Now that Y Combinator has wrapped, we’ve been doing a lot of interviewing at Referly, and my team asked me to share an interview question we’re getting the most mileage out of.
I’ve been doing this question for years and now have seen over two hundred different answers. It’s without a doubt my favorite interview question, because it only take 5 minutes and tells me a remarkable amount about candidates. Even though it’s not a technical question per se, I still give it to every programmer I interview.
Want to hear it first hand? We have open engineering and marketing positions at Referly right now.
Setting Up the Interview Question
Here’s how I set up the question:
When I give this, I usually emphasize each of these points multiple times, with a real stress on their goal: have me understand what’s most important about the topic.
Empathy
As they start explaining, I make sure to have the most vacant look on my face possible. I do not give any “uh huh” or “I see” kind of interjections that underlie most conversations. A star candidate will pick up on this and ask if I understand so far. On the job, these star candidates also are the same kind of people that empathize with customers and think about it in all the work they do once we hire them. Conversely, weaker candidates think that presentation and communication are one in the same, and lose sight of their audience. They end up being the hardest developers to work with just to understand how they’re solving a problem, much less have a constructive argument with them.
Explaining by analogy is a shortcut some of the best candidates use. One example I heard while someone was teaching me the basics of poker was to take advantage of the fact I had played backgammon even though I hadn’t played poker. He talked about how in backgammon all the pieces on the board are exposed information that both players can see, but in poker you have hidden information. These type of explanations go a long way towards quickly communicating an idea with all kinds of implications very succinctly.
Goal Directed and Organized
It is amazing how many candidates will not premeditate before diving into this interview question. Once the trigger happy type candidates get going, they don’t have any kind of bulleted list or outline in their head of what they hope to get across. What’s most incredible about this is how accurately it predicts disorganized and non-goal directed behavior on the job. I’ve been over ruled a few times by my manager on a hiring decision, and this question was a harbinger of things to come. Conversely, the people that think it through and have a few crystal clear points are amongst the best people I’ve worked with. They are not just easy to communicate with, but get results in their work.
Leaders Have the Guts to Say No
For senior positions, I will ask a question early in the 5 minutes that is a complete tangent and has little to do with their goal. A star candidate will politely refuse to go down this rat hole and insist that we stay on topic. This seems unfair since an they’re in an interview and just doing what they’re being asked. In reality though, the very same thing happens often in real work. Even mangers do not innately know what is most important about a topic, and it’s key to have confident people on the team that add focus to conversations.
Stacking Up
Usually only 1 or 2 out of every 10 candidates will do well on all these points. That has held true after giving this interview question over two hundred times.
I take a risk sharing this, because this question has been an amazing tool in picking apart the best talent from rest. I ended up deciding this was worth sharing because it’s been so helpful to me and it’s still really hard to communicate well even when you’ve read this.
Want to try it out? We have open engineering and marketing positions at Referly right now.
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“and loose sight of their audience” – you mean lose
Evident you got absolutely nothing out of this marvelous post.
Unless one of his goals is to portray himself professionally with proper grammar, in which case he would be a star candidate.
You mean with proper orthography, not proper grammar.
Pedancy pwnage!
Whether or not grammar was involved, I’m not sure. Both “loose” and “lose” are verbs, so either formulation is grammatically correct. But I’m fairly certain that “professionally” is a debatable way of describing such a blunt, nitpicking comment.
I would rather hire someone who ignores a lexical slip than someone who ignores a point. At any rate it would be nice for them to have enough basic politeness to suppress their mansplaining dry heaves for long enough to preface a spelling correction with “Great post! By the way….”
Kevin: great post! By the way, my topic would be Ulysses: I think this marks me down as an architectural astronaut. Or at the very least a writer of tortuously obfuscated code: the agenbite of PostScript.
Commenting on a spelling mistake means they didn’t get anything out of this post? Wow. I see it as a courtesy. Not sure how you can jump to that conclusion. Nice grill by the way Darryl. Yikes.
Agreed. A courtesy. Well said. Really great post, thank you. I think I would explain the thrill of being in the zone while slacklining.
No…. !
Somebody has to say no to this rat hole. Move on.
I think your method works for more senior talent, but another part of a managers job is to discover raw talent and develop them. Not everyone can afford a team of mature superstars. SOmetimes a few great ones, and some great young raw talent can produce a lot. So what is your technique for finding an inexperienced person who will develop quickly?
I think you miss his point completely. The question requires no specific knowledge but is about discovering those people with the innate qualities he’s looking for. They can certainly be taught and possibly mastered but he’s looking for people who are just wired this way. You can find elementary school kids who will excel at this question. They didn’t have to be taught, it’s how they are.
The point of this question is to get at the base characteristics Kevin has learned through his career correlate most highly to success for the positions he’s recruiting for and he’s distilled down to one question that gets at the set of them.
“Leaders have the guts to say no”: I don’t see how this is fair. Why should somebody insist to answer the question? There is no more value to answer in the first question than the second. Candidates that are stubborn, find the first one easier or realize the purpose of it will pass.
In real life there is an actual goal and not a weird variant of “Simon Says”.
Because only one of them is tied to a stated goal.
In our company there are all kinds of possible interesting things to work on that are constantly popping up. We need people who can figure out which are the important ones. This is one of the hints at how well someone chooses. I am always looking for better ways to figure this out in interviews, and this is by no means the only sign I look to.
I disagree. By injecting the second question, you’ve stated a new goal. If you’ve ever played the card game “Fluxx”, you know what I mean.
An interviewing candidate is just trying to answer the questions the interviewer brings up. This is not the actual job yet, where they’ll be working on a project that has been declared an official part of the company’s business–it’s just a bunch of questions some guy is asking them. If the guy asking the questions is apparently flighty enough that he can’t stick with an exercise he just set up, why is it the interviewee’s place to rein him in?
I’ve had plenty of projects get sidelined because the very same person who handed the project to me popped up with something else before I was finished. Many times, the original project is never explicitly cancelled, but it turns out to be less important than originally thought, and it never gets finished. If I stubbornly stick to the first project instead of taking the new one, does this make me a better employee in your eyes?
Martin & Somebody I agree with you. An interesting and creative approach, but strikes me as including some armchair psychology and questionable inferences.
To those saying “Kevin is just stating what works from experience, therefore the method is correct” I think you are relying on a propositional fallacy. For the method to work only some elements of it have to work. There could be several elements that don’t work/ have invalid inferences but he wouldn’t know without testing their exclusion.
I think maybe the approach works in the US startup scene, but elsewhere (i.e. in broader industry, in Asia, Europe, Australia etc) the inferences/ assumptions of causal character traits are likely to be completely invalid.
As both an interviewer and an interviewee, I have always experienced the interview environment as having a far bigger power/authority gap than the work environment. There is an expectation I think that the interviewee will follow the interviewer wherever he/she so pleases.
In many cultures declining to “zoom in” to a specific detail (off the main agenda) at the interviewer’s whim would be considered outright stubborn, disrespectful and undesirable. Does that make people of conservative and submissive cultures inherently bad startup employees?
Though there may well be a strong positive correlation for Kevin in his specific context of employee attributes, I think it’s industry application is actually quite narrow, and it’s culturally exclusive.
Nice article.
If any programer can explain better, he can fix his problems also.
One of thing you should also note that how quicker he understands your questions. If he is asking again and again to repeat your question then he has problem with understanding things.
Not to be nitpicky but: “The old expression ‘they are one and the same’ is now often mangled into the roughly phonetic equivalent ‘one in the same.’” Thanks for the informative post, I was actually requested to give a similar explanation during an interview a few years ago.
Wow Kevin, I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re an idiot. Ok so I mean to be rude, but from what I’ve just read it’s justified. It’s a great open ended question, and that is where your wisdom ends. Have you ever considered that an interview situation bares almost no resemblance to how people behave “in the real world”? You don’t think your ability to fake the emotional state of “being lost” weighs on the trigger of an empathetic response? You are assigning arbitrary values in your little game. For example, Gandhi, while a very empathic individual, would probably not make a good corporate sales executive. Also, I would lay odds he would fail your empathy test anyway.)
I could go down the list and rip apart each and every one of your half-witted “post hoc ergo propter hoc” non-sense, but I’m not going to. I’m sure you think you are some sort of genius asking people questions that have nothing to do with the job and seeing how they react, but rest assured, there is someone out there that thinks your a moron. Here’s a crazy idea, try hiring people based on their skills and qualifications and not some game where only you know the rules. You might be surprised about how effective that can be…
You must be kidding. Interview is absolutely the case that demonstrates how people will perform under stress. And most of time our job is stressful. I saw so many people who were slow to answer and code. And guess what – they are slow when it comes to coding and getting things done when hired. Staying to a point is a virtue that only few have regardless seniority. As for jumping to solution then it’s another quite annoying thing that is exactly reflects the reality. So many times one would just start coding without asking a question just to dig unescaple hole under him. This post is quite educating to interviewers who care about whoop they will have to work with.
To see people perform nearly the same test yet under relaxed condition ask about their last or most interesting project. Don’t frame it as a 5 min task. Don’t pretend there is zero previous knowledge. Unless you know everything in this world, there will be things you genuinely don’t know. Inquire about them. If in the end you did learn something than the interviewee explained it. Time her performance but not obviously. I would say that what I suggest does not compete but compliment the synthetic test Kevin devised. Ecxept perhaps not in the same interview. Normally a good candidate has more than one, right?
hear, hear.
I am not kidding. In fact, you have demonstrated my point better than I ever could. Kevin said “It is amazing how many candidates will not premeditate before diving into this interview question.” You said “I saw so many people who were slow to answer and code. And guess what – they are slow when it comes to coding and getting things done when hired.” Looks like you just failed Kevin’s test. Not to worry, it’s not you, it’s the methodology.
This is my whole problem with Kevin’s BS. What happens when you have two arbitrary rules? You get these kinds of arbitrary results…
Btw, not being jerk and stupid is a great skill few of techies possess.
Kevin is sharing a real-world correlation between how people answer this question and those that turn out to be excellent hires. Criticizing the “theory” behind the question overlooks the real-world correlation.
When someone is experienced at something concrete, such as a particular online game, and they give advice to someone wanting to benefit from that experience, the intentions of the advice-giver are rarely misunderstood.
But I’ve noticed that when someone experienced at something less concrete gives advice based on their experience, people often assume that they are sharing some odd “theory,” rather than wisdom gained from experience, and discount it because it can be argued against.
Arguing against something in theory is not the same as trying it in practice to see how it works. And missing out when someone is offering wisdom based on a large real-world dataset showing correlation is a shame.
To try Kevin’s suggestion, which I will, one probably needs to be prepared to do badly first several times. Because it requires skill to interview like this. Unlike asking to reverse a linked list, this trick tests interviewer’s improvisational ability. Acting too.
I have an idea to start learning it as a game, and practice on the already hired employees. I might try it on people in general. Ability to explain is a general skill, and an increasingly useful one at that.
Hmmm… The candidates who passed this test were the only ones who had a chance to demonstrate that they were great hires. Those who didn’t pass the test were not evaluated on whether they are great hires. So, without that control group there is nothing that is proved. It may be correlated. It may not be. There may be wisdom in this approach, there may not be. There may be valid criticism, there may not be.
You, sir, are not effective. It’s overly-specific interviews like these that breed cultures of people who only think your way, which, as anyone in business long enough knows, is a death sentence. You should be looking for people who think differently from you.
It is open end question. How is he planting his ideas into others heads? You don’t make sense.
Thanks for sharing Kevin, it is tough to find interview questions that rigorously test both a candidate’s ability to communicate and display empathy, which are such essential traits on a small and quickly growing team. This is awesome.
Sucks you posted this on HN, it’s not your target audience for this blog post :)
Why not? I am.
I agree with what @noOne says, this is pretty lame, this is really your “favorite interview question”?
What is yours fav?
NoOne broght up that Kevin’s test is not comprehensive, only testing performance under stress. That is a fair point. Yet, it does not negate the premise that you do want to test performance under stress as well.
I guess such a test is favorite because ability to communicate is common between roles in a company. Not specific to hackers. Or managers. Or sales.
While I like your approach, I would tweak it a little to my own perspective (of-course). I like the outside thinking style. I think thoughts like this promote progression, even if its not perfect. On a side note, I learned a bit from reading the comments too. How people talk to each other is a grand persepective on their own character. How anyone in business leadership thinks communicating with a word like “idiot” and/or using general insulting contex is an effective (or proper for that matter) manner of feedback is beyond me. How can you know better than the article when you can’t articulate yourself properly on a simple blog post comment stream? You show your pitfals in simple comments let alone what it’s like to work under you (if you’re a leader at all).
Oh, so true about comments reflecting a character.
Ok I should probably throw in my 2 cents:
Joel Berman is spot on: “I think your method works for more senior talent, but another part of a managers job is to discover raw talent and develop them.”
No One’s mention of “post hoc ergo propter hoc non-sense” is a bit extreme, but I do agree to some extent. Of course, I think you already agree to some extent as well that ‘”it’s a great open ended question, and that is where [its predictive power is limited for a given class of job function]” :)
You’d probably want to use this as a comparison point against the candidate’s responses to other questions. For example, say he (it’s probably a he, women are on average more empathetic than men) doesn’t detect your blank face and goes on a tangent. Ok, so you test him from another angle – pair program with me and help me solve this problem. He might display AMAZING empathy for your problems there. Who knows?
Anyways the point is triangulation. If someone fails both this question, and a question that attacks this from another angle, yeah that’s a warning sign…
@No One: why so hostile? he is just explaining what works for him. I’m assuming you’d be the 1 or 2 out of that ten.
I think hiring people based on what they put down on their resume is only half the battle. You need to dig deeper. I thought this way clever to do that.
@Kevin:
He’s not explaining what works for him. He’s explaining what he likes to do. He’s not a very effective manager; a brief glance at his linkedin profile shows a job-hopping middle-manager.
I agree he probably would. His intentional rudeness makes him stand out. And his major premis that such tests have natural bias towards ability to perform under stress is a valid one. If it eas his goal to call this out, he was apt in reaching it.
Oh not hostile, just a little rude. Why rude? Because interviewing is very serious and very important. People’s livelihoods and the success of companies ride on it. When you see someone turning it into an abomination, it’s difficult to be polite. A shortcoming on my part, perhaps.
I’m assuming you meant I’d be the 8 or 9 out of 10 that failed. Actually, I think I would pass I would pass Kevin’s BS test, but that’s not the point. The point is empathy, goal directed, organized, and having the guts to say no are not magic traits. Even if they were, there is no way to tell if someone has them in 5 minutes. Even if there was, there is no degree of certainty in the result.
Listen, the questions is clever, it’s a great question to ask when you conduct interviews. Just don’t play games like “blank face”, don’t treat it as the miracle method that never fails, don’t make secret rules for the answer, don’t make random rules for the answer, don’t assign arbitrary time limits, etc. If someone is bad at explaining poker on an interview, you should assume they are bad at explaining poker on an interview.
Here is my point, if you are going to ask an open-ended question, you should accept open-ended answers. If you find yourself getting the “most mileage” out of a gimmick like this, you are doing something wrong.
I agree. I hate it when open ended questions have a right or wrong answer… It’s open-ended for a reason…
Thanks. My challenge with interviewing (not in the tech sector, btw) is netting out the interviewee’s character traits. An indirect method like this, IMO, works the best, because you can’t just ask someone “do you possess character traits underlying a selfless, compassionate individual”, and expect to get a meaningful answer.
>> Even mangers do not innately know
Yes; they’re just empty containers, after all. :-)
Deliberately tricking a candidate by attempting to lead them off on a tangent is a bit silly. An interview isn’t like a real business situation. During an interview a candidate wants to show you, the interviewer, whatever you’re looking for. If you ask one question and then another, why should I assume that you only want me to answer the first? Plus, if your ‘tangent’ is related to the original discussion the candidate might assume that it’s a legitimate question, a bit of information that would assist you personally in understanding the overarching topic. In a REAL BUSINESS-TYPE SITUATION you’d probably want your employee to take a second to answer a direct question from a customer, rather than say “Ha, sorry, that’s not relevant. Moving on…”
I don’t doubt that you got good results from this method but that particular step seems misguided.
Many sales people and politicians dodge and redirect questions they prefer not to answer. I don’t agree with this practice, but it is used with some success by people. Perhaps this is one of those people.
Great question and I agree that it does reveal a lot about the person you are interviewing. I could see myself doing well and/or getting tripped up on it. It reminds me of the “elevator speech” – explain your research in the period of time it takes to complete an elevator ride. The best public speakers can do this quite well and I agree its best to assume your audience know nothing about the topic. Again, the best public speakers I’ve seen do this.
Actually, you sound like a major dick. Playing head games in job interviews is the first sign of a bad place to work. Maybe you should go to school and get a degree in psychology instead of polluting the world with this kind of inane childish bullshit.
No, I got everything I needed to know.
What you describe sounds like the type of tactics used to hire people for phone sales and telemarketing jobs.
How long have you been interviewing technical positions?
I’d ace this interview, but I’m not a super talented developer so I’m not sure if its an effective filter. Entertaining read none the less, I felt myself answering the question in my head while reading.
This is a very great question asked by a horrible interviewer.
I would have never followed up on this interview, and that would have been a substantial loss on your part.
The reason is because you could have made a very smart person, with very strong and important developing qualities extremely nervous by obviously scripting the interview as a “You better say what I want you to say” situation.
This form of immaturity and naiveness has shown that the leaders of your project have not optimized the most essential part of your success. How many of those developers do you think you let go that could have been the person who made your product into something that Google will have a tough time competing with tomorrow? Or rather, what makes you think when they buy you they wont identify this group of people you neglected to hire and replace you with the people you shouldnt have rejected?
Your fancy approaches and techniques while perhaps successful to some degree, takes the extreme risk that you just let the person who would have innovated your company into the next Facebook get hired by the startup located just down the street.
There is no secret technique, or perfect test to ask. A great interviewer is just a conversation. Not scripted, with the right answer left to be a learning experience for the both of you. You should talk about visions and dreams while sharing things about yourself. If you can get a geek to have a conversation about databases and protocols. Open source, politics on patents. Things hackers generally like to talk about. You dont need any sort of “sign” of “bias” to find out who legitimatly loves doing what he does. You need somebody conducting the interview to be the kinda of person you want to hire. It seems like you work with alot of Mitt Romney’s imho. (THATS FOR YOU BIG BIRD!)
This is horseshit. I didn’t see any data or studies provided that indicated how you jumped to the conclusion that interview behavior predicted job behavior. You basically just pulled that stuff out of your ass.
This is the kind of silly nonsense you use to hire IT or MBA people, not engineers.
And clean up your spelling – what a joke of an article.
I guess you consider your reply Much more useful to general audience.
Wow, such hostility! I’m kinda thinking that the people who think they would do such a great job, or that the question sucks, or that Kevin sucks, or that Kevin’s mother sucks fat hairy horse dcik … would actually suck at answering the question. No, it’s not the only question that Kevin would be asking, but it’s a very incisive question. If you can’t explain YOUR FAVORITE TOPIC to someone in five minutes, you are a loser who needs to go work somewhere else. Better to find that out in the first five minutes.
By the way, by misspeling “dcik”, I’m trolling you. If your impulse was to coreect my spelling, then know that you are one of those losers whom I would never be hiring. Now, I understand that some people have a hard time spelling. That’s not th epoint. The point is that you’re composing these comments at your leisure, and if know you spell badly, then correct spelling you must.
You just made a decision I would have fired you for if you work for this startup.
You never under any circumstance say something that gives the impression of your startup’s official response to criticism. Quit being a rooky and delete your message before you lose your job.
Oh wait, you cant… Rookie.
You hit the nail on the head there. Personally I think the question is a
fantastic one and one that I will use. But I suspect people who are more
structured in there thinking will find this an anathema.
And the irony is you need both types of people to make a successful business.
Nice article Kevin.
I’d enjoy blowing a lot of smoke for this question… quid pro quo style. I’d draw out where he wants the story to end (hookers & blow, heaven, who knows). Enjoyable.
I hope you ask programmers plenty of legitimate technical questions though. Many of the developers I know who blew smoke up peoples asses to climb the ladder, ultimately get fired for mis-representing their abilities. Or massaging the egos of corporate partners and directors.
If “They are not just easy to communicate with, but get results in their work.”, doesn’t mean the next guy won’t come in and look at the work, then ask “who the f*** wrote this garbage, we gotta start over”.
^ and not intending to be hostile, just my approach, just as the author has one.
Hello thatGuy,
Not trying to be critical here, but my experience and understanding is that no matter what the code written looks like there is a high likelihood that the next guy coming into the job is going to say “we gotta start over” even if what is there were written perfectly.
Well, this could help you hire people who can talk well. Not sure how it would reflect talent.
@RussNelson and @Mortdeus, hahaha! more flames, please? its kinda boring here tonight.
Thanks for sharing your filter question, Kevin!
Do you mind sharing how many of the candidates that passed all your tests (around 30, right?) ended up being hired and how many of those proved to be an asset later? What about those who were hired despite doing poorly on some of the points?
On the other hand people who know something really well tend to be able to explain it in very simple terms. In reality you may be testing how deep or shallow a candidate is and your fiter could be a good one, but for a totally different reason. Think confounding factor.
Yes, I’ve hired about 30 people so far. With only two exceptions that come to mind, most of the people I’ve hired have made amazing contributions. Only a handful have done poorly on this question and gotten hired. One in particular ended up really struggling, and rambling answers in meetings had a lot to do with it (they were a project manager, not a programmer, so communication was way more critical).
I think one of the qualities of a great CEO is the ability to explain something complicated in a simple and persuasive way. Jack Welch stands out to me as a great example, and I think it’s no accident he was so successful.
I understand so far.
What’s with the head games? Why can’t you just engage in normal conversation and ask them about their interests? I like where you are going, but the way you’re presenting it makes you seems like an arrogant prick. I hope that is not your intention. There are much better ways to find the same information about someone.
Still giving interviews? When it has been proven that interviews don’t work? When it has been shown that only testing works?
sources for that?
This is very similar to Sergey Brin’s interview question: http://kottke.org/11/07/googles-unusual-job-interview-question
This is completely misleading.
Being able to communicate is an important skill, but it’s irrelevant for many positions.
And it’s dangerous, because such an approach will make you miss all the people who are a bit autistic but have huge intellectual advantages over your “communication smart” office drones.
Either way, do it your own way, I don’t care if you get all the office drones as long as you let me have the geniuses ;)
http://ludovicurbain.blogspot.be/2012/10/hiring-right-people.html
That’s a really great Dilbert comic you’re using in your blog post right there.
Really one of the best hiring posts I’ve ever read. I just finished reading 3 long and insightful posts on hiring and all of them were great. Then I came across your blog and in just few paragraphs you said / showed more than others in pages! I think yours is a very powerful point. And I appreciate you sharing it (I think it was not that easy for you to decide to write it all down open and straight forward). Thank you!
Brilliant! Thanks for posting.
Despite of some of the nasty comments below, I think the concept here is gold. Sure, I’m interested in the technical abilities and experience of candidates (I hire developers) but, moreover, I’m interested in their cognition. This question seems to reveal some key points about how a candidate thinks, regardless of their experience.
I don’t like this question. Putting someone on the spot tests their ability to be put on the spot. I’m sure it’s a good leading indicator someone has certain types of strengths, but I bet it weeds out all sorts of potentially strong applicants. It’s probably a fun question to ask though :)
Wow, an amazing amount of vitriol over a single question, of many, in an interview!
What I’m hearing here, sounds an awful lot like a bunch of five year olds throwing tantrums because things aren’t going exactly the way they envision. Who ever told you that life was fair, lied to you! The ones who told you that you were special, just for being alive, did you a disservice. Time to grow up and be adults. The world owes you nothing!
My wife owns an employment assistance related service company and she has this a cute little saying, “Everyday is your job interview,” and you have all demonstrated the truth of that saying. What you say in comment forums is indicative of your character. This is the same energy you will bring to the workplace and inflict upon your co-workers, for good or ill. Most of you wouldn’t make it beyond the first interview and wonder why you can’t obtain a job.
My father demonstrated this regularly. In a time when every other individual wasn’t a “programmer” and his skill set was in high demand (fortran and etc.) he could always get the job. His attitude, invariably, got him fired. With programmers being a dime a dozen in the current day, communication is essential.
Thanks for the article. I found it really helpful, especially your descriptions of what you are looking for and some warning signs you’ve experienced.
To start with; I have interviewed candidates for positions doing both development and testing at multiple companies. The process of interviewing for technical positions is difficult and finding good questions to ask ends up being a fundamental need to do it properly and get good results.
The question you are asking and basing your analysis is one that I like to classify as the ‘non answerable question’. What I mean by that is that it is intentionally vague and somewhat irrelevant to the task at hand that the candidate will be performing after you hire them.
I agree that the results of asking such a question are interesting, and if the question is a good one, something that will give you some insight into the way the person thinks and how they may or may not be useful on a team.
The answer to such a question does not show whether the individual is competent at a technical task when working for a period by themselves and under pressure to get their task done quickly.
I realize that presenting this question is done so as to demonstrate how to figure out the non-technical information about a person, and to figure out whether -you- want to hire them for -your- team, so I will address whether your question accomplishes that.
You state that you intentionally are bland emotionally when they are initially explaining, attempting to force them to realize that you are intentionally doing a bad job of listening. I agree that conversation is a two way street; a speaker must consider their audience and shift gears depending on the way the person responds. I do not agree that you can judge a person if they ignore you when you don’t respond. If a highly technical speaker explains something perfectly well to you in a way that anyone could comprehend, and then you still dock them points because you are intentionally not understanding, that is pretty lame. I hope you are not doing this?
In regard to people launching immediately into their answer to your question, there are a multiple of reasons for this. You have noted that their is a correlation to them not pausing and planning, but you have not attempted to figure out what the cause is and if there are exceptions to this.
What I mean by this is that you assume that people who launch immediately into an answer will end up being poor employees who do not plan well. This is an incorrect assumption. When I answer job interview questions I always respond immediately no matter how hard the question. I answer carefully and strategically. I do this to show how I will perform when put under pressure and demanded to perform without being given proper time to plan.
You did note that you specifically tell them to take all the time they need before engaging in the “5 minute exercise”. Despite being told this I would still launch immediately into the 5 minutes. Why? Because I don’t plan? No. Because I don’t want to waste your time. If you are limiting my responses by time, then you will very likely not expect correct work; you will expect deadlines to be met. The very wording of your interview question implies that you don’t care about the quality of the work; merely if they will work well with you on a team.
The instant you ask me this question, I would reconsider if I want to work for you at all.
My end conclusion would be that instead of just being flexible and finding and detecting the best candidates, you are subjecting everyone to fun little personality tests and looks for people with the qualities -you- think will work best. Real people are unique and distinct; they don’t fall into nice categories.
All that said; your question properly works great at getting rid of poor candidates.
What it also does unfortunately is drive away the best ones as well.
Another reason someone might launch immediately into an explanation is because they know the subject well enough to do so. To answer that question, I would probably talk about something like karate. Given that I TAUGHT karate for 20 years, it’s a subject I know quite well, and can explain to almost any level of detail on no notice. But apparently, Kevin takes this as a sign that I’m not organized in my approach to work. My coworkers would definitely disagree with that.
Very solid advices, thanks :)
Kevin, here is a revelation for you. (BTW sound like typical management – and that is a bad thing).
You will never get the best or most loyal talent with your philosophies. The kind of people who pass your “test” will be the types of people who will appear to be compliant workers and good communicators but are basically code monkeys. They won’t think for themselves, they won’t advance in their skills very much – thus you will never have the innovation and edge (which would give you a let up on your competition) that you could have had. They will more often than not get someone else to do some of their work or require constant assistance. They will drag down your productivity. The types of people that you hire will move on much more frequently – preventing a long standing cohesive group.
Your loss (well not just yours unfortunately -your entire company’s)
I think of an interview as a two-way evaluation, for both employer and prospective employee. It’s possible some strong candidates may decide that these setup questions or behavior could reflect poorly on management. That may, in some cases, lead to their behavior being non-reflective of how they would respond in a similar business situation, post-hire.
As a student in masters management degree and a undergraduate degree in psychology, the comments on this is more interesting than the original post.
The argument that interviews aren’t a good judge of character applies only to unstructured interviews. If you use the behaviour-description model or the situational model, which everybody does these days, it works pretty well for your default office. And before you snarkily ask for citations, do your own research. However, we don’t know WHY those two models work pretty well. If you find that everybody who likes the colour blue does well in your company, hire only people who like blue. The content of the question doesn’t matter when you get down to it.
Everyone who does well in interviews knows that it’s a game. You learn the rules to the game, you get good at improvising based on cues the interviewers give you, and you give them what they want to hear (without lying, hopefully). Not everyone has the privilege to say no to a job because they don’t like the way the game is played. As an interviewer, you should be aware that people are only giving you what you want to hear, no matter how clever you think you’re being. Especially if you’re hiring developers, who love figuring out cheat codes! You did not need to explain how to “beat” your question for someone like me to figure it out on the spot. Maybe that’s the kind of people you want to hire, but it has nothing to do with empathy, organization, or leadership. It’s just being good at the game.
Thanks for sharing this. I have interviewed and been interviewed. This is great insight.
What a bunch of bullshit.
Your question is a great starting point. Unfortunately, from a logical standpoint, it goes a bit downhill from there.
To summarize: you ask question #1, then expect an answer. During the answer, you ask question #2, which you don’t want answered, because it is not germane to the topic at hand.
I hate to break it to you, but using that logic, the best answer a person could give for question #1 would be “no, I won’t describe how to stand on my head and spit nickles to you in five minutes, because that has nothing to do with the job I am applying for.”
What would your reaction be to that response? Would they pass the test? Because they just displayed the exact same level of reasoning which you claim is desirable.
What I’m getting at is that you are playing a game using arbitrary rules. Of course you expect the person to answer the question WHEN it’s the question you want answered, that’s the purpose of a job interview. But by trying to trick the applicant, you are introducing so many potentially false variables into the equation it’s amazing.
Others have mentioned some of them, such as cultural prejudices, etc., and in addition you just cannot expect reliability here…For example, let’s say you just got into an argument with the wife, you had a major setback which is going to cost you a large amount of time and money to fix, you have a nagging headache, or maybe you are having the best day of your life, who knows. All those variables will come into play when you ask your dummy question (no pun intended). When is the question asked? How is it asked? How irrelevant is the question? Etc…
My advice to you, worth nothing since you aren’t paying for it, would be to keep the question. Throw out the pop psychology. Be honest with the applicant. Keep using the creativity that you obviously had in composing the question to come up with other ways to provide you insight into their empathy. Good luck!
There’s nothing stopping a candidate from talking about something related to the job as their topic. Ultimately, the most important part of this question is having someone explain something straight up. That alone tells me quite a bit about whether someone would be a good fit.
Ultimately, all interviews are someone detached from the job. A great alternative is to have someone just dive into the work as a contractor. Some of the best employee hires I’ve made started out as contractors, which was a low risk way for both of us to learn whether there’s a fit. Unfortunately, that isn’t always an option.
Again, what a bunch of bullshit.
I wish someone asked me that question in an interview,I would talk their ears off.
But why only 1 topic?
Thanks for sharing!
Fascinating that the word ‘teach’ occurs only once, in the post, and the word ‘educating’ occurs once, in a comment, saying the post itself is ‘educating’. ‘Learn’ happens a bunch, but mostly about learning from the post, or learning how to play the interview game. ‘Explain,’ is everywhere, which feels to me the thinnest, least empathic word for the phenomenon. The comment thread is a dry and revealing take on the relationship between knowing and sharing, such a core human interaction.
BTW, Kevin, I’m curious what you would say if I explained why I didn’t go back to college after junior year, or why my family emigrated to the US and didn’t stay in Canada in 1909?
I’ve never posted on a blog before but having read the comments above, I have been shocked at how aggressive some are. Sharing knowledge and ideas is a great benefit that we are lucky to have and it’s a shame to see an interesting and important subject treated with so little grace. The idea is an interesting one, and perhaps deserves a proper research study to assess its true predictive ability if the author believes so strongly in it. Having worked in marketing communications for more than 20 years ( where a candidate can be asked all manner of peculiar and unexpected questions designed to ascertain their creativity) and having gained the (UK’s CIPD) chartered HR professional qualification, I believe any new learning on how to gauge a candidates character, empathy and ability to deal with ambiguity ( a valuable skill in many businesses) would be welcomed by most.