview processes that include "describe a success/describe a failure" in order to "get a feel" for the person are a hackneyed attempt to distill these complicated things into overly simplistic checklists and scores.