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Appreciate your reply. This question likely places candidates in a difficult situation, especially younger candidates who are excited about the opportunity, or
by KennethLStein 15y ago
Appreciate your reply. This question likely places candidates in a difficult situation, especially younger candidates who are excited about the opportunity, or those needing the job.
If the interviewer plans on asking this question, they ought to have conducted a patent search prior to the interview.
If patents or applications are found - ask the candidate about the problem that was solved by the claimed invention. Ask if the candidate was the one who noted the problem, and ask further questions based upon the answer.
If no patents/published applications naming the candidate are found, don't ask the question.
If the interviewer doesn't want to take the 5 minutes to search, or HR doesn't provide these materials to interviewers as a routine part of the interviewing process then they ought to ask "Are you listed as an inventor on any issued patents or published patent applications?" and then they ought to suggest that in the future HR conduct a quick patent and published application search and distribute the results to those interviewing a candidate.
A candidate ought to conduct a patent search prior to interviewing and use that information to ask a variety of questions and point out noted intersections between tech development and the candidates knowledge and experience.
- raganwald 15y agoIf no patents/published applications naming the candidate are found, don't ask the question. We can’t possibly be conducting the same kinds of interviews with the same kinds of candidates. Or possibly you are talking a very narrow view of the word “invention.” Or you work in a phenomenally litigious sector. For my purposes, “Describe a technical problem you encountered at XYZCorp and how you solved it” is a standard interviewing question. I suspect that if you don’t allow the question I posed in this blog post, you wouldn’t allow this one either.
- KennethLStein 15y agosearch for patents and published applications at: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm the query to use is: in/lastname-firstname If you don't find any references, then asking the candidate to describe a technical problem and means by which they solved it is less likely to be received as a request for confidential information. Hope you find the above links and search query useful! Best.