9 ms·

Interview Questions for Hiring Top Performers

101 points by gkop 11y ago

rhodysurf 11y ago
Aren't these all pretty obvious?
- WhitneyLand 11y ago
  They may seem intuitive, but that doesn't prove the questions or approach valid.
gearoidoc 11y ago
This is a puff piece thinly veiled as a guest post.
- CPLX 11y ago
  The "First Round Review" is an embarrassment, they push out content-free fluffy valley conventional wisdom every day or so, an unfortunate number of which make it to the HN front page for some reason.
  - mycelium 11y ago
    I agree that there's a lot of valley fluff, but some of the content on there is really good: http://firstround.com/review/heres-what-a-real-growth-strategy-looks-like-road-tested-by-facebook-and-remind/ http://firstround.com/review/heres-what-a-real-growth-strate...
  - gearoidoc 11y ago
    I'm confused as to why this made the front page (and is still there). The content isn't new or noteworthy. I suspect some strategic upvoting but maybe I'm just paranoid.
    - mildbow 11y ago
      See what you did there? You called attention to the strategic upvoting. Which means you get downvoted. Welcome to real HN where groupthink is the only think.
      - gearoidoc 11y ago
        Couldn't care less about karma tbh.
WhitneyLand 11y ago
This (like most interview processes) seems very unscientific and error prone. She doesn't mention correlation of their process to successful outcomes and until you do that you're guessing. Also doesn't mention reviewing quality of past work which I'm guessing has a better correlation if the contributions are properly vetted. Unless you're doing A/B testing you'll never know, and are certainly screening out candidates who could have ended up being star players.
- angdis 11y ago
  Yep, and I would go further and say that interviewing is something which has NOT been (and may never be) objectively "figured out" even though industrial psychologists have floundered for decades on how to best evaluate candidates. Interviewing is very much a people-skill.
- evanpw 11y ago
  Here's a meta-analysis of the empirical literature: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%.... TL/DR: Give the candidate an IQ test and a work-sample test. The next best is an "integrity test", which actually measures mostly conscientiousness. You can totally ignore years of experience and education.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - e12e 11y ago
    What is an "integrity test"?
    - e12e 11y ago
      Reflecting a bit on this, and on my comment above re: CVs -- I'm inclined to just start applying to jobs with something along the lines of: I'm above average IQ[1], you can send me a work test at <email>. If the test goes ok, lets talk. Actually, in this light, codeval.com makes (even) more sense. [1] Sadly, not impressively high. I forget what score I got last time, IIRC around 130 or so. Then again, I also have pretty high "Social IQ" (self-assessed ;-), and the tests don't cover that.
dropit_sphere 11y ago
I have a sneaking suspicion that hiring is like stockpicking: after an initial filter, monkeys with darts would do just as well. The problem is: if the interviewers are "constantly learning," (and they are, just ask them), then they are consistently making mistakes that the future, more learn-ed version of themselves wouldn't make. To take an example from the article: interviewers are to ask candidates about some time that they used data to make a decision. What if a candidate responds with a story in which they realized the data were pointing the way to a local optimum that the candidate cleverly avoided? To you, smart HN reader, you are perhaps impressed, and tempted to slap the candidate on the back and rejoice in your shared membership in the club of those who've discovered ambiguity ("Complexity, such a bitch, right?"); but if the interviewer but dimly remembers calculus but is proud of themselves for using a sentence with the word "data" in it, then the candidate's response will come off not as an indication of the ability to "ask the right questions," but a sign of non-cooperativeness, "irrational refusal to let decisions be driven by the data," and perhaps intellectual arrogance. For interviewers, I have no idea what to tell them. For candidates, I can only say: Lie, and then follow through. If they are looking for "grit" but you had a privileged upbringing, make something up and commit to yourself to be grit-ful[0], rather than saying what's in your head, which is "I haven't had much hardship but I get the importance of resilience." If they ask for your greatest weakness[1], say anything but your greatest weakness; instead talk about the difficulty of coping with other peoples' weaknesses ("I don't deal with my father's alcoholism as well as I ought," or "I get impatient with lazy people."). [0]This is basically what the sales people in your org do, which is why you get those requests. [1] This is a dishonest question, because there are wrong answers. The only acceptable answers are weaknesses that the interviewer shares; but by making that the only right answer the interviewer is implying that they have the "best" weakness and therefore have no "real" weaknesses. If they don't introspect honestly, why the hell should you? Or, more charitably, which is a better approximation of reality, that you are both about equal on your paths to enlightenment, or that you are an imbecile? Is truth best served by communicating the former through omission, or the latter through facts?
- gearoidoc 11y ago
  To respond to your point on being asked about weaknesses: I've always taken the honest route. I've given reasons like "hard to find motivation if I don't find the project interesting" and I've found they've gone done quite well (I think I've only been turned down for < 5% of interviews I've done in the past 10 years). The caveat though: explain to the interviewer that you're being vulnerable. I always make it clear that I hate those "strengths presented as weaknesses" bullshit and then explained that I'm going to be 100% honest. People seem to connect with it.
yanilkr 11y ago
All Hiring/Interviewing blogs should have a disclaimer like this. Hiring/interviewing is like judging a medicine by its packaging. It is error prone and there is little you can do to avoid making bad decisions. Many people get good at it after making so many mistakes. It is much easier to ask an expert in the field help you choose a candidate for the role.
trjordan 11y ago
Specifically, I'm not sure these characteristics are the perfect set for all interviews. I only spent 5 minutes reading the article, after all :) But, I like that these are all personality traits with no easy answer. I get the feeling that an interviewer trying to craft questions to test "grit" or "impact" will discover good stories about the candidate. They'll probably push the candidate to talk about real challenges, or explain below-the-waterline projects they thought were important. Assuming there's a technical screen that validates that they're woefully uneducated (I'm thinking FizzBuzz, not 3 hours of red-black trees), it feels like an interview designed to capture these attributes would be pretty probing, and if the topics were divided among different interviewers, they'd all get different angles on the candidate. That seems good. Interviewing for the nominal job description is easy to game. This checklist, if thoughtfully prepared for, seems harder to game.
dkarapetyan 11y ago
This just in: "How to do X by doing Y". The only way to get good candidates is to optimize your hiring pipeline to the point that you can hire someone in less than two days and fire them within 2-4 months if it becomes clear things are not working out. Doing anything else is just a waste of time, money, and effort. There is no proxy out there that will give you only the candidates you're looking for.
brogrammer90 11y ago
If a candidate actually had any of those attributes, never mind all seven, they wouldn't be interviewing at your company. Companies need to realize 99% of candidates are B players, and 99% of their own employees are too.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  Hmm, this is interesting: I usually share your sentiment when I read articles like this. I think companies are overly obsessed with hiring "the best of the best" and should instead focus on finding great employees, which is a different thing. Having said that, I thought this particular article avoided that trap and enumerated attainable attributes of good employees. As a B-player myself, I believe I (and many others) have nearly all of these attributes, never mind none.
  - gearoidoc 11y ago
    I think the "A-Class" employee idea is a myth. Obviously I've come across individuals who are more talented than others but it's very, very difficult (maybe impossible) to put people in a box. Would you prefer to work with a genius engineer who is an asshole to deal with or someone with a great personality who takes somewhat longer to learn?
- soham 11y ago
  Very well said. Interviews are not standardized tests. They are closer to a date/sale, than they are to a test. Same answer in an interview is likely to be interpreted differently by different people, very much like you're on a date. The more you think of interviews like a test, the more you'll agonize about it, and the more you'll feel writing and believing such gospel-ic articles like this. True, there are a few basic common things, but beyond that, it's subjective by definition. Whoever YOU think fits your values and ideas, is an A player. Everyone else is "B", because they are not exactly "compatible" to your thinking. At http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com, that's what we find. Every company has a different viewpoint of what a great engineer is. After a generic training for interviews, it's about compatibility with the companies.
lazyant 11y ago
"For more technical roles, you can even build a timed Excel test with some practice problems or logic tests.", what? is the Excel page for the interviewer or the candidate? In any case, you can use whatever questions you like, they are very trainable and people good at BS and making up anything quick will do well at those.
mildbow 11y ago
Meh. Here's what all these HR sourced "top performer" filters are missing: top performers are a nurture not nature thing i.e they are a function of the environment. What's the incentive for a top performer to work for you? We hear a ton about how the best people "take ownership", but a lot less of why they should build your company for you (rather than starting their own). The most important thing a manager/CEO can do is to align the company's success with the individual. That's how you make top performers out of people you already have.
- czivelonghi 11y ago
  I agree, if you want good people you need to create an environment in which they can thrive. They need challenging problems, stake in the company, and most importantly get out their way and let them build stuff. Great companies are built by engineers and not the HR dept. or CEO's with an accounting background.
a3voices 11y ago
This would be very politically incorrect, but I'd wager the best way to find top performers is to ask "What do your parents do for work, and how much money do they make?" There is a very high correlation between the success of parents and their children.
- jdc 11y ago
  Citations?
  - bluedevil2k 11y ago
    Discusses intelligence and genetics - key point, intelligence is about 50% heritable. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/intelligence-and-genetics-do-some-people-inherit-an-edge http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/intelligence-and-genetics-d... Discusses the correlation between high intelligence and higher incomes - key point, the scatter diagram showing a clear correlation. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations...
- cocolos 11y ago
  This reminds me of the freakanomics episode: Parent's don't matter (http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/15/how-much-do-parents-really-matter/ http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/15/how-much-do-parents-reall...)
  - klenwell 11y ago
    Didn't listen to the podcast, but if the thesis is borrowed from Judith Rich Harris[0], then the GP's claim is still valid. To wit, parents' parenting practices have limited impact on their children (vs. peers and genetics) but their success and income do (via genetics and the influence of wealth over peer environment). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rich_Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rich_Harris
- laxatives 11y ago
  Certainly above average parents are likely to produce above average children. But most the top performing parents' children are likely to regress back towards the mean. Getting the highest umpteenth percentile in anything is going to be crapshoot if you only consider one factor.
graycat 11y ago
Given a person who knows nothing about medicine, then might sell them on leech bleeding. Given a person who knows nothing about technical work, might sell them on the OP. Bet if take five interviewers and have each of them read the OP and apply it to interviewing 100 people and compare the results, will find (1) validity, the interview results will on average be a poor predictor of anything important and (2) reliability, the interview results will scatter with huge standard deviation. That is, it's throwing darts where the scatter is huge and the center of the scatter is far off the center of the target. Uh, didn't see where there was some good double blind tests of the OP for such reliability and validity. Uh, the OP was big on analysis -- good, now have them tell us about their 7 devices and reliability and validity, that is social science 101. Let me just guess, from reality and common sense, what is going on with the OP: The whole OP is essentially just plausibility psycho-babble that HR interviewers would like to entertain. It's aimed at HR. The OP is yet more evidence that under no circumstances should anyone in HR have a substantive interview with an important candidate for anything important. Instead, HR should smile, be nice, offer water, coffee, tea, soda, smile, be nice, give directions to the rest rooms, help with the interview schedule and the organization chart, hand over the benefits packet, smile, be nice, help with the travel and lodging arrangements, help with expense reimbursements, smile, be nice, etc. E.g., the OP wants to ignore school work but wants to emphasize ability with, what was it, analysis? Okay, I can understand why an HR humanities major would get confused here, but a good solution is to look for majors in math, physics, electronic engineering. The OP wants to give as a test of ability with analysis something with Excel. Upchuck: I avoid Excel because it is nearly always way beneath me -- I use much more powerful tools. Excel will do Lagrangian relaxation, the fast Fourier transform, Wiener filtering, least squares, multi-variate spline interpolation, L. Breiman's random forests or even CART, stochastic optimal control, solve some differential equations? I don't think so. I don't waste time with Excel. That's like testing a cardiac surgeon on cleaning bedpans. "Top Performers"? Right, maybe for toilet cleaning. Even then they'd be at risk of mixing the Muriatic stuff with the Drano stuff -- don't do that! HR tries again, fumbles with the ball, drops the ball, trips over the ball, falls on the ball, loses the ball, is face down in the mud. HR: Smile and be nice.
emodendroket 11y ago
Well, at least it's a change of pace from the same handful of technical questions people post over and over again.
aaroninsf 11y ago
TL;DR: "How would you convince me you are willing to exchange professional services for currency?"
klenwell 11y ago
Interestingly, this rubric outlined in article applies the advice Daniel Kahneman gives in his section on interviews in Thinking Fast and Slow. As he acknowledges, it isn't perfect but in studies it generally shows an improvement over the sort of gut-level hiring most people end up doing.
PaulHoule 11y ago
Why don't we ever hear about management tips to get more performance out of the people you have?
- pasbesoin 11y ago
  This suddenly makes me think of the hiring process -- at least the much-criticized and apparently prevalent form -- as a primary example of premature optimization. Perhaps a bit obvious; nonetheless, I find it useful to apply those specific words to it.
- TheCowboy 11y ago
  That information is out there, but it's much easier to focus on changing or improving things that don't involve management practices and organizational behavior, especially focusing on people who aren't part of the business yet. There is a common flawed view that if you can focus on hiring the best people then you won't have problems with performance. It can also result in high turnover, and hinder performance when the rest of the equation isn't weighted heavily. Focusing on things other than hiring also comes with politics, because it involves admitting that something isn't perfect with the organization.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > There is a common flawed view that if you can focus on hiring the best people then you won't have problems with performance. I think, more specifically, there is a common flawed view that hiring the best engineers means you can ignore management and have them "self-organize". Related to this is the false idea that a room full of really smart people don't need dirty things like "process". Nearly every time I get someone to give me a concrete example of why a false positive is dangerous I find a management flaw that is the root cause of the damage.
wyclif 11y ago
"Top Performers" https://youtu.be/yoy4_h7Pb3M https://youtu.be/yoy4_h7Pb3M
unixhero 11y ago
As a candidate, this is the best interview guide I've read.
- kabdib 11y ago
  Trust me, if they're interviewing like this, you don't want to work there.
  - unixhero 11y ago
    I'm an MBA type with a lot of compsci background, and I get this bullshit all the time. These advice were poignant and to the point of actually suggesting to me how to think and how to answer those incredibly silly questions. That's what it's like over at the Corporate Overlords in Scandinavia at least.
lordnacho 11y ago
Still waiting for an HR blog where they checked the people they didn't hire against those they did.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Yep. Nearly every 'article' about how to hire suffers from selection bias. Here's what I'd like to see: Find some super-talented folks who are critical to the success of whatever they're currently working on. Have them name names of companies that turned them down in the past. Then interview HR from those companies to find out what they did that filtered those people out of their organization. This kind of study would probably be impossible for a number of reasons, legal and otherwise, but I bet it would be a fun and informative read.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    The big problem with this idea is that many will assume, rightly or wrongly, that in spite of someone's success at $COMPANY_X that they still would have been bad for $COMPANY_Y. I am personally of the opinion that a good engineer is a good engineer, and a bad engineer is a bad engineer. Organization and culture can amplify or attenuate the "goodness" or "badness", but cannot make a good engineer bad or vice versa. I also think way too much emphasis is put on culture fit, however it gets defined.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    The problem is that people do change. I was an outright terrible employee for years and mediocre in engineering skills and am now fine as an employee but despite knowing the general means to not be a bad engineer am probably just middling or below for various reasons not related to capability as much as personal circumstances. The job market changes over time as well.
- jameshart 11y ago
  Special case of the general class of 'business advice' writing. Any book that says 'here's how you build a great company' or 'here's how you close deals' or 'here's how to manage people' will be chock full of examples of how following the advice works, and how failing to follow the advice doesn't. But there's never any reflection on cases where following the advice didn't work.
kafkaesq 11y ago
What to ask: We look for a time the candidate wanted something so badly, they were unstoppable in pursuing it. Or a time they overcame an obstacle,” Hamilton says. As you listen to the answers to those questions, pay close attention to both the tasks and the duration described. “Try to get a sense of how long that person can stick it out. How long are they going to beat their head against a stats problem?” Good qualities for an academic (or inventor type), but doesn't seem to have much correlation with the kind of "grit" needed for most commercial development work. In which, the vast majority of the time, we benefit the most from "triaging": that is, discerning when not to go down rabbit holes, and when not to "bang our heads" against problems when it may be better to simply... route around them, or leave them be until some sunny day arrives when there's a legitimate business need to properly resolve them, and we have appropriate resources available to do so.
speaknotyet 11y ago
Where is the actual data that back up this recommendations?
brianpgordon 11y ago
There seem to be a lot of questions of the form Have your candidate tell you about a time _______ I hope they're giving their candidates time to prepare answers to these. I feel like I wouldn't be able to think of anything during the interview.
jameshart 11y ago
So yeah - if you think the technical interview process is broken, take a look at this and realize that at least in our business there is hope. Hiring someone for non-technical jobs? This is the best you can do.
78666cdc 11y ago
As a person that has interviewed for and gotten jobs at multiple Fortune 500s (whose tech departments varied from abysmal to impressive effective) and as a person that has been a part of the interviewing/hiring process several times, I appreciate the attempted formalization of interview metrics and see more than a little value in the metrics described in the article. To me, though, there is one "metric" that trumps all the rest, and that is personality fit with existing employees. If you have two brilliant software engineers that just absolutely cannot stand each other, nothing will get done. The best interview experience I've had, personally, has been to be placed into a technical interview - "start programming application X that does Y" - with two existing employees looking over my shoulders asking me why I'm doing what I'm doing and why not something else. The technical justification for my chosen solution to the technical interview question didn't matter much once it was clear I covered a base level of technical ability, but it was incredibly valuable that I and the employees looking over my shoulder didn't want to get into a fistfight after an hour - it meant that we could amicably disagree, support our reasonings for our arguments, and then not have sticks up our asses when the other person's proposed solution ended up being the right one, and then gracefully defer and say "thank you for the conversation and debate." That meld is immensely important. That said, I do recognize that it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge this sort of interaction with increasingly large teams. My experience interviewing and being interviewed is limited to cases where it's been a team of 3 - 8 people. For larger teams, perhaps such a formalized approach makes sense. I do not have any experience that informs me as to whether it is or isn't. But then I have to ask whether there should be a team of more than about 8 people without a dedicated manager. I don't have anything more than a gut answer to that question, but my gut says no.
deeteecee 11y ago
I will just say again like I always do, there is no solution to the problem. You hire, you try, and if no good, you fire. I have some thoughts regarding possibly giving the interviewer some more leeway (like for engineers, don't start off with solve this first) but haven't thought enough about that.
sidcool 11y ago
A lot of questions here seem superfluous. They can be easily bluffed on. Also, the questions assume that perfection exists.

101 points by gkop 11y ago

rhodysurf 11y ago

Aren't these all pretty obvious?

WhitneyLand 11y ago
They may seem intuitive, but that doesn't prove the questions or approach valid.

gearoidoc 11y ago

This is a puff piece thinly veiled as a guest post.

CPLX 11y ago
The "First Round Review" is an embarrassment, they push out content-free fluffy valley conventional wisdom every day or so, an unfortunate number of which make it to the HN front page for some reason.
- mycelium 11y ago
  I agree that there's a lot of valley fluff, but some of the content on there is really good: http://firstround.com/review/heres-what-a-real-growth-strategy-looks-like-road-tested-by-facebook-and-remind/ http://firstround.com/review/heres-what-a-real-growth-strate...
- gearoidoc 11y ago
  I'm confused as to why this made the front page (and is still there). The content isn't new or noteworthy. I suspect some strategic upvoting but maybe I'm just paranoid.
  - mildbow 11y ago
    See what you did there? You called attention to the strategic upvoting. Which means you get downvoted. Welcome to real HN where groupthink is the only think.
    - gearoidoc 11y ago
      Couldn't care less about karma tbh.

WhitneyLand 11y ago

This (like most interview processes) seems very unscientific and error prone. She doesn't mention correlation of their process to successful outcomes and until you do that you're guessing. Also doesn't mention reviewing quality of past work which I'm guessing has a better correlation if the contributions are properly vetted. Unless you're doing A/B testing you'll never know, and are certainly screening out candidates who could have ended up being star players.

angdis 11y ago
Yep, and I would go further and say that interviewing is something which has NOT been (and may never be) objectively "figured out" even though industrial psychologists have floundered for decades on how to best evaluate candidates. Interviewing is very much a people-skill.
evanpw 11y ago
Here's a meta-analysis of the empirical literature: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%.... TL/DR: Give the candidate an IQ test and a work-sample test. The next best is an "integrity test", which actually measures mostly conscientiousness. You can totally ignore years of experience and education.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- e12e 11y ago
  What is an "integrity test"?
  - e12e 11y ago
    Reflecting a bit on this, and on my comment above re: CVs -- I'm inclined to just start applying to jobs with something along the lines of: I'm above average IQ[1], you can send me a work test at <email>. If the test goes ok, lets talk. Actually, in this light, codeval.com makes (even) more sense. [1] Sadly, not impressively high. I forget what score I got last time, IIRC around 130 or so. Then again, I also have pretty high "Social IQ" (self-assessed ;-), and the tests don't cover that.

dropit_sphere 11y ago

I have a sneaking suspicion that hiring is like stockpicking: after an initial filter, monkeys with darts would do just as well. The problem is: if the interviewers are "constantly learning," (and they are, just ask them), then they are consistently making mistakes that the future, more learn-ed version of themselves wouldn't make. To take an example from the article: interviewers are to ask candidates about some time that they used data to make a decision. What if a candidate responds with a story in which they realized the data were pointing the way to a local optimum that the candidate cleverly avoided? To you, smart HN reader, you are perhaps impressed, and tempted to slap the candidate on the back and rejoice in your shared membership in the club of those who've discovered ambiguity ("Complexity, such a bitch, right?"); but if the interviewer but dimly remembers calculus but is proud of themselves for using a sentence with the word "data" in it, then the candidate's response will come off not as an indication of the ability to "ask the right questions," but a sign of non-cooperativeness, "irrational refusal to let decisions be driven by the data," and perhaps intellectual arrogance. For interviewers, I have no idea what to tell them. For candidates, I can only say: Lie, and then follow through. If they are looking for "grit" but you had a privileged upbringing, make something up and commit to yourself to be grit-ful[0], rather than saying what's in your head, which is "I haven't had much hardship but I get the importance of resilience." If they ask for your greatest weakness[1], say anything but your greatest weakness; instead talk about the difficulty of coping with other peoples' weaknesses ("I don't deal with my father's alcoholism as well as I ought," or "I get impatient with lazy people."). [0]This is basically what the sales people in your org do, which is why you get those requests. [1] This is a dishonest question, because there are wrong answers. The only acceptable answers are weaknesses that the interviewer shares; but by making that the only right answer the interviewer is implying that they have the "best" weakness and therefore have no "real" weaknesses. If they don't introspect honestly, why the hell should you? Or, more charitably, which is a better approximation of reality, that you are both about equal on your paths to enlightenment, or that you are an imbecile? Is truth best served by communicating the former through omission, or the latter through facts?

gearoidoc 11y ago
To respond to your point on being asked about weaknesses: I've always taken the honest route. I've given reasons like "hard to find motivation if I don't find the project interesting" and I've found they've gone done quite well (I think I've only been turned down for < 5% of interviews I've done in the past 10 years). The caveat though: explain to the interviewer that you're being vulnerable. I always make it clear that I hate those "strengths presented as weaknesses" bullshit and then explained that I'm going to be 100% honest. People seem to connect with it.

yanilkr 11y ago

All Hiring/Interviewing blogs should have a disclaimer like this. Hiring/interviewing is like judging a medicine by its packaging. It is error prone and there is little you can do to avoid making bad decisions. Many people get good at it after making so many mistakes. It is much easier to ask an expert in the field help you choose a candidate for the role.

trjordan 11y ago

Specifically, I'm not sure these characteristics are the perfect set for all interviews. I only spent 5 minutes reading the article, after all :) But, I like that these are all personality traits with no easy answer. I get the feeling that an interviewer trying to craft questions to test "grit" or "impact" will discover good stories about the candidate. They'll probably push the candidate to talk about real challenges, or explain below-the-waterline projects they thought were important. Assuming there's a technical screen that validates that they're woefully uneducated (I'm thinking FizzBuzz, not 3 hours of red-black trees), it feels like an interview designed to capture these attributes would be pretty probing, and if the topics were divided among different interviewers, they'd all get different angles on the candidate. That seems good. Interviewing for the nominal job description is easy to game. This checklist, if thoughtfully prepared for, seems harder to game.

dkarapetyan 11y ago

This just in: "How to do X by doing Y". The only way to get good candidates is to optimize your hiring pipeline to the point that you can hire someone in less than two days and fire them within 2-4 months if it becomes clear things are not working out. Doing anything else is just a waste of time, money, and effort. There is no proxy out there that will give you only the candidates you're looking for.

brogrammer90 11y ago

If a candidate actually had any of those attributes, never mind all seven, they wouldn't be interviewing at your company. Companies need to realize 99% of candidates are B players, and 99% of their own employees are too.

sanderjd 11y ago
Hmm, this is interesting: I usually share your sentiment when I read articles like this. I think companies are overly obsessed with hiring "the best of the best" and should instead focus on finding great employees, which is a different thing. Having said that, I thought this particular article avoided that trap and enumerated attainable attributes of good employees. As a B-player myself, I believe I (and many others) have nearly all of these attributes, never mind none.
- gearoidoc 11y ago
  I think the "A-Class" employee idea is a myth. Obviously I've come across individuals who are more talented than others but it's very, very difficult (maybe impossible) to put people in a box. Would you prefer to work with a genius engineer who is an asshole to deal with or someone with a great personality who takes somewhat longer to learn?
soham 11y ago
Very well said. Interviews are not standardized tests. They are closer to a date/sale, than they are to a test. Same answer in an interview is likely to be interpreted differently by different people, very much like you're on a date. The more you think of interviews like a test, the more you'll agonize about it, and the more you'll feel writing and believing such gospel-ic articles like this. True, there are a few basic common things, but beyond that, it's subjective by definition. Whoever YOU think fits your values and ideas, is an A player. Everyone else is "B", because they are not exactly "compatible" to your thinking. At http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com, that's what we find. Every company has a different viewpoint of what a great engineer is. After a generic training for interviews, it's about compatibility with the companies.

lazyant 11y ago

"For more technical roles, you can even build a timed Excel test with some practice problems or logic tests.", what? is the Excel page for the interviewer or the candidate? In any case, you can use whatever questions you like, they are very trainable and people good at BS and making up anything quick will do well at those.

mildbow 11y ago

Meh. Here's what all these HR sourced "top performer" filters are missing: top performers are a nurture not nature thing i.e they are a function of the environment. What's the incentive for a top performer to work for you? We hear a ton about how the best people "take ownership", but a lot less of why they should build your company for you (rather than starting their own). The most important thing a manager/CEO can do is to align the company's success with the individual. That's how you make top performers out of people you already have.

czivelonghi 11y ago
I agree, if you want good people you need to create an environment in which they can thrive. They need challenging problems, stake in the company, and most importantly get out their way and let them build stuff. Great companies are built by engineers and not the HR dept. or CEO's with an accounting background.

a3voices 11y ago

This would be very politically incorrect, but I'd wager the best way to find top performers is to ask "What do your parents do for work, and how much money do they make?" There is a very high correlation between the success of parents and their children.

jdc 11y ago
Citations?
- bluedevil2k 11y ago
  Discusses intelligence and genetics - key point, intelligence is about 50% heritable. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/intelligence-and-genetics-do-some-people-inherit-an-edge http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/intelligence-and-genetics-d... Discusses the correlation between high intelligence and higher incomes - key point, the scatter diagram showing a clear correlation. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations-of-iq-with-income-and-wealth/ http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlations...
cocolos 11y ago
This reminds me of the freakanomics episode: Parent's don't matter (http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/15/how-much-do-parents-really-matter/ http://freakonomics.com/2011/06/15/how-much-do-parents-reall...)
- klenwell 11y ago
  Didn't listen to the podcast, but if the thesis is borrowed from Judith Rich Harris[0], then the GP's claim is still valid. To wit, parents' parenting practices have limited impact on their children (vs. peers and genetics) but their success and income do (via genetics and the influence of wealth over peer environment). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rich_Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Rich_Harris
laxatives 11y ago
Certainly above average parents are likely to produce above average children. But most the top performing parents' children are likely to regress back towards the mean. Getting the highest umpteenth percentile in anything is going to be crapshoot if you only consider one factor.

graycat 11y ago

Given a person who knows nothing about medicine, then might sell them on leech bleeding. Given a person who knows nothing about technical work, might sell them on the OP. Bet if take five interviewers and have each of them read the OP and apply it to interviewing 100 people and compare the results, will find (1) validity, the interview results will on average be a poor predictor of anything important and (2) reliability, the interview results will scatter with huge standard deviation. That is, it's throwing darts where the scatter is huge and the center of the scatter is far off the center of the target. Uh, didn't see where there was some good double blind tests of the OP for such reliability and validity. Uh, the OP was big on analysis -- good, now have them tell us about their 7 devices and reliability and validity, that is social science 101. Let me just guess, from reality and common sense, what is going on with the OP: The whole OP is essentially just plausibility psycho-babble that HR interviewers would like to entertain. It's aimed at HR. The OP is yet more evidence that under no circumstances should anyone in HR have a substantive interview with an important candidate for anything important. Instead, HR should smile, be nice, offer water, coffee, tea, soda, smile, be nice, give directions to the rest rooms, help with the interview schedule and the organization chart, hand over the benefits packet, smile, be nice, help with the travel and lodging arrangements, help with expense reimbursements, smile, be nice, etc. E.g., the OP wants to ignore school work but wants to emphasize ability with, what was it, analysis? Okay, I can understand why an HR humanities major would get confused here, but a good solution is to look for majors in math, physics, electronic engineering. The OP wants to give as a test of ability with analysis something with Excel. Upchuck: I avoid Excel because it is nearly always way beneath me -- I use much more powerful tools. Excel will do Lagrangian relaxation, the fast Fourier transform, Wiener filtering, least squares, multi-variate spline interpolation, L. Breiman's random forests or even CART, stochastic optimal control, solve some differential equations? I don't think so. I don't waste time with Excel. That's like testing a cardiac surgeon on cleaning bedpans. "Top Performers"? Right, maybe for toilet cleaning. Even then they'd be at risk of mixing the Muriatic stuff with the Drano stuff -- don't do that! HR tries again, fumbles with the ball, drops the ball, trips over the ball, falls on the ball, loses the ball, is face down in the mud. HR: Smile and be nice.

emodendroket 11y ago

Well, at least it's a change of pace from the same handful of technical questions people post over and over again.

aaroninsf 11y ago

TL;DR: "How would you convince me you are willing to exchange professional services for currency?"

klenwell 11y ago

Interestingly, this rubric outlined in article applies the advice Daniel Kahneman gives in his section on interviews in Thinking Fast and Slow. As he acknowledges, it isn't perfect but in studies it generally shows an improvement over the sort of gut-level hiring most people end up doing.

PaulHoule 11y ago

Why don't we ever hear about management tips to get more performance out of the people you have?

pasbesoin 11y ago
This suddenly makes me think of the hiring process -- at least the much-criticized and apparently prevalent form -- as a primary example of premature optimization. Perhaps a bit obvious; nonetheless, I find it useful to apply those specific words to it.
TheCowboy 11y ago
That information is out there, but it's much easier to focus on changing or improving things that don't involve management practices and organizational behavior, especially focusing on people who aren't part of the business yet. There is a common flawed view that if you can focus on hiring the best people then you won't have problems with performance. It can also result in high turnover, and hinder performance when the rest of the equation isn't weighted heavily. Focusing on things other than hiring also comes with politics, because it involves admitting that something isn't perfect with the organization.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > There is a common flawed view that if you can focus on hiring the best people then you won't have problems with performance. I think, more specifically, there is a common flawed view that hiring the best engineers means you can ignore management and have them "self-organize". Related to this is the false idea that a room full of really smart people don't need dirty things like "process". Nearly every time I get someone to give me a concrete example of why a false positive is dangerous I find a management flaw that is the root cause of the damage.

wyclif 11y ago

"Top Performers" https://youtu.be/yoy4_h7Pb3M https://youtu.be/yoy4_h7Pb3M

unixhero 11y ago

As a candidate, this is the best interview guide I've read.

kabdib 11y ago
Trust me, if they're interviewing like this, you don't want to work there.
- unixhero 11y ago
  I'm an MBA type with a lot of compsci background, and I get this bullshit all the time. These advice were poignant and to the point of actually suggesting to me how to think and how to answer those incredibly silly questions. That's what it's like over at the Corporate Overlords in Scandinavia at least.

lordnacho 11y ago

Still waiting for an HR blog where they checked the people they didn't hire against those they did.

ryandrake 11y ago
Yep. Nearly every 'article' about how to hire suffers from selection bias. Here's what I'd like to see: Find some super-talented folks who are critical to the success of whatever they're currently working on. Have them name names of companies that turned them down in the past. Then interview HR from those companies to find out what they did that filtered those people out of their organization. This kind of study would probably be impossible for a number of reasons, legal and otherwise, but I bet it would be a fun and informative read.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  The big problem with this idea is that many will assume, rightly or wrongly, that in spite of someone's success at $COMPANY_X that they still would have been bad for $COMPANY_Y. I am personally of the opinion that a good engineer is a good engineer, and a bad engineer is a bad engineer. Organization and culture can amplify or attenuate the "goodness" or "badness", but cannot make a good engineer bad or vice versa. I also think way too much emphasis is put on culture fit, however it gets defined.
- devonkim 11y ago
  The problem is that people do change. I was an outright terrible employee for years and mediocre in engineering skills and am now fine as an employee but despite knowing the general means to not be a bad engineer am probably just middling or below for various reasons not related to capability as much as personal circumstances. The job market changes over time as well.
jameshart 11y ago
Special case of the general class of 'business advice' writing. Any book that says 'here's how you build a great company' or 'here's how you close deals' or 'here's how to manage people' will be chock full of examples of how following the advice works, and how failing to follow the advice doesn't. But there's never any reflection on cases where following the advice didn't work.

kafkaesq 11y ago

What to ask: We look for a time the candidate wanted something so badly, they were unstoppable in pursuing it. Or a time they overcame an obstacle,” Hamilton says. As you listen to the answers to those questions, pay close attention to both the tasks and the duration described. “Try to get a sense of how long that person can stick it out. How long are they going to beat their head against a stats problem?” Good qualities for an academic (or inventor type), but doesn't seem to have much correlation with the kind of "grit" needed for most commercial development work. In which, the vast majority of the time, we benefit the most from "triaging": that is, discerning when not to go down rabbit holes, and when not to "bang our heads" against problems when it may be better to simply... route around them, or leave them be until some sunny day arrives when there's a legitimate business need to properly resolve them, and we have appropriate resources available to do so.

speaknotyet 11y ago

Where is the actual data that back up this recommendations?

brianpgordon 11y ago

There seem to be a lot of questions of the form Have your candidate tell you about a time _______ I hope they're giving their candidates time to prepare answers to these. I feel like I wouldn't be able to think of anything during the interview.

jameshart 11y ago

So yeah - if you think the technical interview process is broken, take a look at this and realize that at least in our business there is hope. Hiring someone for non-technical jobs? This is the best you can do.

78666cdc 11y ago

As a person that has interviewed for and gotten jobs at multiple Fortune 500s (whose tech departments varied from abysmal to impressive effective) and as a person that has been a part of the interviewing/hiring process several times, I appreciate the attempted formalization of interview metrics and see more than a little value in the metrics described in the article. To me, though, there is one "metric" that trumps all the rest, and that is personality fit with existing employees. If you have two brilliant software engineers that just absolutely cannot stand each other, nothing will get done. The best interview experience I've had, personally, has been to be placed into a technical interview - "start programming application X that does Y" - with two existing employees looking over my shoulders asking me why I'm doing what I'm doing and why not something else. The technical justification for my chosen solution to the technical interview question didn't matter much once it was clear I covered a base level of technical ability, but it was incredibly valuable that I and the employees looking over my shoulder didn't want to get into a fistfight after an hour - it meant that we could amicably disagree, support our reasonings for our arguments, and then not have sticks up our asses when the other person's proposed solution ended up being the right one, and then gracefully defer and say "thank you for the conversation and debate." That meld is immensely important. That said, I do recognize that it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge this sort of interaction with increasingly large teams. My experience interviewing and being interviewed is limited to cases where it's been a team of 3 - 8 people. For larger teams, perhaps such a formalized approach makes sense. I do not have any experience that informs me as to whether it is or isn't. But then I have to ask whether there should be a team of more than about 8 people without a dedicated manager. I don't have anything more than a gut answer to that question, but my gut says no.

deeteecee 11y ago

I will just say again like I always do, there is no solution to the problem. You hire, you try, and if no good, you fire. I have some thoughts regarding possibly giving the interviewer some more leeway (like for engineers, don't start off with solve this first) but haven't thought enough about that.

sidcool 11y ago

A lot of questions here seem superfluous. They can be easily bluffed on. Also, the questions assume that perfection exists.