10 ms·

The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

578 points by kevin_morrill 14y ago

RobSpectre 14y ago
Totally stealing this.
huhtenberg 14y ago
Oh, this is indeed an awesome question. I would've appreciated to be asked it if I were interviewing somewhere. There's so much I can tell about bacon :) Seriously though, it's a very clever question. Thanks for sharing.
- newsoundwave 14y ago
  What was the question? The site seems to be down and Google doesn't seem to have a cached version yet.
  - bulltale 14y ago
    Paraphrased: Ask the applicant to explain any topic for 5 minutes to the one interviewing. Then the interviewer will draw a blank face. Talented applicants will ask the interviewer if he understands, less talented applicants will just continue their story.
  - svachalek 14y ago
    (paraphrasing) Choose a topic and explain it thoroughly to me in 5 minutes. Impress me with your clarity and conciseness. Secret bonus challenges: Respond appropriately to my blank stares. Resist my tangential distractions.
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    "Pick a subject that you like and know well. You now have 5 minutes to explain it to me and make me understand what's the most important thing about it is. Go."
bulltale 14y ago
Very good question. This could not only apply to programmers, but anyone involved in communicating complex issues (medical personnel, engineers, etc). On a side note, I do not read that many articles about the effectiveness of hiring. It certainly deserves more attention, because the good people in the right places is so important. Start-up idea: Provide companies with interview questions for specific jobs, and then measure employee success/failure and use this to improve the process.
pixelbath 14y ago
This submission has only 14 points at this time, and the server is already a smoking crater. Lesson: Ensure your infrastructure can handle the traffic before you submit links to social sites.
- bduerst 14y ago
  So uh, what is the question?
- jamesmiller5 14y ago
  It might not have been the author submitting the site
  - pixelbath 14y ago
    True, though in this case it was.
- netvarun 14y ago
  The high traffic to the blog post has brought their entire site down. It's always a good idea to host the blog separately from the site - best is to use a managed solution (tumblr, wordpress.com, etc..)
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  How do you know how much traffic you will get? I have no idea how many people visit HN and how many click on any given link in what space of time. Maybe PG or someone can give some guidance?
  - engtech 14y ago
    If you can't handle a couple of 1000 hits in a short time period... does wordpress still default to not having any caching solutions at all out of the box?
  - waivej 14y ago
    I saw a load of about 200-250 simultaneous visitors when one of my sites got posted from ycombinator to the reddit. After 12 hours it tapered off.
hbz 14y ago
Can somebody just post the question? Server's aren't responding.
- pgrote 14y ago
  I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know, and at the end I should understand whatever is most important this topic. During the 5 minutes, I might ask you some questions, and you can ask me questions. Take as much time as you want to think it through, and let me know when you want to start.
tokenadult 14y ago
The submitted site seems to be having trouble keeping up with the referrals from Hacker News, judging by its response time. (And that is amusing for a site called "refer.ly" that is all about user referrals. The site still needs upgrading to work at scale.) The question is "I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know, and at the end I should understand whatever is most important this topic." I have to say that the proposed job interview question is interesting, and the thought process outline in the blog post kindly submitted here for evaluating answers to the question is also interesting. That made me think of a way to evaluate the hiring procedure mentioned in this blog post--do empirical validation of whether people hired through that procedure really do better work over the course of their career than people hired through other procedures. That's the scientific way to look at what hiring procedure to use. Here, in a FAQ that should take less than five minutes to read for a native speaker of English, is what is most important about what science has validated on the topic of company hiring procedures. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes... EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.) The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes. http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl... Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann: "Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure." http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri... But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)." Integrity tests have limited validity standing alone, but appear to have significant incremental validity when added to a general mental ability test or work-sample test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1 http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1 http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-14602.html http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports... AFTER EDIT: A kind comment to this comment graciously assumes I wrote this FAQ only just after when the article opening this thread was submitted. In fact, as was pointed out by a kind reply to that comment, I have prepared this FAQ document in advance, because questions about company hiring procedures frequently come up on Hacker News. I began summarizing the research about six months ago, and other participants here on HN have helped me take this FAQ through several revisions as it reached its current form about two months ago. Questions about hiring procedures come up again and again on Hacker News, and I like to store electrons to conserve keystrokes.
alabut 14y ago
For those that can't see the post, try this - it's a cached version from Instapaper: http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Frefer.ly%2Fblog%2Fmost-revealing-interview-question%2F http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Frefer.ly%2Fblo... And we're sorry about the downtime on the blog! We're trying to fix it as we speak and it kind of caught us off guard, because the blog's handled being on the front page of HN all through the summer without a hiccup.
- jgrahamc 14y ago
  Could always try a little CloudFlare to handle the load.
  - fooandbarify 14y ago
    I think a disclaimer might be appropriate here ;) Not that I mind at all; CloudFlare is awesome.
nollidge 14y ago
> Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. Hopefully there's more guidance than this, because I feel like I'd freeze up and start "um"ing for five minutes trying to decide the best concept to explain. Maybe this says more about me than the exercise, though...
- amcintyre 14y ago
  I'd probably just say, "I'm sorry to have wasted your time--I'm not interested in the position after all," and then get up and leave the interview.
- dmor 14y ago
  You probably would not get hired.
  - kevin_morrill 14y ago
    Actually, people that think about this for a while are the ones I like the most. The people that race right in without thinking about it tend to perform the worst. One of the very best candidates I saw actually just wrote their outline on the whiteboard from the start. When I asked them a distracting question they paused a second, looked at the whiteboard, and said "Wait a minute, this will stop us from finishing in 5 minutes. Would you like me to answer this or finish?"
  - jamesbritt 14y ago
    You probably would not get hired. Probably not. But what does that say about this particular technique? There's the ability to explain something, and there's the ability to perform under sudden pressure. I would give candidates some period of time (say, 10 minutes, if they needed that long) to select a topic first.
    - king_magic 14y ago
      Well, at the same time, I wouldn't be able to do my job if I didn't have the ability to perform under sudden pressure.
carmaa 14y ago
From the article that has ceased to be: --- We have been doing a lot of interviewing at Referly lately, and my team asked me to share an interview question we get the most mileage out of. I’ve been doing this question for years and now have seen over two hundred different answers now. It’s without a doubt my favorite interview question, because it only take 5 minutes and it 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. Setting up the interview question Here’s how I set up the question: I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know, and at the end I should understand whatever is most important this topic. During the 5 minutes, I might ask you some questions, and you can ask me questions. Take as much time as you want to think it through, and let me know when you want to start. 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 loose 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 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 after years of telling people exactly what I am looking for in the set up, weaker candidates still can’t help but get tripped up. Want to experience it first hand? We have open positions right now :)
jbredeche 14y ago
Saw this in an article about Google from last year: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576444363668512764.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230491110457644... About Sergey Brin: "I'm going to give you five minutes," he told me. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area. I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she told me. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you really understand well." Really like this. Covers a lot of bases in a single question, such as curiosity, depth, interpersonal skills, etc.
msrpotus 14y ago
So question about this question: do you think this can be trained (and if so, would that training help with job performance) or it's just an inherent characteristic?
- raganwald 14y ago
  It can definitely be trained and practiced, so quite clearly it is going to skew towards those that read blog posts about hiring.
  - kevin_morrill 14y ago
    The thing is if you're good at this, it translates into real work performance. So I almost don't care if people have "cheated" and studied up on the question. None of the people I've hired suddenly stopped communicating well on the job after doing well on this question.
    - phuff 14y ago
      I think this is the part where you're doing some magical thinking backed up by anecdotes. Have you done any actual experimental work on those who have failed the question but that you've hired anyways? Have you then been able to objectively measure how well they communicate? Your sample size seems pretty small (a couple hundred) so my guess would be no. I frequently see this kind of thinking about interview questions: "If somebody fails this problem this way, then they'll perform poorly on the job in the following way." Unless you actually have performed a study on this kind of thing, then you're probably just guessing when you say those kinds of things, and you're showing a lot of not particularly rigorous thinking about the relationship between the interviewing process and on the job performance.
      - kevin_morrill 14y ago
        It's definitely a small sample size, but I have more data on this than any other techniques I've seen out there. I've been overruled once after no hiring a candidate. Low and behold the same person ended up nearly getting fired 9 months later for the very same issues that came up from this question. They struggled to answer even the simplest questions with one sentence responses.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
I like it. It's pretty close to my favorite one: "What's your favorite algorithm?"
ubervero 14y ago
I love interviewers' tips, upvoted. However, it's not clear to me how Kevin is able to "ask a question early in the 5 minutes that is a complete tangent and has little to do with their goal" to see if they "say no". As much as you want to test the candidate's confidence, you have to ask a relevant question. Maybe an example could help?
- kevin_morrill 14y ago
  Here's a good example... one candidate chose to explain how residential firefighting works. They got into explaining why water is really important. I asked them about halon and they indulged a little bit. Then I asked them to explain how halon works. And so on... If they haven't shut me down by the 3rd question, it's a sign they're never going to, and I stop distracting them. For junior candidates, I usually don't even bother with this, because I am not going to stop myself from hiring just because they fail this question. So it's usually better to see if they can do well at just the core question.
manojlds 14y ago
For those who can't see the page - the answer is 42.
nostromo 14y ago
Giving credit where it's due - this is a famous Google interview question. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576444363668512764.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230491110457644...
- kevin_morrill 14y ago
  I actually heard this question before Google even existed. It's not my original idea either. This is an old Microsoft interview question, and I would imagine it predates them too.
  - RyJones 14y ago
    Yes, I ran into this at Microsoft in the early 90's, and it wasn't the first time I'd been asked to do this in an interview.
  - crag 14y ago
    I ran into this question at Novell in the early 90's. I answered it by giving a detailed description of Issac Asimov's [fictional] theories of Psychohistory (from Foundation). I got the job. But I doubt my answer was the reason why. But it did get chuckles from everyone in the room. I never ran into this type of question again. I kind of wish i had though. Lots more sci-fi to run through. I'm sure it predates Novell too.
    - Jd 14y ago
      Would love to hear more about your answer to the fictional theories of psychohistory. I have not read the Foundation series in a long time, and I've never quite understood the predictive mechanism, how possible Asimov actually thought it was, or the wrinkle introduced by the Mule.
      - crag 14y ago
        From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29: Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. (Physicists know this as the Kinetic theory.) Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms: 1. that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large 2. that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses I believe we are already laying the "foundation for this study. Look at the market. The foundation of the market is us - our consumption (which I believe is ultimately unsustainable - but that's another discussion). At it's core, that's what the market is all about. Right now I suspect Goldman (and the other investment houses) have stopped trying to predict the market. They are trying to control the market. Which leads to many of the problems we have now. Without accurate data, predictions, you can't completely control risk. So risk remains. Anyway to answer your question; I just repeated the theory of Asimov and argued why I thought the theories of psychohistory were already in practice. Which of course they were, since everyone was trying to predict the course of the market; which meant predicting the course of the herd. So if you studied people (all of the people), you could win in the market. But much of the market has changed in the last 20 years. I believe, today it's more about control then prediction.
mlinsey 14y ago
This is one of my favorite interview questions as well! I originally got the idea from an autobiography of an early Google employee; apparently this was one of Sergey's favorite questions. Definitely helps you see how effective people are at organizing their thinking and communicating it effectively.
praptak 14y ago
I remember a similar test from one of the books by Lister & DeMarco. They also mentioned one caveat not present in the linked article: they advice not to let the candidate choose the topic but instead let them prepare a presentation on a pre-chosen one. The rationale for this is that you might see passion and quality that are only attached to topics the candidate is passionate about if the choice of the topic is with the candidate.
- bduerst 14y ago
  I had to do this in an interview for a software project manager position. I presented on how GFP-tagging of proteins works in biochemistry research, to an audience of glassy eyed HR reps. I was hired, but the point is that you can't allow the presenter to take something too technical, otherwise the audience won't understand the jargon.
jazzychad 14y ago
Hmm, I'm not sure I like the idea of intentionally trying to steer the candidate off on a tangent. It feels like a trap. In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult. This would be doubly hard for me since I like to teach (both my parents are teachers and I love to explain things to people so that they can understand them). If a person shows genuine interest in a topic by asking a question that might go in a tangent, I generally want their curiosity to be sated before moving on; in some cases a deeper understanding of a related topic will help educate them on the main topic. Anyway, I think I would fall for this trap for both reasons (not wanting to refuse the interviewer and also wanting to genuinely teach someone). I'm conflicted. However, I like the overall idea of the question. So much time during actual real-world development is spent communicating between coworkers about how a system works or will be implemented. I think being able to gauge a candidate's communication/knowledge transfer ability is very important and a good indicator of success.
- bollockitis 14y ago
  I would never, under any circumstances, tell my interviewer to "stay on topic." How should I know what he believes to be relevant? If he no longer wants to quiz me on my abilities as a developer but would rather discuss the airspeed velocity of swallows, I would assume that he has a reason for doing so, and I would gladly share with him with my limited knowledge of avian aeronautics.
  - nooneelse 14y ago
    Also, the trap question could easily have the opposite "right response" as it does in the post and still be defensible as something important to learn about a candidate. Another interviewer performing the same test sequence might want to see if the candidate can change subjects quickly, roll with new circumstances, and not get flustered or stuck on a single, obsolete outcome.
- engtech 14y ago
  "In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult." If you feel like the interviewer has all the power in an interview, then it'll be difficult to negotiate your salary. You'll do things like give a concrete number when they ask you what your salary was at your last job. The only time I would feel like an interviewer has all the power over me is if I was a new grad with no work experience. An interview is a two-way street, you're trying to find out if you want to work for them as much as they're trying to find out if they want to hire you.
hnriot 14y ago
I would have thought that the author would have bothered to proof read the question.
- alabut 14y ago
  It's not given in written form - it's a friendly oral conversation.
rogerbinns 14y ago
The question I ask at the beginning is "tell me about something you are proud of". This helps sets them at ease, gets them to brag/market themselves and is positive. Later on I pick something prominent on the CV/resume and ask them to explain it in detail on the whiteboard. I try to pick something with multiple components communicating over time (web browsers/mobile clients talking to servers is good). That requires sequencing, boxes, and arrows. The answer also helps set expectations on other items on the CV/resume - if they can't explain something they claim to know well then the other items are likely an exaggeration too. I never penalize answers of "I don't know" to questions about parts, but am astonished at how few candidates will say that. For example they'll say "there is a POST". I'll ask what a POST is. They'll mumble something incomprehensible about HTTP. So I'll ask what a POST is, again. They'll mumble something about GET, and I'll give up. There is no problem with not knowing - Google/Wikipedia/Stackoverflow will address almost all things - but it is a huge red flag not understanding something, being unable to explain it, and being unprepared to say so.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
krmmalik 14y ago
Slightly tangential. I've been running an experiment of my own. As part of my work, I need to hire freelancers for dev, design and so on. It's not specific to the tech field, I also hire virtual assistants as well. I've been working with devs on and off for about 10 years and have my fair share of experiences. I don't interview people that I hire/sub-contract to, I just chat to them. Maybe there are people out there that do interview, but I find it a bit strange, so asking the "5 min" question as per the blog post would be a little weird. But I've been doing some experimenting for quite some time. It's really important that the people that i choose to sub-contract to work well with me as part of a team. When put out an ad for a freelancer of a particular kind, I deliberately say something that paints me as a potentially difficult client. I tend not to let on how much I know about the field that i am looking to hire in either. The results are always amazing. The ones that contact me that don't make even the slightest mention of the possibility of me being difficult, or find a way to laugh about it, are the ones that i choose to do business with first. These people are so intent on focusing on the positives that they don't even notice my poor behaviour. It's that enthusiastic attitude that makes them a really good team player. Of course, after i establish the business relationship with them, i do my level best not to be a difficult client for them. Personally, i always feel that the relationship you have is far more important than the skill set, and the rates being charged. I've tried this experiment a few times - I call it my freelance filter. One example is a project that a freelancer worked on for me when i first tried this filter. His skill set was a bit worrying to me. I had spoken to others that were more experienced, but i loved his attitude and he passed my filter test with flying colours. Anyway, i hired him and he far exceeded my expectations in every way. Was very responsive, communicated really well, exceeded my expectations on the project and over-delivered voluntarily and gave plenty of his own creative input without being detrimental to the project. Anyway - just thought i'd share. It might rile a few people up, but maybe one day someone will benefit from using this process.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Or you are simply weeding out the top class of freelancers before they even contact you because they have enough options that dealing with a potentially aggravating client isn't worth a response. I do agree that, of those who remain, filtering out those who fixate on negative aspects of the relationship is a good idea. Those people will often look for negative things, even if none are there, making them painful to work with.
revelation 14y ago
I do not give any “uh huh” or “I see” kind of interjections that underlie most conversations. And you want to use this method to gauge a candidates communication skills? Human communication is a very complicated and error prone process. If you're going to cut out all the vital clues, how you can expect it not to fail horribly? Feedback from both sides is essential.
- d0m 14y ago
  No. At first, he doesn't give any indications to check if the candidate recognize this lack of understanding. As you said it very well: If you're going to cut out all the vital clues, how you can expect it not to fail horribly? Feedback from both sides is essential. If your audience doesn't acknowledge your basic explanations, it's not worth going deeper in the subject. I.e. If you get no clue, go get them!
- kerryfalk 14y ago
  He states he gives a deer in the headlights look. Assuming he performs it well this is a very clear communication of: "I have no idea what you're talking about" So by not offering the routine and quick forms of 'yes I understand', a good communicator will stop to see where the holdup is, a bad one will march on without noticing there was an issue.
- NegativeK 14y ago
  By cutting out all of the vital clues, the interviewer is making sure that the candidate is even remotely looking for them. Too many clients will smile and nod when they don't understand something. That's far less of a telling sign than staring blankly. When explaining things, I somewhat worry that I'm going to come off like an arrogant prick when I look someone in the eye and ask "Does that make sense?" If you don't, though, you run the risk of people not opening the floodgate of questions they have -- or, worse, you run the risk of assuming that they actually understand and that everything is golden.
mike_ivanov 14y ago
> –anything Let me show you my collection of cat whiskers, it's right there in my tinfoil hat.
- Deestan 14y ago
  That would be a very useful reply. It would effectively communicate to me whether you would make a good hire.
  - mike_ivanov 14y ago
    Are you running a cat whiskers collectors exchange? We definitely should talk.
dollarpizza 14y ago
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. Got that right. Trick questions are always unfair (and mildly insulting, and just a plain waste of time) in interviews, just like they are in real life. "Star interviewers", on the other hand, know that there's no reason to ask candidates to jump through artificial hoops like these.
brandnewlow 14y ago
Along these lines, the CIA requires all applicants for foreign office positions to fly to Washington and deliver a 5-minute briefing on a topic of national security as part of their interview process.
grannyg00se 14y ago
"At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know" This part of the question would really throw me off. If I want to explain wood working, and I can't assume you know what wood is, we are in trouble. I think it is meant to say don't assume there is any domain specific knowledge known ahead of time. That would make more sense to me.
jergosh 14y ago
That is great advice on how to hire mindreaders. While the first idea (explaining something concisely) is defensible, the second (testing if people will 'stay on topic' when deliberately asked about something else) is just crazy.
- danielweber 14y ago
  I put a piece of paper on the desk in front of them. It has the number "3" with a big red X through it. Then I hold a baseball bat in a threatening position and tell them to give me an integer between 1 and 10. This technique works wonders, as I'm able to filter out the 90% of candidates who are losers. Spoiler: the right answer is 8.
  - nookiemonster 14y ago
    +1 would read again. OP is performing cargo-cult interviewing. Hiring is a process. You just can't know someone after your 1/8th segment of an interview day for the candidate. The hires I've made have been with people I've known for years and have a back story of execution. This kind of "mind-hacking" interview style is masturbatorial. I have worked with too many great minds who would fail in this situation to pull a stunt like this. OP also readily admits that he's from microsoft. This kind of crap is a part of the culture that has been ruining that company. Anyone who takes this advice should make sure they understand "caveat emptor."
torstesu 14y ago
Split the pile of application in two halves. Throw one of the halves in the trashcan. Hiring people with bad luck isn't good for business.
- Deestan 14y ago
  While often given as a joke, this is effectively what many of these "best interview question" posts really are: Find any random old way to save time and effort in the interviewing process, then come up with some clever-sounding rationalization.
jrockway 14y ago
Computers don't have empathy. Sometimes a cold and rational personality is what you need when you have to deal with compiler errors and stack traces all day.
maak 14y ago
I've interviewed at many places, and received many offers. What ever happened to no BS, sit down and have an honest conversation. I'm done with interview questions. People hiring fret so much about tricking candidates into revealing certain qualities. The candidate will give you the answer they think you want.
switchcard 14y ago
Based on the numbers provided in the post, it sounds like the best case scenario is: o). 41 people got hired in total after being asked this question. o). 4 of those were hired despite answering it badly. o). Those 4 people did not do well. (these were hires where the manager was specifically overruled in hiring them) o). The other 37 did well. (these were hires where the manager was not overruled) Ie. an interesting, thought provoking post, but tough to draw any definitive conclusions..
secnews 14y ago
You can assess almost nothing that would distinguish one qualified candidate from another to determine who is better spending five minutes with a person. The fact that you see the faults you predicted when you were overruled on hiring decisions is a confirmation bias, not a scientific study of any kind. Job interviews are a terrible method of hiring good long term people, just a necessary evil to weed out the moronic or insane. The concentration has to be long term on how the person does on the job, the willingness to work hard to retain good people and get rid of ones who aren't working out. People who are involuntarily committed are observed for more than an hour, because it's known that an insane person can hold it together and appear normal for longer than that period of time before they start talking to people who aren't there. I couldn't be more sick of posts with "that one interview question" and people who think they are clairvoyant "five minute judges" of character.
pearkes 14y ago
> 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. These types of "trick" questions don't allude to anything. A star candidate also wants to respect their interviewer and refusing to answer a question can be seen as disrespectful. Granted, the characteristic you're trying to surface is a fantastic one (saying no) - but this is not a surefire way of discovering it.
- Caligula 14y ago
  It is a terrible way of discovering it. It's the same as if they asked you a php question. You answer it, and then they say 'wrong!!!! the right answer is php sucks, in ruby I do it like so:...'
jamesli 14y ago
The post is apparently a marketing effort. The interview question is pretty old. If it is that effective as claimed, it would have been known and applied widely. (Then, candidates will prepare for the question and it is not revealing at all.) Also, claiming any interview question as <bold> MOST </bold> revealing is simply simple-minded.
dmor 14y ago
And now on Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/10/04/a-big-question-that-could-decide-any-job-interview/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/10/04/a-big-ques...
tharris0101 14y ago
I hate, hate, HATE gimmicky interview questions. At my job I am asked frequently to be on interview panels for my own department and sometimes other departments. It seems like every manager running the interviews throw out these trick questions at some point or another and I just cringe. There is no magic recipe for interviews. Ask about the person, ask about their experience, see work examples if appropriate and ask some questions to gauge knowledge level for the position being applied for. Anything more and you are just going to second guess yourself out of a good candidate.
wallflower 14y ago
"Sergey [Brin] nodded his agreement, then asked about my six months in Siberia, casually switching to Russian to see how much I had picked up. Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call 'the hard question'. "I'm going to give you five minutes," he announced. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room towards the snack area. I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she said. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you understand very well." ... I decided to go with the general theory of marketing, which was fresh in my mind because I'd only learned it recently.. I went to the whiteboard and furiously drew circles and squares and unleashed arrows like Legolas. I was nervous, but not very. Sergey bounced on a ball and asked questions that required me to make up things up on the spot... ... Later I found out that Sergey did this with everyone he interviewed. An hour wasted with an unqualified candidate wasn't a total loss if he gained insight into something new." "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59" - Douglas Edwards
mortdeus 14y ago
Sooooo. Why did you just give away one of the best questions to ask at an interview?
pilsetnieks 14y ago
Wasn't it originally Bezos who requested interviewees to tell, elaborately, about something he doesn't know?
mrwilliamchang 14y ago
I think this post has a lot of interesting points, but in general I find asking interviewees questions that are not related to their job a little weird because no you are basing your judgement on things unrelated to the actual position. However, if we changed this question to "in 5 mins. please explain the most important partt of X" where X is some relatively commonly understood computer science topic, I think it would be a much better interview question. And if you want you can still look for the traits empathy, goal directed, etc..
dror 14y ago
While interesting and thoughtful, I dislike trick interview questions where you tell the interviewer one thing, but look for another. The first problem is that someone who knows what you're doing, had read this article, for instance, has a huge advantage. The other problem is that it during an interview, I try to get people to relax so that I can get a sense of what they're really like. When they're on their guard of trick questions, it creates the opposite environment.
- kevin_morrill 14y ago
  I think the "trick" elements of it may have been over emphasized by my blog relative to how I really do this question. Ultimately, the core of the question is hard enough, and does plenty to figure out who's a really good communicator. Just explaining something in essential form is actually quite hard.
bproctor 14y ago
Why can't you find out the same information about the persion by just engaging in normal conversation, asking them about their interests, and asking reasonable follow up questions? Presenting it as some kind of weird test that makes the interviewee feel awkward and suspicious is no way to conduct an interview. It says more about how bad the interviewer is.
- kevin_morrill 14y ago
  I definitely do this. I think these clues come across throughout the entire interview.
- Caligula 14y ago
  They avoid a normal conversation because then the interviewer would not be able to be achieve a master smug rating. You need to be psychic and 'get' what direction or type of response that they expect.
jaequery 14y ago
refer.ly just dropped the ball on this one.
Jarihd 14y ago
>>> Here’s how I set up the question: >>> I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. I am an experienced technical guy. In case of technical interview if somebody starts away with that kind of question; i would take that in a negative way. I hate it when interviewers instead of being focused on their requirements focus on unnecessary things. As a job seeker i would like to be felt that i am required for the position; and that am not just a guy seeking money or a change in job. I would like to have the interviewer ask me questions for the job-position that i've applied; such that i feel motivated to continue; and know that the interviewer is serious about the position; and is just not filling up vacant company position.
CookWithMe 14y ago
How about a meta-answer? "I am really passionate about an interview question, which I like to call the most revealing job interview question. 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. [...] 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."
pphp 14y ago
I refer.ly they are looking for a senior software engineer with good knowledge of php and mysql. So perhaps the title should be "The Most Revealing Job Interview Question for Finding a Good PHP Developer". A very conservative approach, in this landscape every single decision must be attached to a clear goal, there is no room for experimentation, you should follow a direct goal Explain to your team how can get they solve the problems for their clients and describe the path for this goal.

578 points by kevin_morrill 14y ago

Totally stealing this.

Oh, this is indeed an awesome question. I would've appreciated to be asked it if I were interviewing somewhere. There's so much I can tell about bacon :) Seriously though, it's a very clever question. Thanks for sharing.

newsoundwave 14y ago
What was the question? The site seems to be down and Google doesn't seem to have a cached version yet.
- bulltale 14y ago
  Paraphrased: Ask the applicant to explain any topic for 5 minutes to the one interviewing. Then the interviewer will draw a blank face. Talented applicants will ask the interviewer if he understands, less talented applicants will just continue their story.
- svachalek 14y ago
  (paraphrasing) Choose a topic and explain it thoroughly to me in 5 minutes. Impress me with your clarity and conciseness. Secret bonus challenges: Respond appropriately to my blank stares. Resist my tangential distractions.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  "Pick a subject that you like and know well. You now have 5 minutes to explain it to me and make me understand what's the most important thing about it is. Go."

bulltale 14y ago

Very good question. This could not only apply to programmers, but anyone involved in communicating complex issues (medical personnel, engineers, etc). On a side note, I do not read that many articles about the effectiveness of hiring. It certainly deserves more attention, because the good people in the right places is so important. Start-up idea: Provide companies with interview questions for specific jobs, and then measure employee success/failure and use this to improve the process.

pixelbath 14y ago

This submission has only 14 points at this time, and the server is already a smoking crater. Lesson: Ensure your infrastructure can handle the traffic before you submit links to social sites.

bduerst 14y ago
So uh, what is the question?
jamesmiller5 14y ago
It might not have been the author submitting the site
- pixelbath 14y ago
  True, though in this case it was.
netvarun 14y ago
The high traffic to the blog post has brought their entire site down. It's always a good idea to host the blog separately from the site - best is to use a managed solution (tumblr, wordpress.com, etc..)
jiggy2011 14y ago
How do you know how much traffic you will get? I have no idea how many people visit HN and how many click on any given link in what space of time. Maybe PG or someone can give some guidance?
- engtech 14y ago
  If you can't handle a couple of 1000 hits in a short time period... does wordpress still default to not having any caching solutions at all out of the box?
- waivej 14y ago
  I saw a load of about 200-250 simultaneous visitors when one of my sites got posted from ycombinator to the reddit. After 12 hours it tapered off.

hbz 14y ago

Can somebody just post the question? Server's aren't responding.

pgrote 14y ago
I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know, and at the end I should understand whatever is most important this topic. During the 5 minutes, I might ask you some questions, and you can ask me questions. Take as much time as you want to think it through, and let me know when you want to start.

tokenadult 14y ago

The submitted site seems to be having trouble keeping up with the referrals from Hacker News, judging by its response time. (And that is amusing for a site called "refer.ly" that is all about user referrals. The site still needs upgrading to work at scale.) The question is "I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know, and at the end I should understand whatever is most important this topic." I have to say that the proposed job interview question is interesting, and the thought process outline in the blog post kindly submitted here for evaluating answers to the question is also interesting. That made me think of a way to evaluate the hiring procedure mentioned in this blog post--do empirical validation of whether people hired through that procedure really do better work over the course of their career than people hired through other procedures. That's the scientific way to look at what hiring procedure to use. Here, in a FAQ that should take less than five minutes to read for a native speaker of English, is what is most important about what science has validated on the topic of company hiring procedures. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes... EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.) The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes. http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl... Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann: "Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure." http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri... But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)." Integrity tests have limited validity standing alone, but appear to have significant incremental validity when added to a general mental ability test or work-sample test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1 http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1 http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-14602.html http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports... AFTER EDIT: A kind comment to this comment graciously assumes I wrote this FAQ only just after when the article opening this thread was submitted. In fact, as was pointed out by a kind reply to that comment, I have prepared this FAQ document in advance, because questions about company hiring procedures frequently come up on Hacker News. I began summarizing the research about six months ago, and other participants here on HN have helped me take this FAQ through several revisions as it reached its current form about two months ago. Questions about hiring procedures come up again and again on Hacker News, and I like to store electrons to conserve keystrokes.

alabut 14y ago

For those that can't see the post, try this - it's a cached version from Instapaper: http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Frefer.ly%2Fblog%2Fmost-revealing-interview-question%2F http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Frefer.ly%2Fblo... And we're sorry about the downtime on the blog! We're trying to fix it as we speak and it kind of caught us off guard, because the blog's handled being on the front page of HN all through the summer without a hiccup.

jgrahamc 14y ago
Could always try a little CloudFlare to handle the load.
- fooandbarify 14y ago
  I think a disclaimer might be appropriate here ;) Not that I mind at all; CloudFlare is awesome.

nollidge 14y ago

> Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. Hopefully there's more guidance than this, because I feel like I'd freeze up and start "um"ing for five minutes trying to decide the best concept to explain. Maybe this says more about me than the exercise, though...

amcintyre 14y ago
I'd probably just say, "I'm sorry to have wasted your time--I'm not interested in the position after all," and then get up and leave the interview.
dmor 14y ago
You probably would not get hired.
- kevin_morrill 14y ago
  Actually, people that think about this for a while are the ones I like the most. The people that race right in without thinking about it tend to perform the worst. One of the very best candidates I saw actually just wrote their outline on the whiteboard from the start. When I asked them a distracting question they paused a second, looked at the whiteboard, and said "Wait a minute, this will stop us from finishing in 5 minutes. Would you like me to answer this or finish?"
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  You probably would not get hired. Probably not. But what does that say about this particular technique? There's the ability to explain something, and there's the ability to perform under sudden pressure. I would give candidates some period of time (say, 10 minutes, if they needed that long) to select a topic first.
  - king_magic 14y ago
    Well, at the same time, I wouldn't be able to do my job if I didn't have the ability to perform under sudden pressure.

carmaa 14y ago

From the article that has ceased to be: --- We have been doing a lot of interviewing at Referly lately, and my team asked me to share an interview question we get the most mileage out of. I’ve been doing this question for years and now have seen over two hundred different answers now. It’s without a doubt my favorite interview question, because it only take 5 minutes and it 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. Setting up the interview question Here’s how I set up the question: I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know, and at the end I should understand whatever is most important this topic. During the 5 minutes, I might ask you some questions, and you can ask me questions. Take as much time as you want to think it through, and let me know when you want to start. 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 loose 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 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 after years of telling people exactly what I am looking for in the set up, weaker candidates still can’t help but get tripped up. Want to experience it first hand? We have open positions right now :)

jbredeche 14y ago

Saw this in an article about Google from last year: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576444363668512764.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230491110457644... About Sergey Brin: "I'm going to give you five minutes," he told me. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area. I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she told me. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you really understand well." Really like this. Covers a lot of bases in a single question, such as curiosity, depth, interpersonal skills, etc.

msrpotus 14y ago

So question about this question: do you think this can be trained (and if so, would that training help with job performance) or it's just an inherent characteristic?

raganwald 14y ago
It can definitely be trained and practiced, so quite clearly it is going to skew towards those that read blog posts about hiring.
- kevin_morrill 14y ago
  The thing is if you're good at this, it translates into real work performance. So I almost don't care if people have "cheated" and studied up on the question. None of the people I've hired suddenly stopped communicating well on the job after doing well on this question.
  - phuff 14y ago
    I think this is the part where you're doing some magical thinking backed up by anecdotes. Have you done any actual experimental work on those who have failed the question but that you've hired anyways? Have you then been able to objectively measure how well they communicate? Your sample size seems pretty small (a couple hundred) so my guess would be no. I frequently see this kind of thinking about interview questions: "If somebody fails this problem this way, then they'll perform poorly on the job in the following way." Unless you actually have performed a study on this kind of thing, then you're probably just guessing when you say those kinds of things, and you're showing a lot of not particularly rigorous thinking about the relationship between the interviewing process and on the job performance.
    - kevin_morrill 14y ago
      It's definitely a small sample size, but I have more data on this than any other techniques I've seen out there. I've been overruled once after no hiring a candidate. Low and behold the same person ended up nearly getting fired 9 months later for the very same issues that came up from this question. They struggled to answer even the simplest questions with one sentence responses.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

I like it. It's pretty close to my favorite one: "What's your favorite algorithm?"

ubervero 14y ago

I love interviewers' tips, upvoted. However, it's not clear to me how Kevin is able to "ask a question early in the 5 minutes that is a complete tangent and has little to do with their goal" to see if they "say no". As much as you want to test the candidate's confidence, you have to ask a relevant question. Maybe an example could help?

kevin_morrill 14y ago
Here's a good example... one candidate chose to explain how residential firefighting works. They got into explaining why water is really important. I asked them about halon and they indulged a little bit. Then I asked them to explain how halon works. And so on... If they haven't shut me down by the 3rd question, it's a sign they're never going to, and I stop distracting them. For junior candidates, I usually don't even bother with this, because I am not going to stop myself from hiring just because they fail this question. So it's usually better to see if they can do well at just the core question.

manojlds 14y ago

For those who can't see the page - the answer is 42.

nostromo 14y ago

Giving credit where it's due - this is a famous Google interview question. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576444363668512764.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230491110457644...

kevin_morrill 14y ago
I actually heard this question before Google even existed. It's not my original idea either. This is an old Microsoft interview question, and I would imagine it predates them too.
- RyJones 14y ago
  Yes, I ran into this at Microsoft in the early 90's, and it wasn't the first time I'd been asked to do this in an interview.
- crag 14y ago
  I ran into this question at Novell in the early 90's. I answered it by giving a detailed description of Issac Asimov's [fictional] theories of Psychohistory (from Foundation). I got the job. But I doubt my answer was the reason why. But it did get chuckles from everyone in the room. I never ran into this type of question again. I kind of wish i had though. Lots more sci-fi to run through. I'm sure it predates Novell too.
  - Jd 14y ago
    Would love to hear more about your answer to the fictional theories of psychohistory. I have not read the Foundation series in a long time, and I've never quite understood the predictive mechanism, how possible Asimov actually thought it was, or the wrinkle introduced by the Mule.
    - crag 14y ago
      From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29: Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. (Physicists know this as the Kinetic theory.) Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms: 1. that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large 2. that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses I believe we are already laying the "foundation for this study. Look at the market. The foundation of the market is us - our consumption (which I believe is ultimately unsustainable - but that's another discussion). At it's core, that's what the market is all about. Right now I suspect Goldman (and the other investment houses) have stopped trying to predict the market. They are trying to control the market. Which leads to many of the problems we have now. Without accurate data, predictions, you can't completely control risk. So risk remains. Anyway to answer your question; I just repeated the theory of Asimov and argued why I thought the theories of psychohistory were already in practice. Which of course they were, since everyone was trying to predict the course of the market; which meant predicting the course of the herd. So if you studied people (all of the people), you could win in the market. But much of the market has changed in the last 20 years. I believe, today it's more about control then prediction.

mlinsey 14y ago

This is one of my favorite interview questions as well! I originally got the idea from an autobiography of an early Google employee; apparently this was one of Sergey's favorite questions. Definitely helps you see how effective people are at organizing their thinking and communicating it effectively.

praptak 14y ago

I remember a similar test from one of the books by Lister & DeMarco. They also mentioned one caveat not present in the linked article: they advice not to let the candidate choose the topic but instead let them prepare a presentation on a pre-chosen one. The rationale for this is that you might see passion and quality that are only attached to topics the candidate is passionate about if the choice of the topic is with the candidate.

bduerst 14y ago
I had to do this in an interview for a software project manager position. I presented on how GFP-tagging of proteins works in biochemistry research, to an audience of glassy eyed HR reps. I was hired, but the point is that you can't allow the presenter to take something too technical, otherwise the audience won't understand the jargon.

jazzychad 14y ago

Hmm, I'm not sure I like the idea of intentionally trying to steer the candidate off on a tangent. It feels like a trap. In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult. This would be doubly hard for me since I like to teach (both my parents are teachers and I love to explain things to people so that they can understand them). If a person shows genuine interest in a topic by asking a question that might go in a tangent, I generally want their curiosity to be sated before moving on; in some cases a deeper understanding of a related topic will help educate them on the main topic. Anyway, I think I would fall for this trap for both reasons (not wanting to refuse the interviewer and also wanting to genuinely teach someone). I'm conflicted. However, I like the overall idea of the question. So much time during actual real-world development is spent communicating between coworkers about how a system works or will be implemented. I think being able to gauge a candidate's communication/knowledge transfer ability is very important and a good indicator of success.

bollockitis 14y ago
I would never, under any circumstances, tell my interviewer to "stay on topic." How should I know what he believes to be relevant? If he no longer wants to quiz me on my abilities as a developer but would rather discuss the airspeed velocity of swallows, I would assume that he has a reason for doing so, and I would gladly share with him with my limited knowledge of avian aeronautics.
- nooneelse 14y ago
  Also, the trap question could easily have the opposite "right response" as it does in the post and still be defensible as something important to learn about a candidate. Another interviewer performing the same test sequence might want to see if the candidate can change subjects quickly, roll with new circumstances, and not get flustered or stuck on a single, obsolete outcome.
engtech 14y ago
"In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult." If you feel like the interviewer has all the power in an interview, then it'll be difficult to negotiate your salary. You'll do things like give a concrete number when they ask you what your salary was at your last job. The only time I would feel like an interviewer has all the power over me is if I was a new grad with no work experience. An interview is a two-way street, you're trying to find out if you want to work for them as much as they're trying to find out if they want to hire you.

hnriot 14y ago

I would have thought that the author would have bothered to proof read the question.

alabut 14y ago
It's not given in written form - it's a friendly oral conversation.

rogerbinns 14y ago

The question I ask at the beginning is "tell me about something you are proud of". This helps sets them at ease, gets them to brag/market themselves and is positive. Later on I pick something prominent on the CV/resume and ask them to explain it in detail on the whiteboard. I try to pick something with multiple components communicating over time (web browsers/mobile clients talking to servers is good). That requires sequencing, boxes, and arrows. The answer also helps set expectations on other items on the CV/resume - if they can't explain something they claim to know well then the other items are likely an exaggeration too. I never penalize answers of "I don't know" to questions about parts, but am astonished at how few candidates will say that. For example they'll say "there is a POST". I'll ask what a POST is. They'll mumble something incomprehensible about HTTP. So I'll ask what a POST is, again. They'll mumble something about GET, and I'll give up. There is no problem with not knowing - Google/Wikipedia/Stackoverflow will address almost all things - but it is a huge red flag not understanding something, being unable to explain it, and being unprepared to say so.

deleted 14y ago

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krmmalik 14y ago

Slightly tangential. I've been running an experiment of my own. As part of my work, I need to hire freelancers for dev, design and so on. It's not specific to the tech field, I also hire virtual assistants as well. I've been working with devs on and off for about 10 years and have my fair share of experiences. I don't interview people that I hire/sub-contract to, I just chat to them. Maybe there are people out there that do interview, but I find it a bit strange, so asking the "5 min" question as per the blog post would be a little weird. But I've been doing some experimenting for quite some time. It's really important that the people that i choose to sub-contract to work well with me as part of a team. When put out an ad for a freelancer of a particular kind, I deliberately say something that paints me as a potentially difficult client. I tend not to let on how much I know about the field that i am looking to hire in either. The results are always amazing. The ones that contact me that don't make even the slightest mention of the possibility of me being difficult, or find a way to laugh about it, are the ones that i choose to do business with first. These people are so intent on focusing on the positives that they don't even notice my poor behaviour. It's that enthusiastic attitude that makes them a really good team player. Of course, after i establish the business relationship with them, i do my level best not to be a difficult client for them. Personally, i always feel that the relationship you have is far more important than the skill set, and the rates being charged. I've tried this experiment a few times - I call it my freelance filter. One example is a project that a freelancer worked on for me when i first tried this filter. His skill set was a bit worrying to me. I had spoken to others that were more experienced, but i loved his attitude and he passed my filter test with flying colours. Anyway, i hired him and he far exceeded my expectations in every way. Was very responsive, communicated really well, exceeded my expectations on the project and over-delivered voluntarily and gave plenty of his own creative input without being detrimental to the project. Anyway - just thought i'd share. It might rile a few people up, but maybe one day someone will benefit from using this process.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Or you are simply weeding out the top class of freelancers before they even contact you because they have enough options that dealing with a potentially aggravating client isn't worth a response. I do agree that, of those who remain, filtering out those who fixate on negative aspects of the relationship is a good idea. Those people will often look for negative things, even if none are there, making them painful to work with.

revelation 14y ago

I do not give any “uh huh” or “I see” kind of interjections that underlie most conversations. And you want to use this method to gauge a candidates communication skills? Human communication is a very complicated and error prone process. If you're going to cut out all the vital clues, how you can expect it not to fail horribly? Feedback from both sides is essential.

d0m 14y ago
No. At first, he doesn't give any indications to check if the candidate recognize this lack of understanding. As you said it very well: If you're going to cut out all the vital clues, how you can expect it not to fail horribly? Feedback from both sides is essential. If your audience doesn't acknowledge your basic explanations, it's not worth going deeper in the subject. I.e. If you get no clue, go get them!
kerryfalk 14y ago
He states he gives a deer in the headlights look. Assuming he performs it well this is a very clear communication of: "I have no idea what you're talking about" So by not offering the routine and quick forms of 'yes I understand', a good communicator will stop to see where the holdup is, a bad one will march on without noticing there was an issue.
NegativeK 14y ago
By cutting out all of the vital clues, the interviewer is making sure that the candidate is even remotely looking for them. Too many clients will smile and nod when they don't understand something. That's far less of a telling sign than staring blankly. When explaining things, I somewhat worry that I'm going to come off like an arrogant prick when I look someone in the eye and ask "Does that make sense?" If you don't, though, you run the risk of people not opening the floodgate of questions they have -- or, worse, you run the risk of assuming that they actually understand and that everything is golden.

mike_ivanov 14y ago

> –anything Let me show you my collection of cat whiskers, it's right there in my tinfoil hat.

Deestan 14y ago
That would be a very useful reply. It would effectively communicate to me whether you would make a good hire.
- mike_ivanov 14y ago
  Are you running a cat whiskers collectors exchange? We definitely should talk.

dollarpizza 14y ago

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. Got that right. Trick questions are always unfair (and mildly insulting, and just a plain waste of time) in interviews, just like they are in real life. "Star interviewers", on the other hand, know that there's no reason to ask candidates to jump through artificial hoops like these.

brandnewlow 14y ago

Along these lines, the CIA requires all applicants for foreign office positions to fly to Washington and deliver a 5-minute briefing on a topic of national security as part of their interview process.

grannyg00se 14y ago

"At the beginning of the 5 minutes you shouldn’t assume anything about what I know" This part of the question would really throw me off. If I want to explain wood working, and I can't assume you know what wood is, we are in trouble. I think it is meant to say don't assume there is any domain specific knowledge known ahead of time. That would make more sense to me.

jergosh 14y ago

That is great advice on how to hire mindreaders. While the first idea (explaining something concisely) is defensible, the second (testing if people will 'stay on topic' when deliberately asked about something else) is just crazy.

danielweber 14y ago
I put a piece of paper on the desk in front of them. It has the number "3" with a big red X through it. Then I hold a baseball bat in a threatening position and tell them to give me an integer between 1 and 10. This technique works wonders, as I'm able to filter out the 90% of candidates who are losers. Spoiler: the right answer is 8.
- nookiemonster 14y ago
  +1 would read again. OP is performing cargo-cult interviewing. Hiring is a process. You just can't know someone after your 1/8th segment of an interview day for the candidate. The hires I've made have been with people I've known for years and have a back story of execution. This kind of "mind-hacking" interview style is masturbatorial. I have worked with too many great minds who would fail in this situation to pull a stunt like this. OP also readily admits that he's from microsoft. This kind of crap is a part of the culture that has been ruining that company. Anyone who takes this advice should make sure they understand "caveat emptor."

torstesu 14y ago

Split the pile of application in two halves. Throw one of the halves in the trashcan. Hiring people with bad luck isn't good for business.

Deestan 14y ago
While often given as a joke, this is effectively what many of these "best interview question" posts really are: Find any random old way to save time and effort in the interviewing process, then come up with some clever-sounding rationalization.

jrockway 14y ago

Computers don't have empathy. Sometimes a cold and rational personality is what you need when you have to deal with compiler errors and stack traces all day.

maak 14y ago

I've interviewed at many places, and received many offers. What ever happened to no BS, sit down and have an honest conversation. I'm done with interview questions. People hiring fret so much about tricking candidates into revealing certain qualities. The candidate will give you the answer they think you want.

switchcard 14y ago

Based on the numbers provided in the post, it sounds like the best case scenario is: o). 41 people got hired in total after being asked this question. o). 4 of those were hired despite answering it badly. o). Those 4 people did not do well. (these were hires where the manager was specifically overruled in hiring them) o). The other 37 did well. (these were hires where the manager was not overruled) Ie. an interesting, thought provoking post, but tough to draw any definitive conclusions..

secnews 14y ago

You can assess almost nothing that would distinguish one qualified candidate from another to determine who is better spending five minutes with a person. The fact that you see the faults you predicted when you were overruled on hiring decisions is a confirmation bias, not a scientific study of any kind. Job interviews are a terrible method of hiring good long term people, just a necessary evil to weed out the moronic or insane. The concentration has to be long term on how the person does on the job, the willingness to work hard to retain good people and get rid of ones who aren't working out. People who are involuntarily committed are observed for more than an hour, because it's known that an insane person can hold it together and appear normal for longer than that period of time before they start talking to people who aren't there. I couldn't be more sick of posts with "that one interview question" and people who think they are clairvoyant "five minute judges" of character.

pearkes 14y ago

> 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. These types of "trick" questions don't allude to anything. A star candidate also wants to respect their interviewer and refusing to answer a question can be seen as disrespectful. Granted, the characteristic you're trying to surface is a fantastic one (saying no) - but this is not a surefire way of discovering it.

Caligula 14y ago
It is a terrible way of discovering it. It's the same as if they asked you a php question. You answer it, and then they say 'wrong!!!! the right answer is php sucks, in ruby I do it like so:...'

jamesli 14y ago

The post is apparently a marketing effort. The interview question is pretty old. If it is that effective as claimed, it would have been known and applied widely. (Then, candidates will prepare for the question and it is not revealing at all.) Also, claiming any interview question as <bold> MOST </bold> revealing is simply simple-minded.

dmor 14y ago

And now on Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/10/04/a-big-question-that-could-decide-any-job-interview/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/10/04/a-big-ques...

tharris0101 14y ago

I hate, hate, HATE gimmicky interview questions. At my job I am asked frequently to be on interview panels for my own department and sometimes other departments. It seems like every manager running the interviews throw out these trick questions at some point or another and I just cringe. There is no magic recipe for interviews. Ask about the person, ask about their experience, see work examples if appropriate and ask some questions to gauge knowledge level for the position being applied for. Anything more and you are just going to second guess yourself out of a good candidate.

wallflower 14y ago

"Sergey [Brin] nodded his agreement, then asked about my six months in Siberia, casually switching to Russian to see how much I had picked up. Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call 'the hard question'. "I'm going to give you five minutes," he announced. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room towards the snack area. I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she said. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you understand very well." ... I decided to go with the general theory of marketing, which was fresh in my mind because I'd only learned it recently.. I went to the whiteboard and furiously drew circles and squares and unleashed arrows like Legolas. I was nervous, but not very. Sergey bounced on a ball and asked questions that required me to make up things up on the spot... ... Later I found out that Sergey did this with everyone he interviewed. An hour wasted with an unqualified candidate wasn't a total loss if he gained insight into something new." "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59" - Douglas Edwards

mortdeus 14y ago

Sooooo. Why did you just give away one of the best questions to ask at an interview?

pilsetnieks 14y ago

Wasn't it originally Bezos who requested interviewees to tell, elaborately, about something he doesn't know?

mrwilliamchang 14y ago

I think this post has a lot of interesting points, but in general I find asking interviewees questions that are not related to their job a little weird because no you are basing your judgement on things unrelated to the actual position. However, if we changed this question to "in 5 mins. please explain the most important partt of X" where X is some relatively commonly understood computer science topic, I think it would be a much better interview question. And if you want you can still look for the traits empathy, goal directed, etc..

dror 14y ago

While interesting and thoughtful, I dislike trick interview questions where you tell the interviewer one thing, but look for another. The first problem is that someone who knows what you're doing, had read this article, for instance, has a huge advantage. The other problem is that it during an interview, I try to get people to relax so that I can get a sense of what they're really like. When they're on their guard of trick questions, it creates the opposite environment.

kevin_morrill 14y ago
I think the "trick" elements of it may have been over emphasized by my blog relative to how I really do this question. Ultimately, the core of the question is hard enough, and does plenty to figure out who's a really good communicator. Just explaining something in essential form is actually quite hard.

bproctor 14y ago

Why can't you find out the same information about the persion by just engaging in normal conversation, asking them about their interests, and asking reasonable follow up questions? Presenting it as some kind of weird test that makes the interviewee feel awkward and suspicious is no way to conduct an interview. It says more about how bad the interviewer is.

kevin_morrill 14y ago
I definitely do this. I think these clues come across throughout the entire interview.
Caligula 14y ago
They avoid a normal conversation because then the interviewer would not be able to be achieve a master smug rating. You need to be psychic and 'get' what direction or type of response that they expect.

jaequery 14y ago

refer.ly just dropped the ball on this one.

Jarihd 14y ago

>>> Here’s how I set up the question: >>> I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll have just 5 minutes to explain it. I am an experienced technical guy. In case of technical interview if somebody starts away with that kind of question; i would take that in a negative way. I hate it when interviewers instead of being focused on their requirements focus on unnecessary things. As a job seeker i would like to be felt that i am required for the position; and that am not just a guy seeking money or a change in job. I would like to have the interviewer ask me questions for the job-position that i've applied; such that i feel motivated to continue; and know that the interviewer is serious about the position; and is just not filling up vacant company position.

CookWithMe 14y ago

How about a meta-answer? "I am really passionate about an interview question, which I like to call the most revealing job interview question. 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. [...] 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."

pphp 14y ago

I refer.ly they are looking for a senior software engineer with good knowledge of php and mysql. So perhaps the title should be "The Most Revealing Job Interview Question for Finding a Good PHP Developer". A very conservative approach, in this landscape every single decision must be attached to a clear goal, there is no room for experimentation, you should follow a direct goal Explain to your team how can get they solve the problems for their clients and describe the path for this goal.